Award-winning point & click adventure Norco comes to PlayStation October 20

blog.playstation.com:

Hi, I’m Yuts, a member of a small game studio called Geography of Robots. We recently released our first game Norco, a point-and-click narrative adventure set in the swamps, refineries, and suburbs of South Louisiana. The game takes inspiration from first-person pixel adventures like Rise of the Dragon, Snatcher, Deja Vu, and more recent titles like VA-11 HA-11 A. Some have also compared it to Kentucky Route Zero due to its surreal Southern themes and the “literary” tone of its writing.

The game has its roots in a Louisiana history project I was conducting with a friend in the years after Hurricane Katrina. I was learning a bit of pixel art at the time and decided to apply some of our research to a classic adventure game format. This experiment quickly took on a life of its own. It got some attention on Twitter, which is how our publisher Raw Fury found out about it. Signing with them opened up lots of opportunities that I never would have imagined, like winning the first-ever Tribeca Festival Games Award and being selected for the PlayStation Indie Fund.

Norco’s story follows a young woman named Kay who returns to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana following her mom’s death. She soon discovers that her brother’s gone missing, leading her down a rabbit hole populated by an influencer messageboard cult, fugitive robots, drainage ditch prophets, giant sentient birds, and other colorful characters. 

The game is more of a psychedelic tour of Louisiana’s River Parish region than a straight adventure, though you’ll encounter puzzles and quests along the way. It borrows heavily from reality. Norco itself is a real community. It’s where I grew up. It’s a lovely town but is also wedged between two massive petrochemical facilities.