The style and concept of this game is something truly incredible, and completely unique. I was drawn in immediately by the premise, and the story and characters kept me interested and invested. There's not really much in the way of gameplay, but that's kind of the point. It's a puzzle game in the form of a forum/blog. I felt that the puzzles got a bit needlessly complicated towards the end, though, and having to visit EVERY SINGLE PAGE for an achievement is just purely awful, but I enjoyed this game overall.

I loved this game. It felt like a lot of love went into this game and there's still so much I didn't see while exploring different pages. The interface itself is the star and combined with the music and sounds, the experience is incredibly immersive and I felt myself get sucked into this other world. Speaking of, the music is one of the best parts of the game and there are some genuine bangers in here. I loved just browsing around, customizing my desktop, and trying out the different programs. I found myself putting off missions to just explore. Putting cases together and figuring stuff out was great as well and nothing felt like it came out of nowhere or would be impossible to find. The cut to the present day as an ending and finding out the truth was something I definitely didn't expect and I felt wrapped up the game well and gives you the opportunity to go back and explore all of the things you may have missed.

This game perfectly encapsulates what it feels like to fall down a rabbit hole in internet mysteries, in sudden tragedy from a face you'll never see the eyes close forever, let alone see ever, their only appearance to you being a small avatar and a name that represents them in a sea of other similar people.

The innocence of that pre-social media world, the more sincere nerdiness, the closed mindedness of the older generations and their fear of the devil in any product their children consume, the juvenile arguments two kids in their teens get into as well as the fake girlfriends they make, the kids who join the platform even if they're underage and stand out from everyone else, the corny mascots for the teenagers that all the teenagers make fun of, the cardinal sin of pissing off a nerdy community and then they pull the rug out from under you (Long live the freelands!)

Each character feels like a human being, though the story writes the personalities to be a little more indulgent in the problems rather than cowardly or just suddenly disappearing like how it would work in reality.

[SPOILER WARNING]
Dylan is such a well written character, he's just this enthusiastic programmer who gets wrapped up in the speeding away success of MerchantSoft and ends up getting too big for his boots, becoming an egotistical prick, and a hypocrite, to a point where he even punishes you for striking the content that you were told to take down, due to a copyright claim from a music artist, who ignores a poor girl upset that she's getting harassed, who acts snobby and rude to everyone including his coworkers like Samantha, and causes the Mindcrash, killing at least 4 people and putting Tim in jail for 6 years, as well as injuring thousands of others, all because he was overenthusiastic about putting his game Outlaw into the new version of Hypnospace, and has to live with that for 20 years, only coming clean once he's finally been discovered, he had truly become rotten at that point but he at least was finally ready to repent and take responsibility for his crime, with a eulogy that feels half as a tearjerker letter to those poor innocent souls taken away, and half as a nostalgic goodbye to that old internet from Jay Tholen himself, but, hey, wait a minute maybe Dylan's honesty isn't what it seems.
Maybe Dylan is just building himself another safety net, only waiting till the eleventh hour to finally come clean about his crimes, clearly only having a face value idea of those people who's blood is on his hands, he asks you to send things related to MerchantSoft to him in hopes he can get it deleted letting him get away freely, he probably joins the archival project so he can cover up his tracks when news came out that Hypnospace was being explored by archivists, he centers his eulogy around himself and his fucking stupid game that was the cause of all these problems in the first place, and his perceptions into the people he killed are shallow face value tearjerkers, meant to get him into court on a favorable confession rather than being nailed down with the evidence and the story that he ruined a teenagers life by throwing the blame on him, this weaselly worm that represents the worst out of the tech bubble, the Mark Zuckerbergs, The Elon Musks, or what could become that any condescending nerd if you give them the power of god for a moment.

Tim is just tragic, he's just a kid wanting to impress a girl he likes by doing cool hack-y stuff, and ends up getting wrapped up in the mindcrash all because he made a scare to win his love interest back, and ends up going to prison for it, and getting blamed for something he had no responsibility for, getting sent to prison for 6 years over it, all the while M1NX and R3ckoning in particular, were trying to reveal the truth, but they were just too late, Thankfully Tim moved past it (but probably spent years dealing with the guilt, and the remorse over Tiffany) getting a job in Computer Science, and having a loving wife and daughter.

