The internet was a wild and bizarre thing to experience in the 1990s. Websites didn’t subscribe to concepts like consistent visual design or reasonable navigation. Downloading anything was a complete crapshoot - you were just as likely to get a joke virus or a badly animated gif when you tried to pirate a Metallica album. I would sit in front of my computer with a chat program up, just talking to people, and do literally nothing else for hours. It was like some magical gateway to another world, a nexus of strange and seemingly endless possibilities.
Hypnospace Outlaw effortlessly captures this sense of time and place. From the moment you launch the game, and the Hypno OS starts loading up, you become immersed in a style of software now lost to us. Sitting there on your desktop are all the essentials - an mp3 player that you can deck out in various skins, a sticky note program that fits about 8 words per note, and your settings menu that lets you choose between different screen savers.
Most important of all is the Hypnospace Explorer icon. This internet browser is the gateway to all the wonderful websites that exist - conspiracies, religious zealotry, celebrations of niche and obscure hobbies, music sharing, political campaigns - it's all here, a mish mash of every topic under the sun, loosely organised and amateurishly presented, yet undeniably authentic.
For most people, Hypnospace is a place to kick back and relax. But for you? Things aren’t quite that simple.
Hypnospace is a place that can only be accessed while you’re asleep. You interact with it identically to how you would with a computer, making imaginary physical motions to control a mouse and keyboard. It's all a little bit strange, with the important thing being that Hypnospace is a closed network run by a single organisation - Merchantsoft. It's something of a mix between Myspace (a precursor to facebook), community forums, and the open internet. Users create pages, either publicly posted to official groups, or unlisted and secret unless you know how to find them.
You play as an Enforcer, given the envious job of moderating and reporting any illegal content you can find. This might be something as simple as removing copyright protected images from a users homepage, or detecting malicious software that will infect a person’s operating system. You can’t create pages, or participate in the chat programs, but you do get access to your moderator tools and can read the headband IDS (amongst other details) of the people using Hypnospace.
Things start off fairly simple - you stumble upon infringements without even trying to, report them, and collect your payment in hypno coin. But as the game progresses infringements become harder and harder to find, and you have to do some serious sleuthing to track them down. It ends up feeling like you’re following an elaborate trail of breadcrumbs, drawing a string of clues together to reach your goal.
Let’s say you get tasked with finding some music that’s being illegally shared. You might start with a search for the relevant album, and find a review of said album. Also on that page is an interview with someone who used to be part of that band. You go to that person’s page, and you discover their involvement with a music community group. You then do a search for that community group and get the details of the person who organises it. At the bottom of their page, they’ll have a message asking people to message them for access to their private cloud storage. Now, you just need to figure out how to find the password to their account, usually by following a similar set of relationships to crack the case.
It's a unique and immensely satisfying way to do puzzle solving. There are hundreds of pages to browse, spread out in a haphazard interconnected web, and you have to figure out what's relevant and where connections lie. Critically, the specific nuggets of information that you’re trying to find are often artfully camouflaged amongst aesthetic fluff. And the quality of these pages is the real reason Hypnospace Outlaw is such a fantastic game. For while the gameplay is enjoyable and satisfying, it's the storytelling that truly sets it apart.
Let me tell you a story about one of the users of Hypnospace.
Rebekah, aka Reberuth, is delighted to finally be on Hypnospace. She’s in the 10th grade, she’s the daughter of a pastor, and she loves Squisherz, which is basically Pokemon. She plays the piano and her favourite song is Lord your name is Lifted. Her parents won’t allow her on the Chitchat program, but she’s excited just to be here.
A few weeks later, there is a contest run on Hypnospace for Squisherz art. Unlike most of the other contestants, Rebekah can actually draw, and her stuff is pretty damn impressive.
The results finally come in. Rebekah has won the contest!
But she’ll never know.
There’s a Christian page on Hypnospace. It talks of the rapture, of sin, of salvation. And halfway through its page, it has a link to The Squisherz Deception, a page that links the innocuous video game Squisherz to satanic worship. It seems silly - but both Dungeons and Dragons and Magic: The Gathering were condemned in the 1990s for exactly this reason.
Rebekah updates her page shortly before the Year 2000 update. She posts about how her father has thrown her game in the trash, and how she now awaits the rapture. The final thing she asks? If, in the unlikely event that the rapture doesn’t come, can someone please come to her church and let her know if she won the Squisherz art contest?
Or for something slightly less heartbreaking, what about Bill Aldrin? His homepage is filled with high quality music reviews, but his web design is very shoddy - and that’s being generous. It seems to mostly be rough scans of reviews from the magazine he runs, and while the content is solid, the scratchy and titled pdfs don’t make for easy reading.
But Bill Aldrin strikes gold when he discovers that Casper, ex-lead guitarist for Klyfta, is a user of Hypnospace! He quickly sets up an interview, discussing his past and current passions. It turns out Casper is now an artist, dabbling in both graffiti and digital art.
And when you click over to the most modern version of Bill’s homepage, his amateurish homepage is long gone. We now have a slick and beautifully presented website, courtesy of - of course - Casper! Bill has clearly continued his conversation with Casper after the interview, mentioned his struggles with web design, and Casper has swooped in to help. Even Hypnospace’s resident page reviewer has updated their page to admit that Bill Aldrin’s House of Sound is one of the best in all of Hypnospace.
These are just two of the hundreds of stories that populate the world of Hypnospace Outlaw. As you try to stalk the main storyline, you cannot help but be distracted by the life and times of the ordinary people who are using Hypnospace. These are the people and places that make Hypnospace feel real and alive. And it's precisely this that elevates this game above mere gimmick into something quietly brilliant.
This is the ultimate achievement of Hypnospace Outlaw. It takes a bunch of web pages and turns it into this complex interlocking machine, with an absurd attention to detail. Tendershoot literally invented an entire genre of music, with history, evolutions, splinterings and subgenres, then delicately seeded it across the cultural landscape. There are power struggles over community leader positions, ideological battles about the commercial nature of Hypnospace, and two dumb kids having a flame war.
There is an innocence here that we’ll never, ever get back. There was a time when corporations didn’t rule the internet, and people had no idea what it was, or how to use it. We didn’t use to carefully curate our online image, or try to exploit social media for personal gain. It was the Wild Wild Web, no rules or guidelines, a special place where you might discover something incredible, or meet people just like you, half the world away.
And this is the heart of what I want to get to when I recommend this game to you. It's not about the gameplay, and it's not about the main story. It's about the faux patriotic fight for the rights to use a cartoon character. It's about the amateur musicians rejection of Coolpunk and their wholehearted embracement of the Fungus scene. It's about the fantasy and science fiction enthusiasts attempting to rebel against the Hypnospace administrators.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a wonderful puzzle game. You will feel exuberant as you crack the code, and track down the password to a secret server that very few even knew existed. But it's the details in between the puzzles that will make you fall in love, and will bring to life a world that is otherwise gone forever.
