A quick stroll around Norco’s virtual art gallery • Eurogamer.net

There’s a virtual exhibition for Norco, the extremely moody, murky point-and-click mystery coming at the end of this month, that you can play here on Steam for free.

I’ve had a little poke around and, alright, it’s a room with some game art in it. Stills from Norco’s early-game environments, static captures of a scene of a distant, rusty skyline pocked with dead trees, another with plumes of chemical exhaust. Silhouettes of chemical plants, overpass bridges, degrading swamps. Plus a few snapshots of the rooms and places you’ll get to poke and prod more thoroughly in the game itself (as I did in my first look at the game), and a secret room I won’t spoil.

The virtual gallery’s running alongside a real one, which has popped up in Gamla Stan, Stockholm and is honestly where I’d much rather be. Taking game art and putting it in an actual gallery is a very literal take on “games as art”, but there is something to it, I think. Especially with Norco, which seems to sit at a junction between its creators’ experience of one real place in the real American south, and their own virtual, concentrated version of it.

Our publisher @RawFury is hosting a virtual art gallery featuring early concept sketches, reference photos, and finalized pixel art from NORCO. The content will also be featured in a digital art book that you can purchase alongside the game. More here: https://t.co/rW9vyp7AFv pic.twitter.com/due13mSHX1

— geographyofrobots (@roboticgeo) February 28, 2022

This content is hosted on an external platform, which will only display it if you accept targeting cookies. Please enable cookies to view.
Manage cookie settings

I’d quite like to be in a room looking at pictures of that, of their early pencil sketches and blotted, oily paintings, photographs of the real thing and big, blown-up pixel-art recreations of it. I’d like to be next to real people talking about it as all of that blurs together, given that whole people-responding-to-what-you’ve-made thing is where the magic really happens.

So yep, a bit literal – a better way to virtually recreate a gallery’s whole communal, reaction-to-art thing is probably just to play the game for a shared audience on Twitch – and ultimately yes, also a marketing exercise. But it’s worked.