Hi, I’m HHRRIISSTT.

I’ve had many favorite games throughout my life, but my favorite-favorite are those that suck me into a foreign place and have deep dynamic systems to play with. Games like Morrowind, Deus Ex, Caves of Qud, and Final Fantasy. I also need to add comics, like BLAME!. Rereading BLAME! recently was hugely inspirational.

Inurbis’ setting was actually originally envisioned in a beat ‘em up, pixel art RPG, in a different location (outside the city). The setting was from a comic book I’d written years earlier - what will mankind look like at its very last breath? Constant exposure to marketing-driven culture has already eroded much of what makes us human - curiousity, honor, love - all packaged up into an experience force fed to us, an inescapable thief of joy, while algorithms segment us into smaller and smaller groups.

We’re now seeing old dangers surface - ignorance, greed and corruption, born from the dregs of mankind, propped up and placed in the highest echelons of our power structures. Those who take and take without a second thought to the world they leave the rest of us. Those who don’t know love or humility. Those few with too much.

It’s not enough that they wreck our planet, poison our society, but what if they even managed to wrestle control over time and space? What terrors might they unleash to keep their own clocks ticking?

I struggled for years to figure out the art project that I would be able to work on “forever”, and a big inspiration came from watching the squirrels in my neighborhood. They survive the eldritch street pavers, run along the power lines, scampering across the roofs of the unknowable giants’ structures, watching us trudge along in our seemingly pointless ways. Generations of survivors in the cracks of our planetary megastructure. What does it really mean to live in someone else’s dream? What does it look like when that dream is a nightmare? And those evil fools are grasping at immortality - what if they get it?

My health has been a huge struggle for the last few years, and as I feel my own clock slowing down, I am finally locked in the with motivation and inspiration to create my own world and share it with others. I want to create something that fully exposes the darkness of humanity, but delights in the life that thrives under our noses.

I hope Inurbis can offer some solace and contrast to our own dreary contrivances.