Tag Archives: 2022

NORCO

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Norco 
Geography of Robots
PC, Xbox, Playstation

Norco is a rare achievement, balancing the legacy of adventure games and multiple movements of American literature. There are pops of Pynchon in product names and comical nobodies, broken by a culture that has no gods, visions of Vonnegut and P.K. Dick in science fiction absurdity, and yet still the lineage of material reality borrowed from Faulkner and Wright. These pair as neighbors to Kojima’s Snatcher and the backrooms of Wadjeteye’s modern adventures games like Unavowed and The Shivah.

The city of Norco is doomed. The cyberdystopian capitalists at Shield have failed to protect the people who work their oil refineries from floods, drugs, and gangs that have started to resemble cults. Your first player character, Kay, knows this before the game begins, and it’s why she left town. However, she’s returned after the passing of her mother, Catherine, and quickly wanders into a mystery. Kay’s brother has gone missing, and Catherine was investigating something Shield representatives took from the house without asking. When you play as Catherine, you quickly see that the client she’s working for, an online app contractor known as “Superduck,” is far, far more than she ever meant to meet.

We live in an age of “the narrative banger,” and Norco is pretty well read as these things go. Largely, it’s written in genuinely funny, conversational dialogue with people like your local scuzzy private detective or Pawpaw the Ditch Man, who believes Catherine and Kay to be direct descendants of Christ’s bloodline. In Catherine’s storyline, she meets the Garretts, a gang of pseudofascists who crack a lot of jokes about social media, porn, drugs, and the like who are being made to share a name by their leader John. This stuff is balanced against the introspective narration of a game like Disco Elysium, with extended (though infrequent) passages of beautiful prose. One great moment early on involves Kay remembering the three floods that have washed through the family’s home in Norco over the years, ending with a projection into the future of a fourth flood that will be the end of the homestead for good.

All this is joined with a strong pixel-art design, full of expressive faces, painterly horizons, and funny, simple animation. It’s really thoughtfully handled and sets the tone for a place that feels lived in, only for the horrors of technology to make mystic overbearance. Norco is a pretty darn good adventure game, with fun environments to explore, fun puzzles, great pacing. It makes this favorites list on the strength of its composition. Its understanding that black comedic satire and thoughtful poetic spirituality can be married, its purposeful use of moody chiptune grooves and pixel art that feels genuinely grimy, its considered politics and political incorrectness.

KNOTWORDS

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Knotwords 
2022
iOS, Google Play, Steam

Game designers Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger’s (Good Sudoku, Spelltower) greatest game is Knotwords, their take on crosswords. Unlike the New York Times crossword (or most cryptic crosswords you’ll find), the game does not rely on definition clues or puns to give you the word. What Knotwords uses to clue players toward solutions is zoned areas – outlined sections of anywhere between two and six squares, and a clue showing what letters will be used in that section. The clue also clarifies any doubles you might need – you might get a three-letter clue that spells “OFO,” for example, and those three letters might contribute to spelling “FOOD.” The zones are divorced from the actual puzzle solutions, meaning the actual solving feels quite a bit like a standard crossword. It’s how you get to that solution that things change.

Anyone who does traditional cryptic crosswords will tell you is that most crosswords you’ll find in a magazine or newspaper are actually trivia games first and word puzzles second. If you are familiar with, say, all of the pop culture and historical references in your average NYT crossword, it’ll be solved almost as quickly as you can enter the letters. If you don’t know the last name of “Figure skater Katarina” or “Castle in ‘Hamlet’,” you may be sunk. Add in NYT’s adoration of theme puzzles and you may be trapped in by obscure puzzle logic, multiple puzzles tied to one piece of trivia you don’t know, or, worst of all, the dreaded rebus.

Knotwords does away with all of that – your only required knowledge is the words you hypothetically can spell with a set of letters. If you happen to be unfamiliar with the word in question (the game uses wiktionary, which doesn’t include proper nouns but does include several exotic boats or shrubberies) you can also ask for a hint, offering the definition as well. But because the game also offers all the letters you need, you can also often solve your way into unfamiliar words just as often as you do in a regular crossword.

Our most recent screenshot of a Best New Time! We’ve kept our streak since public release.

Playing the game for free, you’ll have access to the daily puzzles – these grow in difficulty from Monday to Sunday in a way familiar to most daily puzzle players. On average, doing the daily mini and daily classic puzzle takes my wife and I about five to fifteen minutes before bed. We also have bought in for the “puzzle packs,” which are monthly and include some lightly themed puzzles (still less trivia oriented than any crossword, but puzzles themed around food, flowers, or “no big words” can be fun changes of pace) about on par with the standard puzzles.

By comparison to Good Sudoku, their last game, Knotwords is not a game you can readily binge. It’s also stripped away Good Sudoku’s leaderboards, which I find a huge help here. The app has kept Good Sudoku’s perfect visual design and user interface, however, with great colors, beautiful, big blocky letters, and jaunty music that remains peaceful. The letters thunk down satisfyingly, and after solving a puzzle, you’re greeted by the Rabbit, who makes the most satisfying sounds imaginable. According to Schlesinger, “The bunny SFX were created and implemented within the last 12 hours before we submitted the builds – partially because there was so much to do, but partially because [Zach] and I just both completely knew exactly what it would sound like!”

Some might say this game’s modest ambition is not worthy of a “favorite game.” Maintaining a 761-day streak of playing, I can’t help but disagree. How many games can honestly say their design truly rivals the crossword itself? I think its answers to the classic problems of crosswords constitute brilliant game design – no longer being asked “Carly ___ Jepsen” as the most boring of crossword fills and instead just engaging with the language itself alone let me delete the NYT crossword from my phone. And, on top of that, it offers enough meat to the daily experience that it outclasses the endless Wordle-alikes, only meant to hold your attention for a minute or so. With the games Gage and Schlesinger make, there is perfection in simplicity and elegance in presentation. A game that so respects its players’ time and intelligence is one that has the potential to last in our hearts for years.