Review: NORCO

destructoid.com:

When I played a preview of NORCO last year, I was tentatively excited to play the rest of the game. It had the makings of a really cool experience, but I’ve also been let down by such promising beginnings before. I’m still reeling after finishing the game, but one thing I can say for certain is that this is easily my favorite game I’ve played so far this year.

Just as I said after playing that preview, NORCO is a really bizarre game. However, it doesn’t fall into the trap of being weird just for the sake of it – it uses its strangeness to unsettle you in ways that tie into the game’s main themes really well. Every plot point and character is nuanced, and the game sympathizes with each idea it introduces, regardless of how ugly or off-putting or pathetic it may seem at the outset.

NORCO (PC) Developer: Geography of Robots Publisher: Raw Fury Released: March 24, 2022 MSRP: $14.99

The visuals in NORCO are some of the most stunning and evocative I’ve seen in a game in a long time, and it has some of the most beautiful pixel art I’ve ever seen. It’s moody and atmospheric, feeling like a real space that these characters inhabit, while at other times, the visuals are trippy, otherworldly, and grotesque. It walks a fine line between reality and fantasy, and I felt that it balanced the two perfectly, whether it was in the writing, visuals, or gameplay.

As a piece of genre fiction, NORCO does an excellent job of using its genre to say something meaningful about our present time outside of just being an enjoyable point-and-click mystery game set in the Deep South. The game creates this incredible sense of futility, dread, and inevitability. It’s a portrait of people who are just trying to get by to the best of their abilities, and