Minor spoilers

A devastating plague ravages the world, disproportionately affecting the lower classes, where plague victims are dying in droves.

Rage at the injustices of a corrupt system bubble to the surface and violence spills out onto the streets. It doesn’t last long. Each flare of resistance is brutally suppressed by law enforcement agencies that increasingly seem to serve the interests of a corporate class, and not the citizens to whom they swore an oath.

The political world is paralysed; too inept and mired in bureaucracy to successfully restore order to the states they were elected to govern and faith to the institutions they pledged to serve.

Inequality, poverty, and social injustice are endemic the world over, but especially pronounced in North America. The republic decays daily, disgraced by an amoral and shameless administration bound to avaricious corporate powers.

It is 2052.

A technological revolution has blurred the lines between the human and transhuman. Nanotechnology is changing, adapting, and modifying the chemistry of the human body. It will herald a new dawn, but apparently its light is reserved only for a select few.

“I don’t care what she’s been doing. Tell her she can come home. No questions, no speeches.”

Hell’s Kitchen, New York. The ‘Ton Hotel. Formerly a Hilton, in days gone by. Not better, exactly, just less worse. Now half the neon sign is bust. Lights of a bygone era that are never coming back. The interior is a step down from the step down. Inside, the faulty electrics stand a good chance of killing you. The elevator is perennially broken and spitting out arcs of electricity. Rats hold court in the lobby.

There’s more rodents than guests. Admittedly it's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

The owner, Gilbert Renton, is a decent man. Proud. He speaks with a guttural croak, as if his throat were a car exhaust sputtering out the last gasps of a busted engine. He knows the ‘Ton’s rep, but what can he do? No, really – what can he do?

There’s a framed picture on the wall. It’s a young woman set against a backdrop of impossible green. Was the world ever so green? It is becoming harder by the day to recall.

“Sandra,” he wheezes. His daughter. She was meant to help with the hotel’s upkeep, but the filth is too ingrained now. Scrub away the dirt and there won’t even be a ‘Ton. He just wants to know she’s safe, as safe as she can be in this rotten old world.

Where is she now? Far from the green. In the cold grey of New York’s desperate urban jungle. Hating the ‘Ton, which symbolises the squalor of her life, she turned to prostitution, fell in with a bad crowd. Johnny. JoJo. Punks, but dangerous punks. Now she wants to leave. Where?

Anywhere. Anywhere but here. Like a lot of young people, the only chance of a roof over her head is with a parent. Only now the ‘Ton’s roof, its walls – they’re closer to a prison than a home. The alternative is homelessness. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, but not here. She’s seen enough of this city, inhaled too much of its noxious air, to let herself join its under-dwellers in the sad march to an inevitable early death mourned by no one at all.

Across the street there’s a free clinic. The so-called front-line. It’s starved of cash and is frequently raided for supplies. Half the staff are too afraid to come to work. Appalling governmental failures on a federal and state level have left them without support. They’ve even had to throw open their doors to shelter vagrants who have attracted the arbitrary ire of the police force, or whoever the heavies with guns are. No one knows for sure. All they know is that it can’t go on like this much longer. The entire system is buckling.

Sandra Renton is looking away from New York, to beyond the horizon. Who will tell her there’s nothing there?

“Only in novels do buildings collapse when their spirit is lost.”

A deserted château, Paris. Château DuClare by name. Grand and stately, it is a far cry from Hell's Kitchen, but imbued with its own pervasive melancholy.

The château was once the home of a woman called Elizabeth DuClare. That DuClare possessed great wealth was no secret, but what she did with it was. Although ostensibly a centrist with socially liberal views, at heart she stood for a conservative regime that exercised its power from the shadows. She believed in a world with ancient centralised power systems; class and hierarchy were essential and tacitly maintained, all in the name of a balanced civilization.

The world as it has been defined for centuries.

It was a world taken out from under her by scheming acolytes of that same power system – men who wished to seize the shadows, and ultimately step out of them. But not as men. As something, in their eyes at least, more than men. More, even, than human.

Their paramilitary troops now enforce a strict martial law in Paris, which was enacted after a series of terrorist incidents by a group called ‘Silhouette’.

Terrorists, or freedom fighters? That depends on who you ask; but if you do, do so in the dark, and in hushed voices. Even the ATM’s have ears.

The French president appears on screens across the country, apparently to calm a frightened nation. He’s sweating. A bartender at a nightclub says it’s because there’s a gun to his head. You’d ask him to elaborate, but he’s already turned away, afraid to say more. Afraid of what he’s already said.

When did this coup d'etat take place? How did a nation surrender its sovereignty to...what, exactly? What form do these usurpers take?

There’s a young woman in the club. Her name is Nicolette. She spends her nights here, drinking, dancing, prolonging the present moment to avoid the future. She is the daughter of Elizabeth DuClare. She can afford such luxuries.

The relationship between mother and daughter was strained; Nicolette resented her mother’s secrets, and her mother scorned Nicolette’s radical politics. But there was a certain respect between the two women, which kept the chance of reconciliation alive.

But now Elizabeth is dead. Nicolette is the heir to the DuClare fortune and the sole owner of the lonely château. Standing before it again, after so long, she shivers. She is not sure what she will find inside. A legacy of a lost world, probably. A world that callously resisted equality, and so inevitably led to this one. Wealth, power, influence – all handed to Nicolette by virtue of birth.

