Top Games of 2022: No. 9 - Norco & Citizen Sleeper

9. Norco, dev. Geography of Robots

9. Citizen Sleeper, dev. Jump Over the Age

Our first ever tie in any End of the Year list!

In Spring 2022 we received two text-based adventure cyberpunk games set on the dirty frontier just outside Capitalism. Norco came out in March, Citizen Sleeper arrived May. Together they feel lot like somebody took my GOTY 2021, Disco Elysium and chopped that bad boy right in half. You have the surreal sense of a dying world gone mad in Norco, and in Citizen Sleeper you have a table-top dice mechanic representing the a daily struggle for resources and a place to sleep. Both games also are about minds themselves being copied to be monetized by Capitalism. However, in both cases, the soul is one product too powerful to be controlled.

Norco is set in the actual Louisiana town of Norco, a few miles upriver from New Orleans. The place today exists mostly as a refinery for Shell Oil, with a name maning "New Orleans Refinery COmpany". The semi-fictional setting of Norco is either in a miserable near-future or a twisted alternate reality. There's robots, there's eldritch AIs that have taken over most of the bayou's ecosystem, and there's gangs of pathetic fascist gamer boys roaming around. There is no government, even the evil cyberpunk corporation is barely interested in ruling its domain, and to nobody's shock, the new cryptocurrency is worthless. This is a game whose narration briefly separates from the main story to fast-forward us further along in the timeline, when the Mississippi Delta will finally erode completely and all that is not washed away into the Gulf of Mexico will be small pirate islands. Norco is often depressing, often ridiculous, and those things need not be separate tones.

Meanwhile, Citizen Sleeper is set deep in the Space Age. Your character is what is called a "Sleeper", a copy of a debtor's mind implanted into a synthetic body by an evil galactic Corporation. You have somehow escaped your future life of slavery and find yourself on Erlin's Eye, a circular space station just outside the reach of your owners. The point of the game is to meet the various people around, find work, find stable lodgings, and escape the long-arm of the Corpos. That arm may come as shitty mercenaries who extort you for your continued freedom, or it may come as various killer viruses hiding in the space station system. There's multiple endings, multiple ways to solve problems, but mostly you're making the good numbers go up and the bad numbers go down. Which is itself, deeply addicting. Citizen Sleeper almost does not the good writing and interesting characters. I could just do runs of this dice survival game over and over.

Norco is a point-and-click adventure with linear chapters and one ending. Citizen Sleeper is more open-ended. I actually rejected every ending available and my Sleeper is still on Erlin's Eye, happily living in a hard-won apartment with their cat. In Norco, it's a long mystical track towards one conclusion and one major mystery to solve. You're playing as Kay, a vagrant who has only come home after her mother, Catherine has passed away from cancer. However, in the game you also go back in time a few weeks to play as Catherine in her final days in her futile attempts to leave something behind for her children. Your brother/son is missing and the goal is to find him, wherever he is, whatever trouble he's found himself in. Citizen Sleeper meanwhile is all about unlocking as much of the space station as you can, completing the various tasks that you can each day, and letting the cycle repeat.

But either way, the point of each narrative is a question of finding a home, finding a place, maybe even losing that place. The eponymous Sleeper citizen is most likely going to be victorious. Catherine's journey in Norco is doomed from the start.

There's a beautiful poetry to Norco, which I can only compare its moves to being like Kentucky Route Zero. At one point you're playing along and you're magically transported into a story you're being told, now playing a minigame as a boat on the bayou. There's a strange magic to this world, a logic that feels random or supernatural. Kay's freaky-looking teddy bear becomes a recurring figure, maybe even central to the closest thing you'll find to salvation. It's full of horrifying tragedies, like a man Duck who is also near-death, probably because of the environment poisoning him. He sold a copy of his mind that has now evolved into a god-like entity called Superduck, a physical virus outside of anybody's control. There's great imagery like the faceless Virgin Mary I posted above or a flowing stage curtain decorated with eyes.

Citizen Sleeper lacks that poetry because its systems rely so much on clear mathematical logic. It's about the tough choices you make or do not make. You can lead an assassin to her target, another Sleeper. Your reward to watching this murder is some badly-needed currency. Every action does move the needle further for your own survival, and there is something deeply satisfying about destroying the systems that have kept you under control. For example, you need an injection of expensive medicine every few days - another method of the company of keeping your body in bondage. But as the economy progresses, that restriction becomes less and less of a problem. You prosper in Erlin's Eye, and that is a victory.

I wish there could be a game that could combine the surreal magic of Norco and the steady progress of small victories in Citizen Sleeper. But then again, that game exists, it's Disco Elysium. And I worry I'm being a bit reductive when I compare both these games to that one. They are their own pieces of art that accomplish very different tasks. They do not need the deflationary irony that Disco Elysium traffics in. They actually cannot be that ironic. In these worlds, you cannot be a fascist or a racist or a dirty cop, all those kinds of people exist in the system. In Norco and Citizen Sleeper, you can never be part of the system, either physically or ideologically. 

The only place for the heroes of Norco and Citizen Sleeper is outside systems, in worlds full of danger, magic, and freedom. The must dare to believe that such a thing is even possible, because there is no alternative.