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Decommissioning the Drone Priest
Ander Monson
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I’ve been evangelizing for the 2022 point-and-click adventure game NORCO pretty much nonstop since I discovered it 18 months ago. It’s the final game my students and I played together in my Video Game Writing class this semester that I should be calculating grades for instead of writing this, but sometimes you just have to write a little more about NORCO and not do the job you're paid to do, which is admittedly also to write about NORCO and to let it deeper into your life.
I say you but I mean me, and this is one of the cool tricks video games and essays do: you (the reader, the player) play me (the writer, the protagonist in the game). I mean we are both of us kind of at once, onscreen and offscreen, the I and the eye, which is exactly the kind of spillage I want my video game class to get into. On good days we do.
The whole premise of my video game writing class is that when we let games deeper into our lives, they begin to mean more, reveal more about the games and ourselves, who we are when we play them, and through playing and thinking about how we play them, reveal ourselves to ourselves.
Even at 50, it’s remarkable to me that after so many years of living I remain obscure to myself. Perhaps this opacity is a mercy: it would be awful to know myself completely, to have achieved transparency, to therefore be undelightable, untickleable, unsurpriseable. This could be why I’m drawn to weird books and weird games like NORCO, books and games that are as dense and ultimately unknowable as the forests of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula are, the forests that I used to get lost in as a kid.
On encountering NORCO my students described this game as extremely weird: they are right. For starters, it’s a style of game—point and click, so you’ll be moving the cursor over lots of static images, think King's Quest and the Monkey Island games and the like if you're old enough to get the refernece—that we don’t make or play much anymore, at least in the mainstream of first-person-shooter and MMPORG video gaming, so NORCO feels in that way a little bit stuck in time. But beyond its style it is a deeply weird game, one reason why you should play it as soon as you can.
I don’t think we give enough credit to weirdness in games as a source of mystery and power. I feel the same about books and poems and stories and essays. Let it get weird is what I tell my students. Weird is good.
I mean, I just started Death Stranding, a profoundly weird game, the kind of weird that one doesn’t see very often from big mainstream games. But it’s a Hideo Kojima production, and at this point he’s maybe the biggest game auteur in the business, and as such he's got the currency to do whatever he wants is why, but still the sheer oddness of the experience exhilarated me as I tried to figure out what the hell I was doing hauling around a possibly psychic baby in a water sack.
Weirdness is much more common in smaller games, because the smaller the team the easier it is to make weird games or keep the weirdness from being playtested or edited out of your games, and Geography of Robots’ team, the indie studio that made NORCO, is pretty small. The pseudonymous Yuts, the primary creative mind behind the game, told me that Geography of Robots started as a solo experiment that slowly brought a few more people on, but that as it grew, "it can feel uncomfortable ceding control in certain areas." The flipside of that discomfort is that the game remains extremely weird, and that's what I’d like to celebrate here.
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You’ll notice NORCO’s pixel art stands out for its embrace of abstraction in the age of the hyperreal, the perfect physics, the 120-frames-a-second fluid first-person shooter. This is a game not interested in high resolution pixel-perfect recreation of a real experience but something more impressionistic. I hadn’t previously thought of the pixel art opposite the documentary impulse underneath the game but I feel a tension. NORCO began as a video documentary about New Orleans post-Katrina before it slid towards the game that it became, a meditation on relationships between extractive industry and the communities supported and destroyed by it. The game is meticulously researched and set in a real place (Yuts’ academic background is in geography, so all the maps are extremely real), and it's and filled with characters so odd and well-realized that it’s not surprising to hear that some of them are based on actual conversations Yuts and his team had with people they interviewed for when they were still making the documentary. I mean the game has the heat of the real, and the art style feels like a way to open up a gap—a dreaming space—between a real geography and real people that the game is based on and the game's story, which is of course fictional, set as it is in a dark but oddly familiar future. Part of why Yuts goes by the pseudonym is to deflect an autobiographical reading of the game, his first, and to discourage people to do what they often do with first novels and read the author into the authored.
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I’m particularly enamored by the weird pockets in this game. As we play through the game we have some very strange encounters indeed, like Gus LeBlanc informing us “You got to have a clean ass to fight crime” or what happens when you keep petting Crouton, one of the cats you encounter in the game, against the warning of his owner.
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Or consider relationship between the strange poetry of the place (“They have hooks from the trees with chicken thighs. They shoot bullets in our heads behind our eyes” and “There are mall eyes and ditch eyes and bayou eyes. There are eagle eyes and duck eyes and cardinal eyes. There are John’s eyes and there are your eyes. And your eyes are the refinery eyes.”) and one the character’s confusion with and disregard for that poetry: as Lucky tells us after we accidentally incinerate a massive robot, “Guess that’s what happens when you talk your poetry to ol’ Lucky.”
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This last moment is extremely funny in the context of the game. I laughed so hard the first time I played through it. It reminds me a little bit of the moment in one of my very favorite movies, Mandy, that acts as the hinge between the restrained and brutal first half of the movie and the totally gonzo second half of the movie. Our protagonist’s wife has just been burned alive by some culty assholes, and he (Nicolas Cage in maximal form) falls apart in a famous scene wearing a long-sleeve tiger t-shirt, and then out of nowhere a bizarre commercial plays for something called Cheddar Goblin, a goblin-themed macaroni and cheese in a box, in which a weird puppet goblin dumps macaroni and cheese over kids’ faces and their heads by way of, we understand, advertising this mac & cheese? It’s totally batshit, and from that point the movie veers into an exceptionally pleasurable insanity in which anything could pretty much happen, and it does, and so what we understood the movie to be capable of just goes out the window as it gets much weirder.
