This review contains spoilers
One of those excitingly singular experiences that reaffirms why video games, to me, are crucial and brilliant, Hypnospace Outlaw sets out to recreate a nostalgia-glazed and surprisingly brittle moment of our lives when the confrontation with the internet caused a giddy maelstrom of emotions. Underneath is aesthetic charm, leaning in on that pre-millenium weirdness that defined a lot of the social landscape of the internet before social media standardized - and perhaps corrupted - the practice.
What is essentially a point-and-click adventure. Hypnospace Outlaw is not a game whose world is made up of castles or fantasy lands, no dystopic urban landscapes or haunted houses. What makes up this world are computer windows, emails, download lists, text files, and screensavers. One could misinterpret it for being a text-based adventure given all the text you have to read on webpages and such, but this is not the case since text is only one of the characteristics inherent to the historical world rejuvenated by this game. Your actions are not strictly text-based but, rather, dictated by how one must navigate the inner workings of a computer and internet browser. such a unique scaffolding for the game design to flourish means that the puzzles have atypical solutions. within the point-and-click genre.
The game's sensibilities inhabit this uncanny but fascinating area between our naivety, excitement, and fear of knowing the internet was now going to be a huge part of our lives. The characters whose webpages we visit are in this aching transformative period trying to decide best how to project their lives and their thoughts into the coded structure of online life. You have elderly, conservative-leaning individuals who seem to not be able to organize their page, unintentionally spamming pictures or poorly formatting text; most of ther life was not preparing them for the moment they could translate their many years of lived experiences onto a website. But then you have younger people, clearly savvier at navigating the tools to create individual experiences, already aware that their webpage is a propagation of their image. Insecurity squirms just underneath the purposefully toxic masculinity expressed by some of the teen boys as a means to fake their superiority. We see how social pressures, and even unseen factors, can contribute to the desire for people to become different online, whether for good or not.
And while the obvious satirical edge this game has in representing the many citizens of this frontier cyberspace, laughing with us at an obliviousness we take for granted, the story gradually reveals itself to be much more concerned about the melancholy earned in the name of a blind faith of online utopia. Your role as a content moderator allows glimpses of not just an uncanny existence in Hypnospace, but a potentially dangerous one. That although these characters, and us at that time, look at the internet with cautious optimism, glowing with possibility at the freedom the internet endorses, we forget that the internet is largely dictated by powerful forces; this reality is still at the mercy of many profit-seeking people who may otherwise overlook what people truly need out of this webpages and instant messaging.
Creeping ever so closely to the climax, we begin to understand that the game was challenging our assumptions of what we thought was nonthreatening, even silly. Perhaps it was easy for you to police some of the self-righteous users of Hypnospace, perhaps it was easy to even censor those that were not just in violation but did not align with your own political or social beliefs. By narrative's end, we look at the same world we've inhabited somberly, well aware of a fragility to this world. And then, just like that, we bear witness to how tragic it could be, too. The one major revelation this game pushes to the forefront is that any utopian ideals for a cyberspace society, so free and so networked, erode in the face of one fundamental issue. That is, Hypnospace, just like Facebook, just like Twitter, and so on and so forth, isn't and could never be a utopian alternative. It will run into the corrupting problems all societies are plagued with because the internet is still a human realm. Glossed in a blinding veneer of innovation, we forget that these technological breakthroughs can only be as good as our society would let it. Conversely, it can be as worse as we are in the real world.
Unsurprisingly, in one of the many moments music (the music in this game is so wild, varied, and beautiful) amplifies the giddiness of internet naivety, playing into our excitement in carving out a place of our own within this cyberspace, we submerge in a oxidized nostalgia, misplaced and fracture. We feel a melancholy step into the place where optimism once stood. The song Millennium Anthem - or the shortened remix titled Eulogy - fully dispels the glitzy, digitally rendered facade. It's line, "Y2K, you let me down," ends up being the unfortunate motto for the game. And we care about this loss, this misguided attitude, because the game convinces us of it world and of its human complications. It's sense of humanity is startling compared to other video games, but this is why Hypnospace Outlaw will remain as one of my favorite games in recent memory.
