NORCO Review
Life was never easy for you so you left home and decided to explore what the world had to offer, but then your mom died and you decided it was about time to come home just to check on your brother, Blake. When you arrive home you find that something is definitely not right, and your brother is nowhere to be found. There are whispers that your mother’s death, caused by cancer, wasn’t as straight-forward as it first appeared, and that there’s some sort of dark underbelly that is trying to pull you into its depths.
In the game, NORCO, you will be playing the role of Kay, the estranged daughter. The only thing that is slightly normal is the robot, Million, a robot that your mother rescued and used as her assistant in whatever strange investigation she was conducting at the end of her life. You will visit different locations all over the city, and a couple outside of the city. In most of these areas you’ll get to interact with the locals and discover how strange and mysterious things have become in your hometown.
The game is primarily driven through your dialogue choices, and you will notice that highlighted text in the game will be of the utmost importance, so when you see some, make yourself a note. I can honestly say that it definitely helped keep the game moving when those highlighted text items were part of a solution to a puzzle that stood in my way. You will be retracing your mom’s last days, as well as trying to figure out whatever happened to your mom.
If you are not a gamer into doomsday savior vibes, this is probably not for you, but without giving too much away, I wanted to just state that this game has DOOMSDAY VIBES all over the place. There’s a ton of different characters, some you want to strangle, some you feel sorry for, there’s even a couple that you wonder how they are still alive, but overall the characters all have their own personalities, and that helps the gamer get further immersed into the story.
The one thing that really made me scratch my head, throughout the game, was the very strange battle mechanic(s). It felt like the developer thought the game needed a bit more spice, or knew that the game needed some battles to the death (which for the record NONE of my characters EVER came close to dying). You may have noticed that I put that ‘s’ in parentheses when I said battle mechanic, and that’s because there were a couple disjointed ones slapped together. Now that being said, and the fact is that this game is very puzzle heavy, the mechanics are puzzles in themselves, so I guess that was the developers approach.
This is definitely a game that is not going to be for everyone, but there’s something to it that kept me playing from start to finish. From my understanding there is more than one ending to the game, but once I completed the game for the first time, even though I felt there HAD to be a better ending than the one I had, I did not go back and try again.