In the bayous of Norco, Louisiana, ghosts linger. Not the types in horror movies that jump up in your face, screaming unabatedly, nor the ones you see on strange found footage that you proceed to show all your friends. These ghosts are vestiges of the past, remnants of a bygone time. A time that won’t come back.

Having grown up in Norco, Kay is no stranger to its peculiar inhabitants and rural landscapes. But one day, she’s had enough. She packs her backpack, leaves the only place she’s ever known, and heads for the road. This is how she spends the next five years: aimlessly travelling from state to state, not really achieving anything, her existence reduced to a shadow. But then, her mom dies of sickness. Overcome with a feeling of regret, Kay travels back to her hometown — to Norco.

But home is not as imagined. Slowly but steadily, a power conglomerate is taking over the local towns, and the Norco she knew is getting overshadowed by their capitalist ideals and futuristic machinery. Her house, too, is in shambles, the messy kitchen and living room serving as gateways into the past, a trip down memory lane, if you will. Kay describes these events with a certain apathy, like they belong to a different person; the person who vanished when she ran away. Her ghost. Like one character says, she’s a “young woman without a face floating indifferently through a world stuck in time.”

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Plenty of games have tackled the homecoming trope, but none do it quite like Norco. Typically, this return to a former life concerns itself mostly with what has already happened, the details the protagonist already knows about but we don’t. The home Kay returns to, however, is different. It has changed, molded into a gruesome shape by family dramas, disease and perhaps even occult occurrences.

And this is only the beginning. Slowly, the strange circumstances around Kay’s family and the happenings in Norco are revealed, and a mystery shapes. Carried forward by sharp, concise writing, Norco shifts into something much different and far stranger, a dazzling piece that maintains a fine balance between uncanny and mundane.

The story is told not only from the perspective of Kay, but also a character in the past. Often, a premise is introduced in the past and then further explored in the present, merging these two viewpoints and making the transitions between them almost seamless. As such, you never feel like an interesting part of the plot gets paused, delayed even, by something else. It’s rather clever.

The gameplay also varies, with cascades of different ideas and concepts colliding. An encounter with guards in cutting-edge armor sees the game shift into a turn-based showdown reminiscent of a JRPG, with each round having you either attack with a character or heal them to prepare for the next turn. Then, you attend a puppet show about a hunter travelling the swamps, and you’re transported into a top-down view of the area, able to control the direction of the boat and make a few discoveries along the way. And in perhaps the smartest segment, you undergo a reading of your memory and must decide which recollections to keep and which to forget. Few of these segments are innovative, but together, they lend Norco an ever-bending and unpredictable nature.

What’s so impressive about this story is the way it manages to wrap everything up by the end. A seemingly random encounter early on turns out to be related to a major plot point, and every element of surrealism, no matter how weird, carries a deeper meaning. These aspects don’t feel like they were randomly thrown at a board like dart pieces, but rather like intentional decisions made by the storytellers. I was so engaged that I even started taking notes, attempting to grasp the deeper reaches of the symbolism.

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The game carries in its juxtaposition of rural America and the supernatural a likeness to the magical Kentucky Route Zero. Just like the ragtag cast travelling the dreamlike roads of Kentucky, the characters of Norco face uncertainties in life. They’re driving down blurry motorways in a car fueled by doubt, suppressed by the changes occurring around them. Some try to fight it by searching for purpose, while others give in to the hopelessness.

“No one is satisfied here. We’re trapped in this limbo. A long twilight that bleeds out to the edges of time where even the most fantastic things become banal.”

It puts things into perspective. In a world ruled by the rich and the fortunate, can we — us normal individuals — even hope to change anything? At the entrance to the oil refinery that towers into the skyline, a sign says, “for a greener future.” Feels awfully familiar, doesn’t it? The truth is, as pretentious as it may sound, we live in the world of Norco. The small get suppressed by the large, faceless corporations control our daily life and opinions through bureaucratic algorithms and overwhelming technology. Bleak when you think about it, isn’t it?

And yet, we cling on to life, try to give it meaning. One of the fascinating groups in Norco is a collective of religious zealots all going by the name of Garrett. They wish to transcend this earthly prison, to build a spaceship and reach for the stars. It’s a grand project, one likely to succumb under its own ambition, yet it has a symbolical power. In our own world, too, there are people trying to escape from mundanity. But then again, we all start out reaching for the stars; most of us just give up on that dream.

Theoretically, this game is set in the future. People have stopped using traditional ways of measuring time, there’s an android with what seems like real emotions, and even the local gas station, which lies on an empty parking lot in the middle of nowhere, is managed by an automaton. Yet I would often forget that this is purely speculative fiction. It sure doesn’t feel far from our own world, both in its depiction of towering corporations, but also in the technology that, when you think about it, is not too unachievable. That’s an achievement.

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This is what Norco means to me. It’s a reflection on the world we live in, a subtle critique of the way conglomerates crush and oppress the small, but also a story about the people we meet along our individual journeys and the things we leave behind. With heavy symbolism and wacky yet ultimately human characters, it’s an extraordinary work of magical realism, and it achieves this with a rare brevity, every line of dialogue flowing into the next, not a single word wasted.

To present your ideas is one thing. To do so through delicate hints and the circumstances of your story? That’s art.

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