The SuperDQP Weekly - February 3, 2025

Heads up, this week’s newsletter will be talking about climate catastrophes. It’s not going to be pretty.

A Recommendation

In lieu of a game recommendation, I think I'm going to recommend something else to do with your money instead (though if, like me, you've been looking forward to Citizen Sleeper 2 for a while, you can pick that up too, but still).

I think you should move some money to a mutual aid fund of some sort, or legal non-profit, or other organization that's going to have a tangible impact on your local community.

Give to the GoFundMe of a trans friend who needs assistance paying for medication or moving to a new state. Donate to your food bank. Help fund your local ACLU chapter. Support your local public media station, both financially and politically. (Yes, I'm biased on that last one.)

If you're able, use your money to make some tangible good in your local community. In the midst of swift, relentless federal action at the U.S. Capitol, it's easy to forget the impact that small acts can make in the small communities in which we live. Make those small acts. Don't be afraid to ask for those small acts. It's cliche to say something like "we're all in this together," but we are. Humans are communal animals and we survive hard times by cooperating.

Help your community. Your small actions matter.

(Also, play Citizen Sleeper and its sequel. They may be set in outer space but they're both about this exact thing.)

Climate change and Norco

With wildfires wreaking havoc in Los Angeles this winter and storms devastating the southeastern United States last fall, I’ve found it difficult to stop thinking about Norco.

Norco is a point-and-click adventure game with cyberpunk magical realism set in a Louisiana immediately pre-climate change apocalypse, and if you can stomach all that, you should play it. It often goes on sale for pretty cheap, and while I’m not going to spoil too much about it, it is the kind of game that will surprise and blindside you multiple times if you go in knowing nothing.

But that said, I think that some context is vital.

Norco is the name of the real-life Louisiana city where this game is set. The community was originally named “Sellers” after the wealthy family that lived there, but after the land was, er… sold, to Shell Oil – I do like an ironic town name – it was renamed after the newly established New Orleans Refining Company, and that largely reflects the culture of the city.

It’s located in a region commonly nicknamed “Cancer Alley” because of the health risks inherent to living next to an oil refinery. And, yes, many communities in Cancer Alley have higher-than-average black populations. For as much as climate change hurts everyone, it especially hurts the people on the margins who suffer from systemic racism, housing policies, redlining, and other forms of discrimination.

There have been two explosions that have rocked the community of Norco: one in 1973 when a leak from a pipeline was ignited by a lawnmower, and another in 1988 due to a faulty vapor line. Nine total fatalities, 48 injuries, not counting the endless people dead or dying slowly from chemical-related symptoms and diseases like asthma and cancer.

It is in this city that the video game, Norco, is set, and I feel that context is vitally important. On the surface, Norco might seen like yet another point and click sci-fi mystery story, but it’s grounded in not just real history, but recent history. Even though this game is set in the near future and has robots and other sci-fi technology, a lot of its more dystopian ideas are already here.

Many of its characters are burnt out by the floods, spills, and economic consequences of peak oil that when stuff starts going really off the rails in the game’s third act, it’s all they can do to just smoke a blunt and watch with their smartphones out and recording.

It’s a future that feels so much more real and bleak than its contemporaries. The town is home to a major refinery, but everything that happens in the game feels so small and local. You get a sense that this is a tiny, tight-knit community that is going to collapse sometime very soon, and everyone knows it, and no one is doing anything about it.

The player character’s childhood home has been flooded three times and she knows and does not care that it will be destroyed by a fourth.

The driving plot point is her mother’s death by cancer, and the game flashes back to her life as she desperately tries to latch on to whatever will get her enough money to just finish her research and get her ducks in a row before she passes.

This game haunts me. I get the sense that it’s going to haunt me constantly as real communities like Norco continue to get snuffed out by the incoming climate apocalypse that no one seems ready to stop.

Which is not to say that it’s a completely dreary game, it’s actually a buckwild game with cults, eldritch duck gods, alien artifacts, ghost bayous, a hard-boiled detective in clown makeup, and Christian motifs that can sometimes rival the likes of Blasphemous.

Seriously, I cannot understate just how absolutely insane the last third of this game is. Words cannot express how bananas things get. But it’s all set in this very real, heartbreaking backdrop.

Norco can often feel like an aimless, scattershot mess of a game, grasping at so many ideas that it can’t seem to land with any kind of definitive statement on the state of the world. It goes on long tangents that pontificate on the future of this small community, and how meaningless this whole struggle can sometimes feel, questioning why the main character is even going on this long, bizarre journey to begin with.

But I think that kind of grounds the game and makes it feel like a more authentic snapshot of America, as it is today. This panicked, terrifying moment where we know what’s about to come, and we don’t know how we’re going to stop it, if we even can stop it, or just mitigate and adapt the best we can.

And sometimes, all we can do is just open up a folding camp chair and sit down, open our camera app, and document. Live in the moment while it’s still the moment. Carpe diem, you know?

I don’t think the “doomer” mindset is particularly helpful amid climate catastrophes like the ones we’re witnessing in Los Angeles and the Southeastern U.S. I believe, firmly, that we are capable of migrating to cleaner energy sources and changing our collective lifestyles to reduce our carbon footprint and live more sustainably.

That takes large steps from every industry, including video games. “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” is not just a snappy meme to post whenever a story on crunch culture or poor sales figures comes up. Games with worse graphics can be run by more energy-efficient machines. People who are paid more to work less spend less time at energy-hungry computers and are more able to afford cleaner energy solutions and more sustainable lifestyle choices at home.

But with all that optimism in mind, I also think it’s important to recognize where we’re at. What’s at stake if the United States continues down this path. Devastating hurricanes like Helene and Milton and wildfires like the Palisades and Eaton fires will only become more intense and frequent, and Norco will feel even less like a cyberpunk fantasy.

A Wishlist Recommendation

If you need a palate cleanser after this entire newsletter, and you happen to have a VR headset and a competent PC to connect it to, I highly recommend checking out the demo for Sushi Ben.

Sushi Ben is a cute and over-the-top slice of life fishing comedy anime that you experience in VR. It does a fabulous job of capturing the sensation of over-the-top bravado humorously applied to mundane situations that you'd see in works like Nichijou or My Deer Friend Nokotan, all wrapped in a cel-shaded artistic direction that works surprisingly well in virtual reality.

It's not without jank; there's a lot of unintuitive motion controls that you might not be a stranger to if you play VR games regularly. The fishing minigame took me more than a few tries because it wouldn't accurately read my motions at first. I would definitely advise playing the demo before buying to gauge both the controls and your comfort level in terms of time spent in VR.

If you can handle it, though, it's a charming good time, and a nice refresher of what VR game design is capable of.

Sushi Ben is slated to release in Q2 2025 on PS5, Meta Quest 2 and up, and Windows PC via Steam. The game will feature both VR and non-VR modes.