The video game Norco poses a question peculiar to the climate grief of our era: What does it mean to love a landscape that is engineering its own disappearance?
—then music, with a stint as a guitarist in a punk group. He worked as a volunteer for housing justice after Hurricane Katrina, then earned a master’s in urban and regional planning, writing a thesis on the oil industry’s “second system of cities” crisscrossing southern Louisiana. The degree led to a job as a Geographic Information System tech for the City of New Orleans, and to a series of projects that he developed with friends.
Storytelling through hands-on investigation is how adventure games, from Zork to Myst, work. Yet Norco uses the genre’s conventions to re-create the experience of mourning, skillfully adapting the mechanics of exploration to sifting through a loved one’s loose ends. I played the first demo not long after my father died, and was moved by how exactly it mirrored what I felt amid the clutter of his audio equipment and unfinished songs.
The ambient unease alternates with a streak of gonzo humor. A desperate vender in the French Quarter peddles hot dogs that predate Hurricane Katrina. An alligator seeks revenge on a shrimp fisherman, whom the player must find in the maze of a darkened bayou. Another mini-game involves fighting the ex-cashier of a local convenience store, who is picketing his automated replacement. The game’s black comedy is sharpest when it targets the voyeurism that often fetishizes Louisiana’s ailments.
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