Norco’s award-winning point-and-click adventure game launches on PlayStation October 20 – PlayStation.Blog
Hi, I’m Yuts, an employee of a small game studio called Geography of Robots. We recently released our first game, Norco, a point-and-click storytelling adventure game set in the swamps, oil refineries, and suburbs of South Louisiana. The game draws inspiration from first person pixelated adventures like Rise of the Dragon, Snatcher, Deja Vu and more recent games like VA-11 HA-11 A. Some have also compared it to Kentucky Route Zero due to its surreal southern themes and the “literary” tone of his writing.
The game has its roots in a historical Louisiana project that I ran with a friend after Hurricane Katrina. I was doing some research on pixel art at the time and decided to apply some of our research to the classic adventure game format. This experiment quickly took on a life of its own. It got attention on Twitter and that’s how our publisher Raw Fury found out about it. Signing with them opened up many opportunities that I could not even dream of, such as winning the first ever Tribeca Festival Games Award and getting into the PlayStation Indie Fund.
Norco’s story follows a young woman named Kay who returns to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana after the death of her mother. She soon discovers her brother has gone missing, leading her down a rabbit hole populated by a message board cult of influencers, runaway robots, gutter prophets, giant sentient birds, and other colorful characters.
The game feels more like a psychedelic tour of Louisiana’s River Parish than a typical adventure, though you’ll encounter puzzles and quests along the way. He borrows heavily from reality. Norco itself is a real community. Here I grew up. It’s a beautiful city, but it’s also sandwiched between two large petrochemical plants. It has a complex history, like much of the region outside of New Orleans. We try to explore all these topics in our own way.
One thing I recommend while playing is to listen carefully to the soundscape. The sound engineers worked meticulously to create a compelling atmosphere by collecting field recordings of wetlands, native bird species, insects and more. We tried to be as deliberate with the artwork. We explored the locations that inspired the game on foot, taking many reference photos at different times of the day, and often redrawing scenes from scratch several times to get it right.
Since we released Norco on PC a few months ago, we’ve been hard at work polishing and improving the game – we’ve added Spanish, French, German, Russian, Brazilian-Portuguese and simplified Chinese localization, gamepad support, expert mode, Autoboy, countless fixes bugs and quality of life improvements are all features that will be available to you on PS4 and PS5 when Norco launches on October 20th.
If any of this seems interesting to you, then check it out. Thank you, I hope you enjoy Norco!
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