Why does NORCO feel so familiar?

NORCO, by Geography of Robots, is probably my favorite video game of the year, in a year packed with so many incredible little games. Citizen Sleeper, Signalis, Pentiment, even titles like Immortality and Harvestella—all phenomenal games, all absolute bangers in the narrative, aesthetic and vibe department. And yet NORCO is the one that has stuck with me the hardest.

I first played NORCO back in the spring, and I was immediately bowled over. I’ve spent months struggling to express the way I resonated with the game’s writing. It was more than mere recognition; it was a deep sense in the place my soul is supposed to be that I had been in situations like this before, that I understood where NORCO was coming from. My teens and early twenties were spent around people like the ones that populate NORCO, and my memories are peppered with situations and relationship dynamics very similar to those in the game. Living in “flyover country” is weird as hell.

The thing that makes NORCO special, however, is its ability to tell a story that is so hyperspecifically Southern Louisiana that even with those flashes of recognition and connection, the game still feels grounded in a reality I did not and couldn’t ever share. While doing hoodrat shit with your crusty friends tends to look similar in deed across the board, I must confess that I never did hoodrat shit in the swampy bones of a petrochemical refinery complex.

The world of NORCO – and I’m talking about the world, here, not just “Southern Louisiana,” a place I’ve never been – feels both radically different from and uncannily, uncomfortably similar to our own. A Land Of Contrasts? More like a land of fascist paramilitary groups taking out key infrastructure; a land where communications networks have grown into cyborg viruses that we all hook into because hey, it pays the bills; a land where regular people are faced with tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt to treat cancer but they can go to a back-alley clinic and spend next to nothing for the silver package to get their memories scanned and “versioned.” All of it sounds ridiculous; only some of it is fiction. The fourth flood will follow a slow hurricane and it will be a calamity.

Climate change, late stage capitalism, social tension and possible-but-never-full-collapse. Punk scene dynamics, internet edgelord meme shit, dealing with tourists. So many little points of darkness to latch onto.

NORCO is not ultimately about all of this; all of this is set dressing. NORCO is at least in part about a fucked up family at the point of its obliteration. It is about the answer to a question, intensely personal: when it counts, can you let go of the ties that bind? Or will you sink into the swamp, holding onto an ersatz legacy until nothing remains?

Maybe that’s why NORCO feels so familiar.