Going into this, I assumed Hypnospace Outlaw would more or less be a quirky 90s internet simulator, and it is that—but it's also much more. At the risk of sounding really pretentious, it's kind of a tribute to the internet, regardless of the time period, in all its best and worst forms. For every troll or hacker dweeb with a holier-than-thou attitude, there are just regular, passionate folks that are sharing their hobbies online. For all the games and media in general that try, and sometimes fail, to appropriately capture internet culture or modern culture in general, Hypnospace Outlaw doesn't feel out of touch at all, presumably since it harkens back to a simpler time when the web was this hot new thing with a relatively miniscule install base (at least compared to today).

Now, of course, you could be cynical about Hypnospace and claim that its just capitalizing on nostalgia and has no substance or value for people who weren't on the ground floor of the pre-Y2K fervour it depicts. That said, as someone born in 1997, I could fully get on board with the cosy, charming, and somewhat naïve world wide web that Hypnospace is recapturing. I suppose since the game takes place in a fictional version of the early internet and you play as a newcomer to it, that does help bridge that gap for people like myself. However, the point is that I had no qualms getting on board with the version of the web that Hypnospace Outlaw is selling.

The writing across the board is great, balancing heaps of silly with the occasional serious tones (depending on what sites you're visiting) without it coming across as jarring at all. As you explore the web and act as a firm but fair administrator for its users (and more so for the corporation running it), a mystery narrative also starts to develop that becomes really engaging and kind of takes it beyond the fun, quirky game that it seems from the outset.

The culmination of this mystery is decent enough but perhaps not as dramatic as some may be expecting, although, given the jovial, wacky writing and presentation of the rest of the game, perhaps making it too dramatic and dire would have betrayed the overall feel that Hypnospace Outlaw goes for as a playful examination and time capsule of early internet culture.

Really, my only big complaint is that some of the cases you're handed down by your bosses can have really abstract solutions and unless you've really been paying attention to every detail of every site you visit, you may need to consult a guide once or twice. However, of course, your mileage may vary there.

Even with those quibbles, Hypnospace Outlaw is such a spectacular treat in every way a video game or piece of media can be, whether you're intimately familiar with the pre-Y2K internet or not and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

10/10

Hypnospace is a wonderful simulation of early internet. The ethereal, untouchable mystery that lurks in the fog of bad html and new discovery. Almost spiritual depictions of unknown tech that people were finally able to broadcast their thoughts and hobbies widely on. Trifles of the mundane enshrined in pages along low res gifs, elevated on a marble platform jpg to mythic status.

It captures the weirder discoveries of the late 90s, early 2000s net perfectly in a way that is becoming rarer and rarer. It also has a lot of great writing and adventure game puzzles that really make you hearken back to the days where you would be doing the thing youre doing in the game: genuinely scouring pages for a specific file with not much in the way of tools to help you, peeking into others' lives on a pre-social media canvas, dodging flame pages between users. It also has an interesting plot that can be largely ignored, giving another authentic flavor to the experience that resolves in a pretty interesting way.

Aesthetically and sound design/soundtrack wise it is truly perfect.

I don't know if ill 100% the postgame but im deeply considering it considering i explored it to death and still omly viewed around 60% of pages available in hypnospace. Definitely play it if you get the chance

Seriously, what's with your obsession with messing with people's fun in Hypnospace Outlaw? You're like the ultimate troll, lurking in the digital shadows with nothing better to do than ruin someone's good time. And your choice of character? It's like you're trying to be the epitome of cringe. Can't you take a hint from Cakey and me? We may not always see eye to eye, but at least we're not trying to be the embodiment of every negative stereotype out there. Seriously, rethink your life choices, buddy

Score: 8/10

Professor?!

☆

This game made me feel like I wasn't even real. I enjoyed the concept of it, but I would probably never play a game like this again. I loved every bit of it, don't get me wrong, but it just didn't give me the wow factor I needed to ever crave this type of gameplay again. I do really like the art style of it all!!

I had a rough start with Hypnospace Outlaw. The opening hour led me to believe it was first and foremost anti-capitalist satire, and when the game resisted my actions made under this assumption, I was frustrated. The premise alone, sleep being commodified in the name of productivity, sounds dystopian. The tutorial introduces your role as an online moderator, which you perform by reporting violations such as copyright infringement and harassment. You’re told that, although you can submit a report once you meet the report quota, you can earn a cash prize for each violation reported beyond this quota. This immediately brought to mind a similar mechanic in Papers, Please, which incentivizes you to detain people whenever possible for a commission. Sure, in Hypnospace you’re only paid in hypnocoins which explicitly have no real-world value, and sure, there’s no backstory about how I have to feed and house my starving family, but come on! I went in expecting to have my morals pushed and was ready to wield (and abuse) my authority.

That’s not what Hypnospace Outlaw is.

While struggling to deal with the game’s second case, centering around harassment in the teen forum, I was forced to realize what Hypnospace Outlaw was actually trying to do. I’d found a lead about a site called “The Dumpster,” a mean-spirited blog making fun of lolcows. None of what was on that blog was outright harassment – reading between the lines it’s obviously meant to be demeaning and cruel, but the language is mild and inoffensive enough so that it’s following the letter but not the spirit of the law. That didn’t deter me, and I tried to report every single line of text on the site for harassment. But none of them actually stuck – I got told over and over again to stop sending false reports. “But how am I supposed to abuse my authority if the standards for what constitutes a violation are so high?” I thought. “It’s like I really am supposed to act like a regular moderator.”

