| This article is based on the exclusive licensing agreement between Campfire and Game Informer in China, and please repost with your consent.
At the turn of the century, point-and-click games carry the possibility of interactive narratives, giving players a refreshing environment or dialogue puzzle. This type of game usually adopts the visual pixel art style, and the auditory preference for electronic synthesis music, which is full of charm.
Today, the scale of various sandboxes has exceeded imagination, and it also contains a large number of plot lines driven by choices, and the combination of the two can not make people indulge in it. Against this backdrop, Norco is more like a golden age led by Sierra, a legacy that is undoubtedly an outstanding exponent of digital adventures.
Geography of Robots' first attempts touched on the often overlooked Deep South of the United States, exploring the problems of bourgeoisism and classism that run rampant in the land. The artistic style of "Norco" is completely retro-futuristic and clean; the story behind it takes the surreal sense to the extreme, which can be said to be another genre masterpiece after "Kentucky Route 0".
In Norco, the estuarine swamp is like interconnected nodes on a map. I bounced back and forth between locations, reading historical manuscripts in broken shops, rushing to convenience stores to buy dog food, and then finding hallucinogenic drugs in dark toilet cubicles, and then talking to the citizens of the streets.
Each fragment is full of psychedelic colors — beneath the boundary between trees and heaven, the river flows, refracting sparkling waves; the light is half-light and half-dark, casting long shadows on the overgrown mounds; there are no cars on the highway, only watercolor-like clouds. Every word in Norco hints to the player that the city is weirdly twisted and terminally ill, but it's still so beautiful that it deserves attention.
When the protagonist, Kay, returns to his home, the small community in Louisiana is dead in name only and on the verge of disappearing. Kay's younger brother Blake is missing, and her estranged mother, Catherine, is on the offensive of cancer. In the months leading up to her death, Catherine was obsessed with studying anomalous floating debris on the nearby lake, which attracted the attention of the evil oil plant Shield. Players can play as Kay, wandering around the modern but mysterious Norco, searching for Blake's whereabouts and completing Catherine's unfinished life.
The plot of "Norco" twists and turns, and from time to time I can bump into a tired detective, find a magnificent machine, and every time I find this strange thing, I am always scared into a cold sweat. The game's text is huge, the dialogue and worldview construction text is rich, and the fantastic prose strokes and philosophical quality connotations make me read it happily.
Occasionally I can't keep up with the plot, and kay's "MindMap" comes into play. The production team cleverly transformed the traditional mission log system, bringing together a large number of closely related important items, NPCs, and locations. In this interface, I can trace back important events and more details in the relationship between the characters, advance the plot, and review the mission objectives I want to have.
"Norco" does advocate a gameplay with puzzle solving as the core, and if you want to avoid being deceived, you have to pay attention to the small details in the plot. A multi-segment task requires me to take out my phone in the game and scan the background with the camera to find the hidden mystery. This design undoubtedly gives "Revisiting the Old Place" a deeper sense of exploration. There are still some derivative puzzles hidden in the surrounding environment, and if I hadn't moved my cursor inch by inch to explore carefully, I would have missed it. The design is also a perfect fit for the foggy, hallucinatory atmosphere of the overall story.
The only thing that annoys me about Noco is the slightly snake-like combat system. Kay and her growing number of friends (such as stuffed toy monkeys, humanoid security robots, etc.) occasionally run into people who don't have good intentions to get in the way. At this point, if you want to attack, you have to complete the mini-game on the screen, either by writing down the order in which the pattern flashes and pressing it again; or by grasping the time interval and pointing out the enemy's weakness. The encounter was so played that it inevitably felt lengthy, and I quickly grew tired of it. In a game with such a unique design idea, this combat system is inevitably eclipsed. Fortunately, there are not many fights, which is really a relief.
I've never played a game like Norco, which is rooted in a unique culture, whether it's praise or condemnation, and the way it's artfully expressed. In this picture of nearing doom, the shattered America in front of Kay and Catherine is not far from reality. The rapidly growing industrial complex looks at it as if it could replace low-income households at any moment; automated production systems take away the workers' jobs; and the criminal rich are busy blocking the ascent passages of the people at the bottom.
But this game also has a small moment of seeing the sun. In the cool night breeze, I sat on the top floor of City Hall and admired the stars with strangers, and only a few hours ago I browsed a few cherished memories on a faulty flat-screen TV. In this way, "Norco" reminds us that behind the appearance of madness there is also an inner beauty worth digging into.
Translation: Zhou Xiao
Edit: Zoe