Hypnospace Outlaw is a really unique adventure game where you navigate a fake internet-alike as a moderator of sorts, trying to ban offenders and helping people with their problems by solving puzzles, installing apps and navigating through a lot of early geocities/90s-inspired nostalgia. With great humor and pointed design, it was an interesting experience, but I couldn’t really get into it and kinda checked out of figuring out everything by myself at some point.
The initial moments with the game were great; in a very authentic setting, you are introduced to the setting and world of Hypnospace and quickly get your first mission about finding copyright violations for a cartoon fish and dishing out content removals left and right in order to get paid. The world evolves a little thorough the game and people react to your actions in the context of the story, and that’s good stuff. The second case was about an illegal payment processor being used, then about bullying. It was fun visiting all these pages and trying to find the solutions, althought the fact that you got access to more and more pages meant that there was more and more places to look for clues, which became overwhelming for me.
Then there was the “disturbing images” case, which, as silly as it is, kinda disturbed and grossed me out. I think it’s at that point that I checked out somehow from the game. I tried keeping at it, but I was just wary of being shocked again. The puzzles got a bit more complicated, having you use different programs, but my mind really wasn’t into it, so I kinda cruised through the rest of the game by using a guide and got to the end. I’m not sure if things would’ve been super different if I hadn’t been disturbed by that one case, but things turned out the way they did regardless.
Ultimately, I still think Hypnospace Outlaw is really neat and a great piece of art. It’s made with a real heart and a sense of time and place that will appeal to early-internet users, and the game mechanics are also fun to mess around.
