skmdy
2019
the minute long loading times make me feel like im really there, shuffling the tiles
2019
if you enjoyed askiisoft's prior work "pause ahead" you're gonna find a lot to like here, just from design principles (admittedly with more focus on predicting enemy ai). the time from encounter to kill is usually so short and the routing is so tight that you won't have a lot of the awkward moments between gunfights or any waiting for an enemy to lumber their way over to you that its most common comparison "hotline miami" has. there's an argument to be made that this is all just a very dressed-up puzzle platformer or sokoban-like once you get into the flow. but i like that about it.
2005
genre-defining.
2016
i looked at it from the top down and everything was just making research materials or guns and i was so upset by the mechanical simplicity that i quit the game. this isnt a factory its an abacus
2001
now the similarity between ikaruga and halo 3 is that when you kill three enemies in a row, the screen tells you you killed three enemies in a row and it gets excited and you hear a lil robot sayin "somethin-or-other chain"
SO glad to find there are other people trapped in the same cycle of playing 2 days in this game and then quitting it for another 12 months like me. its like the metagame has more meaning than the actual game itself
2019
This review contains spoilers
the only game ive ever reviewed on steam
"unique from other internet community simulation games/fictions in that it doesnt rely on having a community in the first place. youre forced to flicker about from case to case, learning about niche celebrities and just as quickly suspending them, only ever witnessing the fallout. you are not allowed to have any direct contact with users outside of staff and hq. the chat profiles of nearly every user with a webpage taunt you in their footers but you can never download the app to talk. you are your own outlaw
the people you see kind of reflect this though. many of the users of hypnospace have lost family members, are shunned for their appearance, or are otherwise isolated in some way from their real life communities in a way that the service could relieve. a lot of these same people are evangelical christians. there's a girl who says she's going to church to pray in the new year 2000; she thinks "the rapture is probably going to happen then." again, unlike internet-based fictions where you're part of a community, most of these people believe they are past their usefulness (or they're too young to understand what they are useful for). the miracles caused by faith at the cost of everything worldly are the only light at the end of the tunnel for these people. the end times look like a computer that can run in your sleep and make anything come alive in your consciousness. it just happens to be run by a startup funded by dot-com bubble venture capitalism
hypnospace lets you commemorate your loved ones. it lets you find a creative outlet in your dead midwestern town or even just lets you collect squisherz. it cant promise heaven, but it will give you heavenly relief. like so many other games before it hypnospace outlaw is a story mostly about how easy it is to obsess with memory to cope with utter numbness. guarding those memories is the vehicle to faith, and faith the vehicle to paradise. the rebirth of hypnospace is only a stepping stone to the true rebirth of heaven, to its users. the y2k mindcrash was an unwitting mercy
death's brother is sleep, and sleep's name is hypnOS"
i don't know why theyre making a sequel. it makes me upset theyre making a sequel.
"unique from other internet community simulation games/fictions in that it doesnt rely on having a community in the first place. youre forced to flicker about from case to case, learning about niche celebrities and just as quickly suspending them, only ever witnessing the fallout. you are not allowed to have any direct contact with users outside of staff and hq. the chat profiles of nearly every user with a webpage taunt you in their footers but you can never download the app to talk. you are your own outlaw
the people you see kind of reflect this though. many of the users of hypnospace have lost family members, are shunned for their appearance, or are otherwise isolated in some way from their real life communities in a way that the service could relieve. a lot of these same people are evangelical christians. there's a girl who says she's going to church to pray in the new year 2000; she thinks "the rapture is probably going to happen then." again, unlike internet-based fictions where you're part of a community, most of these people believe they are past their usefulness (or they're too young to understand what they are useful for). the miracles caused by faith at the cost of everything worldly are the only light at the end of the tunnel for these people. the end times look like a computer that can run in your sleep and make anything come alive in your consciousness. it just happens to be run by a startup funded by dot-com bubble venture capitalism
hypnospace lets you commemorate your loved ones. it lets you find a creative outlet in your dead midwestern town or even just lets you collect squisherz. it cant promise heaven, but it will give you heavenly relief. like so many other games before it hypnospace outlaw is a story mostly about how easy it is to obsess with memory to cope with utter numbness. guarding those memories is the vehicle to faith, and faith the vehicle to paradise. the rebirth of hypnospace is only a stepping stone to the true rebirth of heaven, to its users. the y2k mindcrash was an unwitting mercy
death's brother is sleep, and sleep's name is hypnOS"
i don't know why theyre making a sequel. it makes me upset theyre making a sequel.
100%ing this game and putting it away forever improved my life by measures. takes as long as writing a book but you never get to have fun using your head and you can hear your pineal gland calcify in real time. hate it