The background of Hypnospace Outlaw, an alt-90s internet space approximating Geocities/AOL, is not something I ever got to experience for myself. By the time I first started to seriously experience the internet as a kid in the early 2010’s, Web 2.0 was well underway, with Hypnospace’s inspirations already well on their way to becoming a relic embedded firmly in history. Yet when playing this game, it’s so easy to see the fantastical allure of what the internet could be. Even as an obviously curated space, I think its poignant that this is the most fun I’ve had just “browsing the web” in a long time. More still, it highlights how even as a lot about the internet has changed, a lot remains similar at the core: people who want to express themselves struggling with greater corporate interests.
Every page of Hypnospace is a meticulously constructed, multi-media collage of clip art, funny-looking early 3D models, and hyper-compressed videos that all feel right at home together. It's also really fucking funny. Whether seeing an old man failing to put together a properly functioning page (props for the effort though) or a bunch of teenagers sticking the same image uniting themselves against the teenzone bully, every page has a—and typically a whole array of—absolutely ridiculous bits that are a delicacy to experience. Indeed, so much of this game's comedy born out of the fact that the way people express themselves is often really funny, whether intentionally or not.
An amazing moment occurs during the first mission to copyright strike images of one 1964 cartoon character "Gumshoe Gooper". You spend a while idling through the vast space available to you, browsing page after page with no luck, until you finally strike the jackpot... a first grade teacher posting the drawings her students made online. Welp! Get on scrubbing those pics, pig. The comedy just ratchets itself up as the game progresses, and you get to see these same webpages evolve, opening the door to so many fun developments (many of which you don't get to truly appreciate the payoff until the end of the game). Part of me wants to be as vague as possible talking about the various elements of the game, because it all deserves to be experienced blindly. Yet, because there's such an immense amount of things to experience, it doesn't really matter "spoiling" a few things.
Short digression I orginally had near the end but moved up here for pacing reasons: There's a very particular focus on music sub-cultures that spawned on the internet, from what I can tell spawning from the creator's own experience in such groups. However, as a relative music normie who just puts on the music I think sounds nice without caring to get too much into the weeds, I felt some of the intricacies of the discussions on various pages were lost to me. This isn't a failure of the game so much as on myself, but I just found it interesting.
Thanks to the sheer joy of scrolling through each and every webpage, it allows for the actual gameplay of Hypnospace to be brave in a sense. It is always a fine wire for the puzzle adventure game to cross between giving the player a freedom with which they're able to answer questions. A game that limits the players responses to a pre-defined list of answers, like choosing clues in Ace Attorney, may lead to the player just selecting the most right sounding options versus truly intuiting the logic of the answer. That's not necessarily an issue, but it can lead to the deduction process feeling unsatisfying if handled incorrectly. On the other hand, a game can let the player respond freely to the question in an attempt to be as realistic of a deduction process as possible, but that a path that very easily leads to a frustrating experience. Not to mention, it's a nightmare of answer parsing, something Square Enix tried to tackle with their eloquently named "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case" and, um, well. Lol.
Hypnospace Outlaw skews towards the later option, giving you a page-tagging keyword system and a search bar that lets you search those keywords. While there's plenty of pages accessible from the various "zone" landing pages, many others require you to dig through other pages to find links to them. Some pages require you to intuit very specific keywords to access them. There's like 3 or 4 different secret areas that require you to get through multiple layer of security and keyword intuition to access! Yet I only had to look at a guide for all of this a single time (which, once I did the thing required, really was my fault for not reading correctly), which is incredibly rare for a chronic guide looker-at-er such as I! Even if I couldn't find the thing I was looking for, it was so easy to rabbit hole myself down some other interesting series of pages, often leading to a bunch of different secrets that may or may not be relevant to the main task assigned. Then, eventually, I would stumble upon the information that triggers that all-so-wonderful lightbulb moment, and progress would be forged soon after. It's an incredibly seamless experience, bouncing to and from the "main path" of the game, and one that made me feel so smart with each one of those lightbulb moments.
With all that, I'd be so easy for Hypnospace to be a really well designed puzzle adventure game with an amazing sense of humor, but there's something the game really surprised me with; the element that brings it into the realm of one of my favorite games of all time.
At its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about communities: how they are born, how they prosper, and—perhaps most poignantly—how they wither away and die. You are an internet cop intentionally on the outside of the communities you patrol, an agent of the corporate minds who's capitalist ambitions directly fly in the face of the well-being of these communities. You never directly speak with most of the people who populate Hypnospace, and in fact are forbidden from doing so by your job. Yet, despite all that separation, it's impossible not to grow an attachment to so many of these characters, with a surprising amount of depth both in their interactions amongst themselves and with the corporate overlord Merchantsoft.
Then, towards the end of the game, the game pulls something really interesting that I will not divulge any more into that gives the game a sense of mournfulness to it. No matter how long communities exist, they'll fall apart eventually. Sometimes it's by the nature of people drifting apart as their lives diverge, or those apart of it passing away; oftentimes it's by the forceful cudgel of corporate interests or all sorts of other ugliness. Yet the people within these communities persist, and the great memories of the communities stored within them persist.
