REVIEW: Hypnospace Outlaw
Developers: Tendershoot, Michael Lasch, ThatWhichIs Media
Publisher: No More Robots
Released: 2019
Platforms: Steam | GOG | Itch.io | Switch | PS4 | Xbox One, Series X/S
Playing this game off stream allowed me to fully immerse into the retro-future that is Hypnospace. Like a branching reality, Hypnospace Outlaw takes place during Web 1.0 and the turn of Y2K, except if the Internet was accessed through a virtual headset (while you sleep!). When I watched a little footage and the trailer, I knew this game would be for me. And then it blew my expectations out of the water.
Hypnospace is an immaculate recreation of 90’s-era computers. Navigating its make-believe desktop felt so natural to me, that one time I pressed Alt-Tab and sat stupefied when it brought me to my real computer, and not my fictional sticky notes from behind the Hypnospace browser.
There are great software parodies and homages, such as an absolutely not intrusive Bonsai Buddy clone - I swear, you can trust me, I’m a dolphin. You can feed and love a virtual pet that (on the surface) does little more than poop all over the desktop. There’s a fully functional music player, with a couple UI skins reminiscent of Windows XP (look, we were ahead of the 2000’s curve in this timeline).
Hypnosapce itself is also a perfect mirror. Page layouts are simple, often with eye-bleeding colors. Videos are crusty and miniscule. Everyone has a song playing on their site, with a few users that converted their selection into an in-universe equivalent of MIDI. People love to spam GIFs. Everything loads slowly (although you can wiggle your mouse to actually speed things up).
Tech-illiterate users have messy text boxes and broken div tags, identified by using the game’s TTS feature; it will stop reading at seemingly random points. What fantastic attention to detail!
It’s difficult for me to list all the flourishes that capture the feel of the early Internet; it has to be played to be understood.
The only things missing from this alternate Internet are forum boards. Maybe they were outside of the game’s scope. Regardless, it doesn’t hinder the experience (truth be told, I didn’t even notice; I’ve barely interacted with forums over the years).
There are dozens of websites to read, each with their own personality. Most of them update with each plot time skip, and I somehow squeezed 20 hours of content by fanatically studying them all (I’m a slow reader though; take that with a grain of salt). I’ll dive into a few examples in my Best/Worst list, but I don’t want to spoil too much here.
This is another game where I felt the ending was weak, but the journey as a whole was satisfying, and I don’t have any regrets taking it. I recommend going in as blind as possible to get absorbed into the lore of Hypnospace.
HIGHEST PRAISE!
