Hypnospace Outlaw presents a precise simulation of the apex of 90's internet culture. Separating anarchic innocence from hubristic malice is the objective while soaking in the garish spectacle of a lost time is its gratuity. Twenty years removed, Hypnospace Outlaw exposes the dividing line between the internet as a digital frontier and its current status as a corporate hellscape.
Y2K broke the internet. Not in a highly publicized tech rapture, but as a herald of the World Wide Web leaving its adolescence. From the Eternal September of 1993 up until the end of the millennium, what passed for the common internet was a loose collection of busted websites assembled by normal people. Primitive tools were used to fashion digital identities in an age when an online persona was a novel concept instead of a fact of life. Today we can only Wayback Machine to fragments of this time and weep at its low resolution crimes against style and coherence, but, back then, the internet and webpages were legitimately awesome. You had to be there.
Hypnospace Outlaw takes you there. Under the guise of an alternate 1999 where people wear electronic headbands and explore “Hypnospace” while they sleep, it presents a satirical version late 90’s internet culture. It was the days of GeoCities and AngelFire, of web-rings of shared interests, and graphically-violent portals for designated cyber topics. The internet was an abstract for real life, and the only way we knew how to build and express it was with outrageous color schemes, grainy scanned photographs, and abysmally recorded audio. Hypnospace Outlaw’s staggering collection of fake websites, in style and content, are virtually indistinguishable from the twenty-year-old memories I keep inside of my head. It’s like I’m re-living someone else’s recollection of a shared space and time.
Hypnospace would be a fine virtual museum, but there’s actually a goal in place. The player assumes the role of an Enforcer, a content moderator within Hypnospace. With a period-appropriate tutorial and a nifty set of administrator tools, it’s your job to comb Hypnospace through a browser and identify terms of service violations. These actions include flagging copyrighted material, making a call on whether or not language is overly offensive or profane, finding harmful software installers, and checking for unregulated commerce.
While it’s possible to dive into every single webpage and attempt to ban content, there are also tangible cases assigned from higher ups. It starts by identifying, with an attached picture, copyrighted material within a specific web portal. Later, in the designated Teentopia zone, there’s a bit more nuance on the part of the player where it’s up to you to decide if a webpage features targeted harassment or aimless high school-level social venting. This particular instance felt extremely real because it’s exactly what my friends and I did when we were teenage losers with nothing better to do; we talked shit about people we didn’t like and each other, and for some reason we aired that laundry our personal AOL pages.
Hypnospace Outlaw’s low-fidelity aesthetic might betray the sincere amount of work that went into making it as authentically detailed as possible. In the bottom of Teentopia lies the webpage of Zane and the whiney guitar rock that plays over his edgelord prose is an absolutely perfect facsimile of the content you’d encounter on a random dude’s website. This sense of familiarity also applies to the page of a misunderstood teenage poet, an aspiring hacker, a paralyzed man who designs web graphics, and the goth girl who writes scary stories. The people and places populating Hypnospace aren’t measures of stereotypes, but rather authentic satires and memories of real places populated by a specific demographic.
A job as an Enforcer is not all routine narc work. As the caseload increases the player is encouraged to dive further down into some more nefarious rabbit holes of Hypnospace. How this is done is a mixture of genuine Adventure Game intuition, finding tells inside antiquated references, and classic trial-and-error hunting around. If you miss a particular prompt or don’t quite understand what’s being asked, it’s possible to spend a lot of time pouring through Hypnospace and trying to narrow down what in the exact hell you’re supposed to be looking for. Some of the later objectives are deliciously outside the box and demand a combination of resources in order to solve correctly.
There’s a level of built-in frustration that Hypnospace Outlaw struggles to balance. You can use your compensation as an Enforcer to buy virtual pets and antivirus programs (either for pleasure or in pursuit of a lead) and the in-game viruses progress through different levels of agitation and annoyance. It’s possible to either not have the capital to solve them or not even understand that they can be solved. The world that Hypnospace Outlaw is lampooning is also the world in which it’s living. I don’t know there’s a solution to this observation, and I’m not saying it isn’t worth it in the grand scheme of what Hypnospace Outlaw is trying to accomplish, but it merits consideration if you’re easily frustrated.
Hypnospace Outlaw is at its best when it undercuts the pre-millennium euphoria and optimism with a pervasive sense of darkness. In the early days of the internet it was difficult to tell the difference between grifters with bad intent from ambiguous weirdoes just trying to have a good time. We didn’t understand that action taken in the digital realm might lead to real life consequences, or the power that rumor and suspicion had outside of official channels. These problems are still with us in 2019, of course, but back then there was an attractive and sinister ambiguity to the whole thing. There was malevolence in place despite the bright colors and innocent packaging. Hypnospace Outlaw’s overarching story nails this thesis, especially if you stick around to experience it all or replay it to see what leads may have been overlooked.
One thing I can’t imagine is what it must be like to play Hypnospace Outlaw if you weren’t there to witness its inspiration. Everything here must feel like an alien world conceived by children and enforced with questionable authority, which is exactly what the internet was for a 16 year old 1999 (it is convenient that I was 16 in 1999). In this case Hypnospace Outlaw transitions from an adventure detective game into an anthropology dig where the player excavates digital reality along with sorting through the crimes of camouflaged degenerates. This probably rules and might even make Hypnospace Outlaw more valuable of an experience for those who either weren’t alive or didn’t get to be online.
Hypnospace Outlaw joins games like Her Story and Cibele in using its medium as an all-inclusive interface to tell the story of another time in another place. It’s delirious with its depiction of its era and genuine to the point where a moderately inebriated person might confuse the experience with legitimate time travel. Movies do this all the time with atmosphere but games rarely nail it with interface. Retro-inspired throwbacks that have dominated the independent space for the last decade aren’t even aiming for this kind of experience. What Hypnospace Outlaw accomplishes, on the scale of its content and the authenticity of its interface, is wholly unique.
Hypnospace Outlaw presents a precise simulation of the apex of 90’s internet culture. Separating anarchic innocence from hubristic malice is the objective while soaking in the garish spectacle of a lost time is its gratuity. Twenty years removed, Hypnospace Outlaw exposes the dividing line between the internet as a digital frontier and its current status as a corporate hellscape.
