NORCO and the Death of Society
Yaouchu Bi, Guest Contributor
I was unsettled by the ending of NORCO that I got from my playthrough. Your mother sinks into the lake, her corpse still possessed by the mysterious “Pawpaw” who had kidnapped you and your bother. Running away, you chase your brother through the fields. The credits roll, and you never see the city again. The game has nothing more to say.
The town of Norco, from above, through a haze of pollution.
There’s a certain dread to this last moment that other images in the game don’t manage to convey. NORCO takes place in Norco, a dystopic, magical realist rendering of a southern Louisiana town of the same name. Dominated by the energy corporation Shield, pollution, flooding, and political chaos has set the town on a path of endless decay and disorientation. We play as Kay, who left the town five years after her relationship with her mother Katherine broke down. As we try to find our missing brother and uncover the mysteries left behind by our late mother, we find the town in a state of limbo: its public institutions virtually dysfunctional, its youth taken over by a growing Christian cult that recruits through an augmented reality application, its networks infested with a rogue cyborg artificial intelligence called “Superduck.” The only constant seems to be Shield, which is now after your mother’s hidden research into some sort of alien object.
Through Duck, an old friend of Kay’s family, NORCO discusses the impact of Shield’s operations on a local neighborhood.
And so the message that its final scene communicates is also not a complicated one — just like this town that seems beyond saving, there’s nothing one can do to put back together a broken family, a family so shattered that even an ephemeral reunion has to take place in a spaceship erected in the middle of a lake, as if the story were saying that, just like the hideous religious cult and the supernatural organisms that make up its universe, it is also a scene of impossibility.
This imagery of disillusionment and disintegration finds resonance in our contemporary moment, where the Covid-19 pandemic, quarantines, economic recession, and the climate crisis have fragmented the lives of so many. NORCO rejects the neoliberalism that it concretizes in Shield, the dominance of which in has meant pollution, surveillance, and the collapse of neighborhoods. Yet, it’s also here that NORCO meets an impasse that’s symptomatic of a certain ambivalence. It doesn’t attempt to imagine a new form of social collectivity that would revitalize the town. Its rejection of neoliberalism and the corporation is not underpinned with a revolutionary imagination calling for new forms of social-ecological community. Put simply, NORCO doesn’t believe in collectives — not Shield, the capitalist collective, not John’s Christian cult, the religious collective, and not the Superduck either, a sort of weird cyber, post-human collective. In the surreal final battle, we are pitted against the representatives of every one of these collectives — Shield’s robotic guards, Superduck’s monstrous bird-like avatars, and John and his followers.
NORCO is a game of nodes, a game of discrete fragments and sealed-off compartments. The space of the city it represents is segregated into locales, its locales segregated into scenes, its scenes segregated into points of memory and interaction that we then proceed to activate one after another. Human relationships are no exception. From the very beginning we are introduced to the mind map, an interface on which the individuals and entities to which the protagonist Kay’s story is connected are presented as a web of nodes. The only connections are those between two individuals. The family is broken into three nodes, the edges between them equally precarious. This isn’t to suggest that the discretization of spaces mandated by the genre of point-and-click adventure necessarily conditions the way NORCO conceives of social relationships in its narrative, but there is, undeniably, a striking homology between the two. Though the player plays as Kay as she traverses the city, we find ourselves forever segregated from the city’s interior as we look at the disjunct images making up this decaying city. It’s as if Kay, who ran away from her home years ago, is as severed from all this as we are.
NORCO is a game of nodes.
Some have compared NORCO to Disco Elysium for their equally intoxicating dialogue and nihilist themes, yet the latter, even with all its sarcasm and skepticism, still expresses a certain belief in human community-making. The equivalent of these little sparks of hope that dot Martinaise’s working-class landscape is almost entirely absent in Norco’s abandoned neighborhoods. It entertains the possibility of individual anarchists like Lucky living alone outside the system, while failing to imagine an eco-revolutionary collective that could build a different relationship with the environment. It invests its trust in individual detectives like Le Blanc, but cannot picture any community organization or a public institution that tries its best to pull the streets together. Unions are nowhere to be found. The government never makes an appearance. Even in NORCO’s battles, the characters in the player’s party fight separately: every round, a single character is selected to perform an attack, while the enemy selects a single character to damage. They don’t play different roles, heal each other, or apply buffs. They simply take turns.
In the end, the only concept of collectivity NORCO still tries to believe in is the family. In the alternative ending of the game, Kay fails to rescue her brother from the mysterious Pawpaw. She is forced to sit, along with her brother and the corpse of her mother, in a spaceship that Pawpaw believes will bring them to heaven. The ignition is set, and the rocket burns out and explodes. She becomes “pure, radiant light” above this city which she vowed never to return to. With the help of a stand-in father-figure, a cult, and an alien object, the family is finally reunified again — in death. Of course, this is no happy ending, yet the religious motif and the symbolism of light twistedly sanctifies the family and positions it against the other collectives, all of which are associated with imageries of corruption. Is this the ending that was supposed to play out all along? Perhaps this inclusion of two endings is itself another mark of NORCO’s ambivalence.
Perhaps this game doesn’t provide answers. But it tells a story that speaks to us, painfully and powerfully, about searching for solutions to the socioeconomic and environmental crises facing us. Just like that bleak, rotting town on the coast of Louisiana that NORCO recreates, humanity needs stories that reimagine what human collectivities can be as we find ourselves waist-deep in crises that will never find resolution in the atomized connections between individuals. In NORCO, we chase the orb of light, a supernatural being that is supposed to show us the answer, only to find that it offers none. Perhaps, the game is a reminder that it’s up to us to make our own future.
