Hill Agency Devs on Their Unidealized Cyberpunk Indigenous Future, Inspirations, and More

wccftech.com:

Indigenous developers have been making encouraging inroads into the world of indie games in recent years, but Hill Agency: PURITYDecay from Achimostawinan Games and Canadian Âpihtawikosisân/Métis designer Meagan Byrne represents something a bit different. Hill Agency doesn’t take place in a historical or mythological setting like most games focused on Native characters, but rather in a dystopian noir-tinged far-future city that’s been reclaimed by Indigenous peoples following a great disaster. Being Métis myself, I was immediately struck by Hill Agency’s unique concept and recently sat down with Byrne and lead artist Sadekaronhes Esquivel to talk about the game’s inspirations, unique vision of the future, unidealized approach to depicting Indigenous culture, and more.

A Hill Agency demo has been available for a while, providing an intriguing, if limited, slice of the game. The demo focuses on a simple “mystery” involving finding a kid’s lost robot dog, but as you would expect, the final game is much larger in scope. Byrne originally had a vision for a more complex narrative with looping, interconnected subplots, but budgetary concerns forced her to focus on a single core narrative. Thankfully, that plot goes far beyond lost robodogs, with Byrne promising a mystery that will take you from the gritty city streets, to the consumerist Risen City, to posh flying palaces in the sky.

“We're calling them levels, you know, the way that you would have like a sewer level, sky level, that kind of thing. So, we've got like three levels. There's the ground, which is the Sovereign Nation of the Akâmaskiy. And then there's the Risen City, which, you go up this space tower, and I don't quite know how to describe it… it’s sort of like