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

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.

Improvements and impediments

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 university meets mall meets like your standard office tech city in the sky. There are a couple of spaces that you explore […] and you end up getting into the back rooms and seeing some stuff that you probably shouldn’t have seen. And then there’s the final level, which is the Flying Palace, which you don’t even know what it looks like on the outside. It’s never even conceptualized anywhere, but you kind of get up there and it’s this totally different space. It’s very opulent, it’s like the hyper rich. You get to see a bit of that before shit gets real real.”

Limited resources meant some gameplay mechanics had to be left on the table. Hill Agency lets players can freely choose who they accuse when mysteries reach their climax and there were notions about implementing a reputation system of sorts where NPCs would react negatively if you made the wrong choice, but it didn’t make the cut. Egregiously wrong answers where the suspect and evidence don’t match at all may be rejected, but there’s no way to discover if you’ve made the “right” choice. That may perturb those put off by the idea of throwing around false accusations, but according to Byrne, Hill Agency is more about providing a unique experience rather than being a hardcore detective game.

“We do have stuff in the final game where if your evidence isn’t good enough, if it’s like, the wrong wrong character, and the evidence doesn’t support that, you’ll get a note, basically saying ‘Ahhh, I don’t think so.’ Because that’s the nature of detective games. We also wanted to make it a little more, “go this direction.” For us, it’s less of a detective game and more of a novel you get to explore at your own pace. That partly is, again, because of the nature of our studio, being so small, so shoestring budget, that there are things we really wanted to have in the game, and there were systems we really wanted to be able to polish, that we realized… we didn’t have the resources to do that, and if we left them as was, people were going to get really frustrated. So for us, our first game, it was, let’s just make sure everyone has an interesting experience rather than, ‘Ah, I had a great detective experience.’ Next game, next game.”

While not everything the makers of Hill Agency envisioned make it into the final game, extra development time (the game was delayed back in mid-2022) did allow them to improve the game’s presentation.

“It looks a lot better. […] We ended up getting a technical artist to come in and he’s got, like, 15 years experience. And he just called it, ‘She’s All That-ed.’ It was really good to begin with, he just kind of did a little bit of tweaking with the lighting. It’s Unreal Engine, which is basically known for is their lighting system. So it looks real pretty. We’ve been really lucky to work with two Indigenous interns who’ve actually now come on as full time staff. And they really brought in an entirely new vibe to certain spaces we’ve got. So, like, now there’s unique audio. We’ll also be launching the soundtrack with full tracks, not just the loops.  [In the demo] it’s just kind of that one sound. Once you’re actually playing the game, each level has its own sound. Certain areas have their own sound. And I just think Paul, our sound designer and implementer, has just done a fantastic job. I’m really excited. This space really feels alive.”

Native Noir

To some degree, Hill Agency is a mashup of Byrne’s own background and the 80s and 90s cyberpunk movies she grew up with, but the game isn’t mere self-insert fan fiction. The concept for her game was partly sparked by the more problematic side of movies like Blade Runner and the unique feelings they instilled in her as an indigenous person.

“I was very aware even as a young person of the overwhelming Orientalism [of Blade Runner] and the fact that the world was being presented as sort of an othering and scary and alien. But in my mind, I always look at Chinatown with a bit of jealousy, because they get to have these spaces that have their language in it. We don’t really get spaces like Chinatown. […] It really did make me feel like it’s kind of unfair, that a lot of indigenous people don’t get to have, y’know, ‘Nativetown.’ That comes with its own kind of messed-up-ness of like, why should we? It’s our land, it’s our home, we shouldn’t have to have a special area of a city dedicated to us. And that was kind of the impetus for the Ground Level city as a whole. I just was like, I want to see what land back looks like to me. And for me, it was reclamation, it was taking things that already exist and just repurposing them.”

That theme of reclamation and repurposing meant Byrne tried to rethink how basic urban staples like apartments might work in her Indigenous future, with multigenerational families taking up entire buildings. Meanwhile, Hill Agency lead artist Sadekaronhes Esquivel created a unique style for the game’s characters that combines more traditional Native touches with snappy threads straight out of a 1940s noir flick. The later may seem atypical for an Indigenous game, but it made perfect sense to Esquivel.

“One of the things that we really talked about was the idea that we’re indigenous people surviving in these places, rebuilding society, and as people we’re often looking for sustainable ways to do things. And when you look at the clothes from like the 1930s, 40s, 50s they’re all handmade. Like, the shirts, the suits, the pants, everything. Everything was handmade. Some factory making, but it was built to last, it was quality stuff. In our future, the idea is that you would have like clans or families that are like, we’re going into textiles, we’re making fashion for people out of things that are reusable and sustainable and will keep lasting for generations. And you can hand down if you want.”

It isn’t just Hill Agency’s duds that are inspired by classic noir movies, the grit is there too. Both Byrne and Esquivel wanted to avoid an idealized Indigenous society. Vast inequality still exists in the world of Hill Agency and some challenging subject matter will be tackled. Also, frankly, some of characters you encounter are just kinda… jerks. Both say that’s entirely intentional, with some of the characters perhaps being inspired by real people (just don’t tell them that).

“That’s part of our history. It’s part of our tradition. You know, we’re just people. I think that’s the thing that always bothers me about, the noble Native and stuff like that. No, we’re just human. Like, we screw up, we project our traumas onto people, we don’t always see our shortcomings. We don’t always listen, when somebody says they have a problem. That’s normal and fine.”

Looking to the future

While Byrne is obviously focused for the launch of Hill Agency, she, Esquivel, and the rest of Achimostawinan Games also have other worlds they want to explore and “so many game ideas in the backlog.” This excitement for the future is tempered with some apprehension, as getting Hill Agency made was no easy task, with potential backers often expressing skepticism. Byrne doesn’t buy it though as she believes there’s a growing Indigenous market for games made by Indigenous people.

“Publishers, they’re like, ‘Who are you making this for?’ Well, I’m making this for Native people and they’re like, ‘We just don’t see it as a market that’s really worth getting into.’ And I’m like, that’s bullshit. This is an amazing market.”

Hill Agency: PURITYdecay launches today on PC (here’s the game’s Steam page).