Hypnospace Outlaw Review
Reviewing this game a whole week-and-two-days-late, we have Hypnospace Outlaw! You play as a Discord Moderator volunteer hypnospace enforcer. Basically a volunteer moderator for 1999's biggest sleeptime network, Hypnospace. Hypnospace is simply a version of the internet not too different from our own back in 1999 with the key difference being that it can only be accessed while sleeping. As an enforcer, your job is to take on moderation tasks from dispatch to combat copyright infringement, bullying and whatever the trolls/unaware teenagers throw at you. It makes for an incredibly unique puzzle game all about putting your internet sleuthing skills to the test by attempting to intuit keywords, find secret pages and try to avoid the eventual fate of getting some stupid ass viruses.
This game feels like the definition of "make a game for around 5 like-minded freaks maximum", and I'm lucky enough to be one of those freaks. Obviously I have an interest in the early internet and it if you think neocities is interesting but don't feel the desire to make a site, I'd highly recommend you give Hypnospace Outlaw a shot to scratch that early-web-itch. I'd also ask that if anything you've read so far interests you that you stop reading now since I think it's a game that I really enjoyed playing blind.
The meat of the game takes place over a period of 3 days in late 1999 where you're tasked with a couple of simple cases hunting down copyright infringement and harassment. The cold open and professional tone of the emails from dispatch makes it feel like you've got a real serious job and that hypnospace is a place to be taken seriously. But as the days roll by, it becomes all the more apparent that the hypnospace developers, Merchantsoft, are a complete wreck of a startup with one co-founder being a hilariously out of touch suit and the other being an immature coding whiz with no intentions of doing any of the dirty work that comes with running a software company. The game slowly tears down this professional facade one day at a time. From the new alpha of Merchansofts game "Outlaw" bricking your computer, to getting suspended from enforcer duties because you copyright struck the co-founders illegal music downloads. And this is all in regards to a single person inhabiting the world of Hypnospace Outlaw. What this game really excels at is making a living breathing world through the humming window of a computer screen. Each time you start a new day almost every site is updated with new details and additions from their owners. As someone whose spent entirely too much time on the internet, many of Hypnospace's characters have reminded me of people I used to know. From band kids in high school, to nerdy adults trying to finally prove themselves to be cool,it's staggering how well Hypnospace manages to characterize what's frankly an absurdly large cast using exclusively the medium of text on a website.
One of my favorite parts is how they depict common internet phenomena like virus and hoaxes. Rumors of Hypnospace causing a disease called "Beef brain" leads to old people putting "BEEF BRAIN SHIELD" sidebars on their website to protect themselves from beefy rays. Click a sketchy link and you'll get a virus from an amateur programmer leading to all sorts of shitty pop ups. It's really endearing and makes me nostalgic for all the time I spent as a kid trying to navigate the internet while it still felt like a wild and mysterious place.
MAJOR SPOILER WARNING but the when the coding centric founder of Merchantsoft, Dylan Merchant, releases his new game as a part of the Hypnospace 2000 update, he inadvertantly causes an incident know as "The Mindcrash". Originally the mindcrash was a joke setup by an amateur programmer named Tim where he hijacked one of hypnospaces corporate sites to try and get the attention of a girl he liked, but it was all just a hoax to get attention. Unfortunately for Tim, Dylan's buggy game led to hundreds of users being injured and some even being killed, likely due to rapidly flashing images cause seizures. Merchantsoft is shut down and Tim is wrongly sent to prison for 6 years on charges of manslaughter. This leads to the games final act where in present day, you're contacted by an archival group looking to archive the final months of hypnospace. Thanks to your enforcer edition keeping a backup of all of hypnospace, you can now travel freely between all 3 of the games main days. One of the members of the archival group Chelsea, reveals that she's actually a former Merchantsoft programmer you worked with as an enforcer in 1999. She knows that Dylan caused the mindcrash and needs you to hunt down proof. This final segment is what makes Hypnospace an phenomenal game to me because almost all webpages, even the ones you didn't have access to on the first couple days, have multiple versions that are now accessible to you for one final data hunt. I don't want to totally spoil everything but the depth with which everything in this game is updated and changed and how it affects multiple characters relationships with each passing day is mindboggling. I really can't express how detailed this games world is and how excited it makes me for the sequel. Outstanding game, truly never played anything else like it.