Okay, wow. Wow. Game of the year.
NORCO is an adventure game about Louisiana and you should play it. The last time I posted one of these I wrote some big long essay but this time nah, I'm just gonna say, play this. The game speaks for itself better than I could.
NORCO is a love letter to Louisiana, all of it. It is about occultism and mind uploading and environmental racism and alt-right recruitment and coming home to the shitty small-town suburb you grew up in and the swamps. It is a story about a dystopian future New Orleans which turns out to look exactly like the New Orleans of today which turns out to look exactly like the New Orleans of 40 years ago. It has poetry and gorgeous psychedelic art and hilarious writing and so many good ideas about adventure game design it just tosses off effortlessly.
It also has Ideas, which is why I'm going to take the liberty of posting the "we drew inspiration from these" reading list from the end credits here:
Uneasy Alchemy (Barbara Allen, 2003)
Diamond (ed. Steve Lerner, 2005)
Templars in Louisiana (Wilbur Stiles, 2015)
Mossville: When Great Trees Fall (Documentary film, 2019)
By the way, if you want the playlist of New Orleans / dirty south hip hop I opened my Norco streams with, it's here. There's three songs on there I didn't get to in the stream.