Norco’s award-winning point & click adventure comes to PlayStation on October 20 – PlayStation.Blog
Hi, I’m Yuts, a member of a small game studio called Geography of Robots. We recently released our first game Norco, a point-and-click narrative adventure set in the swamps, oil refineries, and suburbs of South Louisiana. The game draws inspiration from first-person pixel adventures like Rise of the Dragon, Snatcher, Deja Vu, and more recent titles like VA-11 HA-11 A. Some have also compared it to Kentucky Route Zero due to its surreal Southern theme and “literary” tone in its writing.
The game has its roots in a Louisiana history project I worked on with a friend in the years following Hurricane Katrina. I was learning a bit of pixel art at the time and decided to apply some of our research to a classic adventure game format. This experiment quickly took on a life of its own. It got some attention on Twitter, which is how our publisher Raw Fury discovered it. Signing with them opened up a lot of opportunities that I never would have imagined, such as winning the Tribeca Festival Game Award for the first time and being selected to the PlayStation Indie Foundation.
Norco’s story follows a young woman named Kay who returns to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana after the death of her mother. She quickly discovers that her brother is missing, leading her down a rabbit hole populated by an influential message board cult, runaway cyborgs, ditch oracles, giant sentient bird and other colorful characters.
The game is more of a psychedelic excursion to Louisiana’s River Parish area than a straight-forward adventure, though you’ll encounter puzzles and quests along the way. It borrows a lot from reality. Norco itself is a real community. That’s where I grew up. It’s a pretty town, but it’s also nestled between two huge petrochemical facilities. It has a complicated history, as does much of the area outside of New Orleans. We try to explore all of these topics on our own terms.
One thing I recommend when playing through the game is to listen closely to the audio scene. Sound designers worked carefully to create a convincing atmosphere, collecting field recordings of wetlands, native birds, insects and more. We tried to be equally intentional with the artwork. We explored the game’s inspiration locations on foot, took lots of reference photos at different times of the day, and often redrawn scenes from scratch multiple times to get it right.
Since we released Norco on PC a few months ago, we’ve been working hard to polish and improve the game – we’ve added Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian-Portuguese and Simplified Chinese localization, gamepad support, Expert Mode, Auto Match and loads of bug fixes and quality of life improvements – all features will be available to you on PS4 and PS5 when Norco released on October 20.
If any of that sounds interesting to you, then check it out. Thank you, I hope you enjoy Norco!
