In Norco’s sci-fi world, smartphones are literal brain poison

polygon.com:

At the beginning of the point-and-click adventure Norco, protagonist Kay throws her phone into the Rio Grande. Moments before, we witness conversations with her brother Blake, who calls Kay with desperate updates regarding their mother’s cancer symptoms. As we learn about these calls, the lines of two crudely-drawn frowny faces glow over the silhouettes of Kay and her brother on a video chat. By throwing her phone away, Kay distances herself from a childhood spent between “devastating rituals” in a town exploited by the local oil industry. Norco’s characters have a complicated relationship with the past, and it’s encapsulated perfectly through their parasitic relationships with their phones.

Norco switches between Kay’s perspective and that of her mom Catherine. Catherine’s timeline covers the weeks leading up to her death, and her misadventures using a gig worker app called “QuackJob” that she downloads in order to pay an increasingly large pile of medical bills. The app allows Catherine to work for a company called Superduck and pick up various tasks (basically fetch quests) to earn a fake digital currency called “$QCK.” When Catherine arrives at a warehouse for one of her Superduck tasks, she meets the figure behind the company. It’s not a Chad in Patagonia but a giant monstrous bird with a network of writhing flesh beneath its wings. It’s here where we learn that Superduck is a sort of virus that traverses technology and plants alike.

Although Catherine’s involvement with this gig work is ultimately what brings her down a dark path, her phone is also the main tool that empowers her to move through the world. She travels via rideshare on a tiny account of $40 or so. She uses her phone to discover secret statues hidden