Adrian is a huge hidden big bad, he's a soulless corporate tool, who hired his brother (who are separated by TWENTY YEARS, they hardly know eachother. he's using Dylan's ego as a springboard to get programming work out of him) and barely is seen until LeakyPipes, where you see he's a total bumbling idiot and doesn't know the first thing about tech, and doesn't know the damage he's done by letting a puny, worm of a man play god, and just goes totally hands off, not hiring enough extra staff to do proper work on Hypnospace and letting Dylan move programmers that question his authority off of the programming and onto things like HSPD Dispatch, culling geek forums and putting them on backburner servers because he wanted the product to sell better to general audiences and thoughtlessly allowing malware onto his platform, even punishing you if you try to take it down, due to it being a sponsor.

It's a beautiful story, really, offering a storybook version of these modern/late 2000s social media controversies, mixed with the condescending web admin who shuts down the entire forum because people made fun of him of the 90s, through the lens of Geocities and email chains, wrapped in a bow of hazy dreamlike 90s nostalgia.

Truly one of the best games of all time.

Truly a VoyeurPunk game. This games has me peering in from the outside in two ways.

Hypnospace Outlaw creates an environment where you are always looking in on other people’s lives, but only the artifacts they decide to post online. I love how this game fleshes out characters you never say a word to through status updates, the styling of their public pages and the contents of their private files (if you can locate them). By doing this Hypnospace Outlaw allows deep secrets of the characters to feel just that secret and personal.

I also get to peer into a time on the internet I never experienced, but love to see. The chaos of those early internet days feels hypnotic in a way I wish I could experience.

To say nothing of the interesting messages this game has to say about online communities and the grey zones of moderation, both of which are rarely explored in video games.

I could go on and on about this game. I have such a love for this game and could get lost in it’s webpages forever

One of my absolute most favourite games of all time, it itches and scratches a part of my brain i thought could never be itched in a video game.

In this game you are an enforcer in an online sleeptime web service called “Hypnospace” operating in 1999. This games flavour is stooped in late 90s crap internet, awful web design with close-knit online communities. Through your enforcer role, you are assigned cases which involve navigating the “Zones” (akin to Geocities Neighbourhoods) of hypnospace to find infractions which you must use your CHIME moderation tool to combat.

Through these cases and your navigation of zones you get to see the lives of the users of Hypnospace, they start to become almost real as time progresses through the game.

The soundtrack to this game is also one of the best ive ever experienced, the game is almost a concept album with multiple collaborators taking up characters in the world of hypnospace like hot dad as the chowder man and queenjazz providing the music for ingame linkin park spoof SEEPAGE.

All in all an incredible indie experience from a genuine team of creators, I cannot recommend this title enough.

An extremely interesting concept for a game, essentially putting you into the shoes of a forum moderator. While on paper, it doesn't sound like a very appealing framework for a game, Hypnospace Outlaw puts you inside of a bygone world full of images, sounds, and sensations that exist just on the border of my conscious memory. My first forays into the internet took place in the early 2000s, but for a short period of time, I bared witness to the exact environment the game places the player into. Much like Broken Reality, one of my favorite games of all time, the game is just one crafted for someone of my condition I feel, someone who barely remembers the way things used to be and wishes to relive those foggy early memories. This scratched exactly the itch I was yearning for at just the right time. I wish I could rate the game higher, but unfortunately the more puzzle focused gameplay left me wanting a bit more, compared to Broken Reality's exploration focused gameplay. Absolutely a near perfect game objectively however, and one Id suggest to almost anyone.

Man, that was a neat game. Really enjoyed the 90s nostalgia. The art, music, and writing were all on point. I have fond-ish memories of geocities and xanga and the like, and it was fun to explore a well-done and humorous recreation of that period.

Unfortunately, in only 6.5 hours, it managed to be both frustrating and monotonous. Most of the first handful of cases felt more tedious than engaging (looking through dozens of pages for "shocker" images in particular), and the final case was just a bit too esoteric for my liking. I only missed one little thing (something that showed up temporarily on a flashing page) and ended up spiraling off, despite knowing the general type of thing I needed to find. I ended up using a guide to figure out that bit since I'd hit my frustration point. Oh well.

Still, it worked really well as an interactive art gallery with a bit of a story to it. Definitely worth the time if you have any amount of 90s nostalgia or just enjoy the particular stylings of the period. Just don't torture yourself for hours on the last case like I did haha.