SPOILERS ARE NOW OPEN

PREVIOUS MESSAGE

Welcome to the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club. Our 22nd game is Norco. The target completion date is December 12, 2022.

We ask that until that date you use the forum software to mark any spoilers, either story based or mechanical, in the discussion below. Ideally the bulk of the discussion will occur after December 12, but if you want to comment before then you are welcome to so long as the spoilers are marked. We ask that if you leave a comment before that date you also come back to the thread after it to read other people’s comments and respond to them, though of course we cannot force you to do so.

All are welcome to participate regardless of whether you have stated a preference to or not and there is absolutely no commitment. You do not have to finish the game to participate but please let us know if you have not.

You can find out more about the Unsanctioned Unofficial Game Pass Game Club or suggest future games for it here.

What is Norco?

A mix of text and point and click adventure set in a grimy alternate vision of Louisiana.

How long is Norco?

How long to beat lists it as 5.5 hours long.

I got an Xbox Series S YESTERDAY, so I'm eager to join in this cycle :D

Norco has some of the most beautiful prose I've read in a game. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I did.

Hooray, I need a kick in the rear to keep playing this game! I’ve really enjoyed the narrative but I usually want to play something else when I get my limited gaming time.

As someone whose family lives in and around New Orleans, they really nailed the look of it in a special way.

Installing it now. Alex spoke very highly of it on the NL cast, and I've been recently been enjoying some point-and-clickers for pretty much the first time in my life, so I'm looking forward to it!

All hail team need-a-kick-in-the-rear! I'm excited to finally make myself play this.

Spoilers open!

I really really like this game, everything from the art to the writing to just the vibe, but I haven't been able to finish because of some real life stuff (I have a friend who needs to evict her abusive ex-husband and I haven't practiced in housing court in awhile so I have been focused on getting all that figured out.)

I'm going to try to finish ASAP and really looking forward to the discussion here. There's a ton to talk about. This game has a lot of hype but for me I think it lives up to it.

This has been a great year for Cyberpunk narrative games!

@bigsocrates: I'm essentially in this camp where I've been trying to finish the game and really like it, but a bunch of real life shit has been getting in the way.

I’m not finished yet (just got to the third Kay chapter), but I’ve been enjoying the game a lot. I’ve found that I need to be in a very specific mood to start playing, but then it’s hard for me to pull away. It’s very well written and, as I said in my earlier comment, authentic to New Orleans. Been kind of annoyed when I solve a puzzle and the game makes me hit the legs I don’t need anyway, but that’s fairly rare.

Superduck is terrifying in many ways.

My real life stuff also getting in the way of me finishing Norco, but I’m hoping to keep this evening open to see more of it. It’s really well done! Just tough to play when I want to devote a solid 3-4 hours of playtime to get into the mood. Doesn’t seem right to just play it for an hour here and there.

I really wanted to love this game but it just didn't click for me the way it seems to for others. The writing is great and the story goes places in a way I wasn't expecting, but for whatever reason I never was able to get truly pulled in. I'm glad I played and finished it, but of the 2D narrative point and click-ish games I played in the past month, I liked Pentiment much more than Norco.

Also, this wasn't why it didn't click with me, but I am not a fan of the visual style. I'm not averse to retro style visuals, but this specific type of super pixelated visuals while also trying to be detailed is not my favorite. Probably doesn't help that I have very little nostalgic attachment to early '90s point and clicks.

Finished the game tonight. I felt oddly let down by the ending, and from doing some reading, I think I got the “best” one. I felt like I wanted something else afterwards, since there were a number of loose threads that looked like they’d be tied up for sure. Overall, I think it’ll make my top 10, but it’s in that borderline tier for sure instead of one of my favorites for 2022.

I finished the game tonight. I actually thought it came together very nicely and I really enjoyed the end game. I did hit some weird bugs in the bayou section including one that may or may not have been an actual bug that forced me to replay like 30 minutes of the game (I think an interface item was missing but when I went back it turns out it just changes in that section so you have to click the boat to leave the Duck Blind and maybe I missed that the first time? Either way it's dumb that they changed it for that one section. I definitely had some very bad bugs with the bayou navigation stuff including one that flipped the screen and zoomed all the way in and made it almost impossible to navigate.)

I don't really agree with @allthedinos criticism because I think it would have been a betrayal of this game's whole vibe to wrap everything up neatly. Of course it's all messy with loose ends by the end (though I think all the major storylines get wrapped up, not actually sure exactly what he's talking about except some minor stuff.)

I really loved how grimy this game was and how good the writing was. I also think it did a fantastic job merging text adventure and point and click. I think it doesn't quite beat out Citizen Sleeper for me for best adventure style game I played this year (Though CS is more of a visual novel with some tabletop RPG elements) but it's in the same conversation and I loved both of them.

This is the rare game that lived up to the hype for me.

I was genuinely sad when LeBlanc died. That guy was both a totally obnoxious asshole and possibly the nicest person in the game outside Catherine (And maybe Dallas, who was also a good dude.) Also it's pretty ballsy how the climax of the game is just right there on the cover art.

In some ways there's just not much to talk about in the specifics because this game is so much about tone and feel rather than the actual story or even the characters. It's more than the sum of its parts because all the aesthetics and even the gameplay work together to really just set a consistent tone, which makes it immersive even though it's a text adventure/point and click.

I love it and I'm definitely going to buy a copy at some point just as a tip to the developers. I may even try another play through or just messing with the chapter skips. Wish you had more than three save slots available though! Branching games should always have a ton of save slots!

@allthedinos: I now realize that of course you mean that they never wrapped up the central question of whether the ball of light was an angel or an alien or something else or whether you actually had the blood of Christ or any of that.

The funny thing is that it never occurred to me that they might! I realize that's stupid on my part, but I just kind of assumed it was all part of the weirdness dark atmosphere more than an actual question that could be answered. I spent the game hoping that Kay would be okay and wanting to find out what happened to the brother and Catherine, all of which was clear, and I didn't even think we'd get an answer about the ball of light! Ha!