These aren't the only weirdo moments in NORCO (there’s an extended bit where this guy tells you the story of trying to find a bathroom after eating an expired hot dog that goes on so long and if you listen to all of it you get a trophy) but it’s the one where I maybe most fell in love with the game
It takes place during an infiltration mission gone off the rails where after burning the giant poetry-talking robot we encounter a rando enemy apparently called The Drone Priest, which tells us for unknown reasons with an extreme degree of unearned swagger, “They’ll never decommission the drone priest, baby” before informing us that “The drone priest is going to KILL YOU,” which it then tries to do.
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There’s no real reason, game- or plot-wise for there to be a drone priest at all, much less one that calls us baby. It’s the baby, the calling us baby that takes this moment from kind of weird to super weird, I mean from fine to ultrafine, and that super weirdness is the part that really delights me, that gets NORCO (and the Drone Priest) lodged in my memory.
I think what I love most about this game is its willingness to really commit to its bits and to take them pretty far indeed. They’re largely secondary to the gameplay and plot but the fact of their existence and how far you can go down them creates a powerful almost fractal-like effect where you start looking closely enough at everything, and sometimes you can keep zooming in and it yields more and more weird-ass self-similar detail at a micro-level. The resulting impression is that everything in this world has depth if you look closely enough at it, but of course it doesn’t.
That impression of infinite depth is one I’m very attracted to in games. Like I love looking at the hundreds of books on the walls of the Finch house in What Remains of Edith Finch and recognizing some (shout out to Borges) and not recognizing others and wondering how many of them are real, and having the thought: what if we could read all of the books on every shelf in the game? We can’t, as it turns out, of course we can't, but in some other games you can, like Skyrim for instance, or even in NORCO where you can read some books, sort of:
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What I’m arguing for here is a kind of selective rabbit-holing, not required for playthrough but rewarding closer interaction and for the kind of players like me (and you) who see a hole and just want to see what's inside it.
The effect is one of discovery for the player but it also gives the impression that the author might almost be discovering it too as we go down the hole together, and what’s in the hole may or may not have much bearing on the larger story except to point out that everything has depth, potentially, and wonder, and might result in delight or a joke or something more resonant with the game's themes. I want to know that this world rewards curiosity and close examination, as our own world in fact does, though it's easy sometimes to forget this.
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Later, you might also run across another very weird dialogue between Pawpaw, an enigmatic and more than vaguely threatening character and some French Quarter half-assed Santa we encounter and give money to or do not (it is not noticeably Christmas in the game otherwise, even if Geography of Robots claims NORCO is a Christmas game. (My class mostly didn't buy this claim, but, as with Santa, run-down or real, some of us believe).
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This dialogue goes a lot harder than it has any right to and as a result wins me over immediately.
That’s what I’m arguing for here is going hard down weird holes. I want more weirdness in the games we make and play, in the poems we write and the stories we read. I want more weirdness in the books we pay attention to, even if that very weirdness means there's fewer of us paying attention to these books and games. That's ok.
Maybe this desire comes out of my teaching experience in the creative writing workshop model where it’s easy to see how a group of writers can start to sand the edges off interesting work if we’re not mindful of protecting our weirdness and we let others try to push our work to the middle of the genre or the aesthetic or the other things that we're familiar with. Or maybe it comes from the moment we are in when one of my students tells me that he used ChatGPT to edit his final portfolio for my other class, to which, good job in at least disclosing, which is my rule in the syllabus, but what these LLMs do is remove the things that make us us, that make us weird, in their delivering us what they think we want: mean of the dataset, the heart of the heart of the country.
Fuck that. What I want is the weird, the trace of the human hand, the odd corners of the individual mind, the fucked-up Santa talking to my fucked-up companion in ways that only raise questions about what exactly is happening in this game.
I find these in solo dev or small team indie games like NORCO or, say, Promise Mascot Agency (2025), or in 2015’s Fran Bow, which I just started playing based on a presentation by one of my video game writing students in part because it's a production of a human couple, and it plays like that too. I play that game and I get to play a mind, or maybe two minds. I like that feeling. It feels like NORCO. It feels not like escapism but like connection. It feels like intimacy. It feels powerful. It feels like being called baby by the drone priest.
To put it another way, they may be able to decommission the drone priest, but they’ll never decommission the drone priest, baby.
You should go buy and play NORCO, even if you don't like video games. I think this might change your mind. And whether or not you believe it is a Christmas game, it is presently 65% off on Steam for the season, which is probably the best place to play it (I find pointing and clicking easier on a computer than on my PS5 but it's available there too). That’s less than I’d pay for the egg nog latte I’m going to get at Starbucks tomorrow (don't judge me) and it is a whole lot weirder and more intimate.
While I'm on the subject, Fran Bow is also less than $5. I like it a lot so far. It rhymes with NORCO even. You cannot yet, however, play Fantasy Horse 6:
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Ander Monson is working on finishing up a book about playing video games and is the author of Predator: a Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, among other things. He teaches video game writing and nonfiction and other stuff at the University of Arizona.
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