After that point it stuck. I had been trying to shove square pegs into round holes, but once I realized my place in Hypnospace, I embraced it. I stopped looking at everything as a potential violation and started to lose myself in the different communities and subcultures found on the forums.

Hypnospace Outlaw is pure fun. It’s unrelentingly earnest and empathetic to the people inhabiting its fictional world, and my role as moderator is just a framing device to put me, the player, as a tourist into this world. It perfectly balances an absurd, almost cartoonist tone while still feeling entirely grounded. People are weird! When given complete freedom to express yourself in a judgement-free (or at least judgement-lite) zone, we’re all cringe and embarrassing!

In recent years I’ve been making an effort let myself enjoy things without shame. I’m only 20, so I wasn’t even alive when this game would have taken place, but it resonated with my journey with unrestricted internet access and how I portray myself online. I remember making a Tumblr account at 13 and over-decorating it to make it feel like my own space before feeling so ashamed at how “cringey” it all was that I deleted it before ever posting anything. Even today, I’m always terrified to post my own thoughts and opinions (like this review!) because putting it out into the world and having it be perceived, people forming ideas about me separate from how I view myself, is terrifying. Anything I put out into the world becomes a reflection of myself, and sincerity is terrifying! It’s so much easier to hide behind a veil of irony!

The people of Hypnospace, on the other hand, are so unabashedly themselves. Each and every person’s page is a sensory nightmare of conflicting colours, textures, sounds, and imagery. But it feels so personal and so earnest that I can’t help but smile anyway. That’s admirable, and something I want to work on myself.

It’s kind of funny then, how I went in expecting this to be mean-spirited and cynical, only for it to instead be a love letter to the internet and those that put a piece of themselves online. I don’t think I could have had this same conclusion if not for my faulty first impression of Hypnospace Outlaw.

It is interesting to start, and while it can feel somewhat slow and boring when you get stuck, and the aesthetics of the websites do get old fairly quickly, the game does progress at a decent pace, bringing in frequent changes to shake up the landscape, and does not overstay its welcome. It took me 4.6 hours to reach the credits, and most of that time was undoubtedly spent reading random webpages in the game.

The gameplay starts off simple, but does eventually get fairly involved, requiring the player to think to combine information from multiple sources to find the answers the game tasks them with finding. The world-building (character writing) is surprisingly effective, condidering the game's limited scope.

Overall, if you can get it for cheap, it is hard not to recommend this short and sweet experience.

At the time of writing this, it is Hypnospace Outlaw's fifth anniversary so I thought now would be a nice time to review it!

Quick background, I found out this game existed through a recommendation that someone made to a streamer I was watching, and based on the description they gave I was like "that sounds fun and unique, I'll grab it if it's on sale"

I went into the game expecting to have fun exploring the sites and pages, but not really feel much more than that. I was wrong, this game blew my expectations way out of the water!

I didn't have any real nostalgia going into this, I was born WAY after the events of this game, but nonetheless the presentation was just so damn good- Nothing in this game ever felt like it was out of place for its time period and everything was just the perfect amount of chaotic, scuffed, and pixelated.

The gameplay is really solid, it's fun to scour all the pages looking for stuff that falls under what the current violations and cases are. There's some pretty good puzzle solving elements too, where things aren't as simple as just reading someone's page until they say something that falls under harassment or whatever. You can also see your actions influence the characters! Every time you hit someone with the violation hammer, you can expect to see some sort of reaction from that site's owner, whether it's a rant in their status message or even an actual addition to their site. Some of the puzzles near the end DID feel a little "... I would never have gotten that without glancing at a guide" but Im willing to consider that just a me-problem rather than a game-problem. There's also a built in hint system that I didn't use and dont remember if it ever got explained in game but it exists and supposedly it's pretty good! (Type "hint" in the search bar)

The individual sites themselves are all fantastic- From the conspiracy theories to the storefronts to the crappy and crude pages made by people who aren't too tech-literate, every single one just oozed personality. I NEVER got bored of just reading through them and going down each one of their rabbit holes because each one was just such an interesting or funny read.

And that's not even mentioning the characters behind these sites at all! I expected them to just be funny but for me to ultimately not care about them and literally the first case in, I was proven so wrong. By the end of the game, I cared so much and was so invested in quite a lot of these characters! There's a real sense of community and friendship around them all, the way they interact and link to each other's pages or come to each other's defenses or maybe get mad at each other all feels so natural and real- Even the characters that are all pretty contained and dont influence the main story much (-there IS an actual story to this game, and I cant talk about it much more without spoiling but it's phenomenal) have their own little micro-stories around them that I couldn't help but be invested in too!

And not to mention the music, the various doodads and silly stuff and decorations you can buy for your desktop, and all the stuff I've just completely missed due to how I played or the pages I didn't pay full attention to...

It's definitely a weird recommendation for me since it's ABSOLUTELY not something that everyone will enjoy, but if you love just reading and exploring weird and wacky and fun websites then I CANNOT recommend this game enough! Every second of it was just such a blast.

Thank god I decided to be nosy and look into that recommendation not directed towards me-