In a great year for adventure games, Norco still felt like a miracle.
, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
It's the year 20XX or so and self-aware artificial intelligence has proliferated such that it's a nuisance on the festering internet and a simple expectation of domestic labor and security-focused robots. Climate change has advanced unchecked, delivering at least one more Katrina-level disaster to New Orleans, and the United States is in the grips of some kind of low-grade civil war,"a meme that set Albuquerque on fire.
We might have just passed one such deferred resolution ourselves in the real world, potentially dating one aspect of Norco's sci-fi prediction less than a year after it came out. As I write this, FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested in the Bahamas and mainstream celebrities who had been publicly shilling for cryptocurrencies in the first half of the year are just kinda shuffling their feet and refusing to make eye contact with you.
This was a regular occurrence for her growing up, but Norco ominously predicts that the next time will be the last. You get to witness that final flood during the climax of the game, going room to room in what is either a dream or a prophetic vision. You revisit the ghosts of Kay's life, like her parents and de facto uncle, all directly or indirectly killed by the oil refinery that owns her home town.