What is essentially a point-and-click adventure. Hypnospace Outlaw is not a game whose world is made up of castles or fantasy lands, no dystopic urban landscapes or haunted houses. What makes up this world are computer windows, emails, download lists, text files, and screensavers. One could misinterpret it for being a text-based adventure given all the text you have to read on webpages and such, but this is not the case since text is only one of the characteristics inherent to the historical world rejuvenated by this game. Your actions are not strictly text-based but, rather, dictated by how one must navigate the inner workings of a computer and internet browser. such a unique scaffolding for the game design to flourish means that the puzzles have atypical solutions. within the point-and-click genre.
The game's sensibilities inhabit this uncanny but fascinating area between our naivety, excitement, and fear of knowing the internet was now going to be a huge part of our lives. The characters whose webpages we visit are in this aching transformative period trying to decide best how to project their lives and their thoughts into the coded structure of online life. You have elderly, conservative-leaning individuals who seem to not be able to organize their page, unintentionally spamming pictures or poorly formatting text; most of ther life was not preparing them for the moment they could translate their many years of lived experiences onto a website. But then you have younger people, clearly savvier at navigating the tools to create individual experiences, already aware that their webpage is a propagation of their image. Insecurity squirms just underneath the purposefully toxic masculinity expressed by some of the teen boys as a means to fake their superiority. We see how social pressures, and even unseen factors, can contribute to the desire for people to become different online, whether for good or not.
And while the obvious satirical edge this game has in representing the many citizens of this frontier cyberspace, laughing with us at an obliviousness we take for granted, the story gradually reveals itself to be much more concerned about the melancholy earned in the name of a blind faith of online utopia. Your role as a content moderator allows glimpses of not just an uncanny existence in Hypnospace, but a potentially dangerous one. That although these characters, and us at that time, look at the internet with cautious optimism, glowing with possibility at the freedom the internet endorses, we forget that the internet is largely dictated by powerful forces; this reality is still at the mercy of many profit-seeking people who may otherwise overlook what people truly need out of this webpages and instant messaging.
Creeping ever so closely to the climax, we begin to understand that the game was challenging our assumptions of what we thought was nonthreatening, even silly. Perhaps it was easy for you to police some of the self-righteous users of Hypnospace, perhaps it was easy to even censor those that were not just in violation but did not align with your own political or social beliefs. By narrative's end, we look at the same world we've inhabited somberly, well aware of a fragility to this world. And then, just like that, we bear witness to how tragic it could be, too. The one major revelation this game pushes to the forefront is that any utopian ideals for a cyberspace society, so free and so networked, erode in the face of one fundamental issue. That is, Hypnospace, just like Facebook, just like Twitter, and so on and so forth, isn't and could never be a utopian alternative. It will run into the corrupting problems all societies are plagued with because the internet is still a human realm. Glossed in a blinding veneer of innovation, we forget that these technological breakthroughs can only be as good as our society would let it. Conversely, it can be as worse as we are in the real world.
Unsurprisingly, in one of the many moments music (the music in this game is so wild, varied, and beautiful) amplifies the giddiness of internet naivety, playing into our excitement in carving out a place of our own within this cyberspace, we submerge in a oxidized nostalgia, misplaced and fracture. We feel a melancholy step into the place where optimism once stood. The song Millennium Anthem - or the shortened remix titled Eulogy - fully dispels the glitzy, digitally rendered facade. It's line, "Y2K, you let me down," ends up being the unfortunate motto for the game. And we care about this loss, this misguided attitude, because the game convinces us of it world and of its human complications. It's sense of humanity is startling compared to other video games, but this is why Hypnospace Outlaw will remain as one of my favorite games in recent memory.