Hypnospace recognizes the humanity of internet spaces so well, and caps things off with an ending that, to my total shock, made me a bit emotional! The incredible soundtrack definitely helped pull off the moment. A goodbye to Hypnospace is a bittersweet goodbye to a web of communities I never got to be apart of and yet still grew to know so well. Even as the communities die, the memories remain archived forever.
And may we forever stand with Gooper.
Every page of Hypnospace is a meticulously constructed, multi-media collage of clip art, funny-looking early 3D models, and hyper-compressed videos that all feel right at home together. It's also really fucking funny. Whether seeing an old man failing to put together a properly functioning page (props for the effort though) or a bunch of teenagers sticking the same image uniting themselves against the teenzone bully, every page has a—and typically a whole array of—absolutely ridiculous bits that are a delicacy to experience. Indeed, so much of this game's comedy born out of the fact that the way people express themselves is often really funny, whether intentionally or not.
An amazing moment occurs during the first mission to copyright strike images of one 1964 cartoon character "Gumshoe Gooper". You spend a while idling through the vast space available to you, browsing page after page with no luck, until you finally strike the jackpot... a first grade teacher posting the drawings her students made online. Welp! Get on scrubbing those pics, pig. The comedy just ratchets itself up as the game progresses, and you get to see these same webpages evolve, opening the door to so many fun developments (many of which you don't get to truly appreciate the payoff until the end of the game). Part of me wants to be as vague as possible talking about the various elements of the game, because it all deserves to be experienced blindly. Yet, because there's such an immense amount of things to experience, it doesn't really matter "spoiling" a few things.
Short digression I orginally had near the end but moved up here for pacing reasons: There's a very particular focus on music sub-cultures that spawned on the internet, from what I can tell spawning from the creator's own experience in such groups. However, as a relative music normie who just puts on the music I think sounds nice without caring to get too much into the weeds, I felt some of the intricacies of the discussions on various pages were lost to me. This isn't a failure of the game so much as on myself, but I just found it interesting.
Thanks to the sheer joy of scrolling through each and every webpage, it allows for the actual gameplay of Hypnospace to be brave in a sense. It is always a fine wire for the puzzle adventure game to cross between giving the player a freedom with which they're able to answer questions. A game that limits the players responses to a pre-defined list of answers, like choosing clues in Ace Attorney, may lead to the player just selecting the most right sounding options versus truly intuiting the logic of the answer. That's not necessarily an issue, but it can lead to the deduction process feeling unsatisfying if handled incorrectly. On the other hand, a game can let the player respond freely to the question in an attempt to be as realistic of a deduction process as possible, but that a path that very easily leads to a frustrating experience. Not to mention, it's a nightmare of answer parsing, something Square Enix tried to tackle with their eloquently named "SQUARE ENIX AI Tech Preview: The Portopia Serial Murder Case" and, um, well. Lol.
Hypnospace Outlaw skews towards the later option, giving you a page-tagging keyword system and a search bar that lets you search those keywords. While there's plenty of pages accessible from the various "zone" landing pages, many others require you to dig through other pages to find links to them. Some pages require you to intuit very specific keywords to access them. There's like 3 or 4 different secret areas that require you to get through multiple layer of security and keyword intuition to access! Yet I only had to look at a guide for all of this a single time (which, once I did the thing required, really was my fault for not reading correctly), which is incredibly rare for a chronic guide looker-at-er such as I! Even if I couldn't find the thing I was looking for, it was so easy to rabbit hole myself down some other interesting series of pages, often leading to a bunch of different secrets that may or may not be relevant to the main task assigned. Then, eventually, I would stumble upon the information that triggers that all-so-wonderful lightbulb moment, and progress would be forged soon after. It's an incredibly seamless experience, bouncing to and from the "main path" of the game, and one that made me feel so smart with each one of those lightbulb moments.
With all that, I'd be so easy for Hypnospace to be a really well designed puzzle adventure game with an amazing sense of humor, but there's something the game really surprised me with; the element that brings it into the realm of one of my favorite games of all time.
At its core, Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about communities: how they are born, how they prosper, and—perhaps most poignantly—how they wither away and die. You are an internet cop intentionally on the outside of the communities you patrol, an agent of the corporate minds who's capitalist ambitions directly fly in the face of the well-being of these communities. You never directly speak with most of the people who populate Hypnospace, and in fact are forbidden from doing so by your job. Yet, despite all that separation, it's impossible not to grow an attachment to so many of these characters, with a surprising amount of depth both in their interactions amongst themselves and with the corporate overlord Merchantsoft.
Then, towards the end of the game, the game pulls something really interesting that I will not divulge any more into that gives the game a sense of mournfulness to it. No matter how long communities exist, they'll fall apart eventually. Sometimes it's by the nature of people drifting apart as their lives diverge, or those apart of it passing away; oftentimes it's by the forceful cudgel of corporate interests or all sorts of other ugliness. Yet the people within these communities persist, and the great memories of the communities stored within them persist.
Hypnospace recognizes the humanity of internet spaces so well, and caps things off with an ending that, to my total shock, made me a bit emotional! The incredible soundtrack definitely helped pull off the moment. A goodbye to Hypnospace is a bittersweet goodbye to a web of communities I never got to be apart of and yet still grew to know so well. Even as the communities die, the memories remain archived forever.
And may we forever stand with Gooper.
sirconnie
2 months ago