All things Sandra Renton could never and will never know. Nicolette doesn’t know Sandra Renton personally, but she knows the Sandra Rentons of the world, and her heart bleeds for them. It’s why she’s drawn to the revolutionary politics of Silhouette and the political philosophers who give it shape and voice. The ancien régime her mother helped curate must not be allowed to rise again when – if – the present tyranny is overthrown.

She knows this – at least as well as someone born and raised in a rural château can know it. Which is just another way of saying she doesn’t know it at all.

Today’s revolutionaries are tomorrow’s tyrants.

A dark and sinister conspiracy unites all of these divergent aspects, but that’s just a framing device to tell of institutions, government and otherwise, that have failed to fulfil their basic pledges to the people they were meant to serve – and the devastating consequences that ensued.

These depths exist in the margins. In the snippets of conversation at bars and health clinics; in the locked apartments and gloomy offices; in the frantic emails of beleaguered doctors and frustrated officials; in the Sandras and Nicolettes, who don’t exactly carry the weight of what’s being told, but who nonetheless provide it with essential context and meaning.

As a hypothetical future it was, and remains, remarkably prescient. And in its depiction of widespread and crippling inequality, its echoes of our present moment are more than a little chilling.

“To someone in a garden many lifetimes ago.”

Every iteration of Norco, from the game’s initial demo to the release of the first act, has clarified its weird, haunting voice that little bit more. That’s an obvious enough observation, but it was a voice that promised more than most. And as each iteration expanded the art’s dimensions, that voice’s potential was amplified. Still, I was uncertain of its reach. Now Norco has arrived, having deliriously flung open its doors, and my first trip down the rabbit hole is over.

Thinking about it some hours later, I’m pretty sure it’s one of the best games ever made – or at least a fresh direction of travel for the medium.

When her mother succumbs to a persistent cancer, Kay returns to her hometown of Norco, Louisiana, after an exile’s journey across a collapsed America. Beneath a molten sky abused by smokestacks, the family home is empty except for an android whose face sparkles like stars in a pool. Kay’s brother should be there but he’s vanished, leaving bad vibes in his wake. With some prompting from the android, Kay sets off in search of him, exploring shadows old and new as an arcane mystery quickly devours what’s left of her life.

American greats like McCarthy and DeLillo and even Dos Passos percolate in Norco's mystic dystopia, but the language is its own. As a piece of eco-criticism, Norco is a revelation, crafting a world we both know and do not know. Possibly the last world we’ll ever know if we can’t take apart the dead-end capitalist perdition we’ve all but committed to. Norco, with exceptional clarity and imagination, demands nothing less to avert an apocalypse that connects every one of us.

But for the developers, that apocalypse has a personal nexus. Sat on the Mississippi River just west of New Orleans, the Norco of the game is a strange and sinister dreamscape, textured with history and biography. Like a reflection on a beloved memory of home. Only that memory has been contaminated, phosphorescent light blinking on sallow water. Stretched into its own future, memories like these are up for grabs and committed to servers, taking the last piece of home.

When I went looking for Norco in the present, I was struck by the hotspots on Google Maps: they were almost all oil companies, as if that passed for an identity. Somewhere in the ley lines connecting this unforgiving industry, the tragedy is very real in a place that’s only ever been owned, cultivated and drilled. The accumulating tragedies become something like a scream in the game, channelled into a statement about the singular tragedy of the failed American system. And as I write that, I want to reach for The Wire – Norco is that damn good.

As a point and click narrative adventure, Norco is just as exploratory. There are items to gather and people to speak with, but the genre’s hallmarks are kept to a minimum. Instead, Norco is a layering of experiences, always mindful of perspective – whether that’s Kay’s or her mother Catherine’s, who share the narrative. Perspective informs what players do.

In one sequence, you’re slinking through a rainy night at the behest of Superduck, a horrifying artificial intelligence that operates like a self-aware Craigslist. Superduck’s mission spins into infiltrating a motley crew of gross white dorks, who have shacked up in a local mall. To gain entry you need to utilise their leader’s mobile app to find digital signposts across town. It’s weird as heck, but also completely believable, and it’s the framework for your back-and-forth between locations and characters.

The action unfolds organically, opening nooks and crannies in Kay and Catherine’s respective nights that find the profound nestled in the mundane. Small scenes that indulge anecdote and myth, deepening the flawed, broken, and messy humanity splattered over Norco. Small scenes that don’t ever lapse into whimsy; each one inserts a fresh layer, building towards catharsis. You rarely run into such snapshots in games, making them all the more special here.

Creatively, it’s not easy producing something fundamentally about Now – and Norco really is about Now, in case there’s any question. It’s a problem that pops up in far too much literary fiction – reflexive observations on the present that lack authenticity. But there’s nothing reflexive about Norco. Its understanding of digital languages, and their impact on self and our internal and external landscapes, is behind all the amazing pixel art, the dreamy, eclectic music, and every perfect bit of prose.

The game just sort of gets what matters right now, which is what the best science fiction does, right? The water is rising, the institutions of government fraying, and the collective madness building, yet still we retreat into the loveless inhumanity of corporate systems. Even their own creators can’t escape them in Norco, in one of the game’s many quietly devastating moments.

Which is all just to say Norco is a vital piece of videogame art that absolutely everyone should play immediately. Its dreamscapes shift beneath us, bending towards the quasi-religious until you want to cling tight to the few hands left in reach. Because as unrelentingly bleak as it can be, Norco is still holding out for a better world than the one it sees dead ahead.