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Scene from "NORCO": The indie game won an important award even before it was released
Photo: Geography of Robots
Science fiction often includes spaceships and extraterrestrials, departures to alien planets, dark neon ghettos full of high-tech ninjas and cyber prostheses.
But sometimes not.
Science fiction works are mostly set in a more or less distant future, but their themes tell of the time in which they were created.
However, historical and to a certain extent nostalgic franchises such as »Star Wars«, »Dune« and »Foundation« are currently getting the most attention, as is the far too much hyped return of classic cyberpunk.
Contemporary and therefore perhaps more relevant science fiction takes place on the fringes.
It's similar with video games.
From »Mass Effect« to »Halo« to »Cyberpunk 2077«, the content of the blockbusters often remains formulaic and therefore suitable for the masses.
But those who are interested in something new will find two exciting alternatives in the indie games »NORCO« and »Citizen Sleeper«.
Southern Gothic doomsday blues: This is »NORCO«
In »NORCO«, a point-and-click adventure, the future only looks different from our present at second and third glance.
The eponymous district of the southern metropolis of New Orleans is also in reality a dystopian-looking industrial landscape.
Huge refineries of an oil company light up the night sky with gas flares, somewhere in the flood plain between the Mississippi and endless swamps.
In the game, it is only the android in the trashed backyard of the shabby parents' house that makes it clear: this is not the present.
The mother has just died of cancer when the protagonist tries to find the missing brother and shed light on the family history.
As a classic point-and-click adventure in an idiosyncratic pixel style, »NORCO« offers above all an exciting story that mutates from a detective thriller to something completely different through several chapters and changes in perspective.
Unscrupulous corporations, broken communities and a destroyed environment, plus an elite celebrating masked balls in front of flooded suburbs: "NORCO" shows a gloomy future that would be difficult to digest if humor and, above all, humanity didn't flash out again and again.
The debut game by a young development team with roots in New Orleans was awarded the first »Games Award« at New York's Tribeca Film Festival last summer - and thus before its release.
And a few days ago, the game, which was released at the end of March, also received the "Long Feature Award" at the Berlin festival "A Maze."
Down in space: This is »Citizen Sleeper
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The successful series »The Expanse« has impressively demonstrated that space inhabited by humans brings with it both old and new social and political conflicts.
In the game »Citizen Sleeper«, the protagonist finds himself on a battered space station somewhere in the middle of nowhere.
As a lawless hybrid of an artificial body that is always in acute danger of decay and a consciousness simulated by software, he starts at the bottom of the pecking order in a complex society of administrators, workers, gangsters and engineers.
Day after day, the scarce resources have to be used wisely: for tedious work up in the dock, for necessities such as medicine and food, or for the people who are gradually becoming friends here.
»Citizen Sleeper« is a playfully original mixture.
It's an excellently written adventure that also deals with resource management.
And thanks to the role-playing mechanics, the game even offers different courses and endings.
The dense world on board the huge space station is a ruin because of boundless profiteering and contempt for human beings;
but new life sprout within it, metaphorically and literally.
Above all, the characters make the game of the individual developer Gareth Damien Martin interesting.
There is the father who wants to seek salvation with his little daughter in the dangerous flight;
the mercenary who begins to doubt her own violence;
the killer who eventually arouses pity in the player.
In countless small and large narrative threads, the survivors become a community.
That connects the two games
Despite different genres and settings, both games, »NORCO« and »Citizen Sleeper«, can be reduced to a common denominator: they show how survival can eventually, with luck and help, become life again and how the rubble can be turned into what is important for the future could be saved while burying the old, the past.
Both games speak of a future in their own way, but even more of today: of sadness and anger over a destructive past, but also of the will to do better, to overcome the pain.
The destruction of our livelihoods, inequality and injustice, the great danger, but also hope - these are the issues of our time.
Science fiction, when it is relevant, does not tell of the future, but of the now - and in the best case of how we might still get out of all the problems.
»NORCO« and »Citizen Sleeper« are highly recommended in this regard.
