Update log
Full NORCO update
The complete published notes, normalized for clean reading and source attribution.
Repeated intro
HELLO! We wanted to do a quick year-end review. A lot’s happened since the game came out in March. Reviews, bugs, interviews, podcasts, patches, vinyl pressing, prints... We're going to forget some stuff, but here's an attempt at a recap.
Extracted changes
- Performance
- Balance
RELEASE & RECEPTION
We released the game on March 24th. It feels like multiple years ago at this point. Anxiety was high. Being a neurotic group, we chalked the Tribeca win up to a strange fluke, and were confident that NORCO would get shredded by critics and reviewers. We went in prepared for this inevitability, armed only with our personal love and respect for what we created. We were floored by the positive reception from players as well as from Kotaku, PC Gamer, Vice, Polygon, and other outlets. It's been a source of energy and inspiration for the past several months as we move through updates, bugs, and porting.
PATCHES & NEW FEATURES
We’ve also received our share of helpful criticism. We've done our best to address what we can. We’ve added the ability to automate combat encounters in the game, provided an “expert mode” for eliminating signposting for more challenging puzzles, made various edits to pieces of the script that were undercooked or too verbose, added full gamepad support & a “chapter select” menu, improved performance, and more. You can always check the latest patch notes here.
SOUNDTRACK
Not long after launch, the record label Sacred Bones released the NORCO OST as a split with our dear friends Thou. We’d been discussing some kind of collaboration with them for a while, and were thrilled for it to finally materialize. The split features extra material, an album's worth of original Thou tracks, and sleeves that double as pixel art prints.
INTERVIEWS, WRITTEN REFLECTIONS & VIDEO ESSAYS
Following the release, I spoke to a number of outlets, including WWNO, Polygon, Gaming in the Wild, and Waypoint. By the summer, I’d gotten a little tired of hearing myself talk and decided to step back from interviews, but those early conversations were extremely valuable in setting the right context for players to understand the game – its origins, intentions, and how it relates to other regional media. I’m forever grateful for those opportunities.
There were a number of written essays that resonated deeply, such as “ NORCO and the Art of Never Going Home ” by Eddie Johnston, as well as “ notes on norco ” by lotus.
Youtube creators shared several thoughtful and in-depth video essays about NORCO, such as this one by RagnaRox that brilliantly communicates the spirit of the game:
That Dang Dad also reflects on the game’s relationship to oil and climate, and The Svamp King uses hauntological elements of the game as a springboard for discussing lost and alternative futures.
CONSOLE PORTING
This ended up being more of a job than we anticipated, but as of early December, we’re very happy to be on the other side of it. A lot of the technical debt that we accumulated in the lead-up to release came back to haunt us.
One lesson I learned throughout all of this: avoid crunch at all costs. Not only does it ruin your mental health and your morale, but it leads to messy code that you’ll have to fix in the end. After a couple of big refactors, the code is in a much better place. The 1.4.4
Source