Hypnospace Outlaw Review
Hypnospace Outlaw, a simulator game played as if from a 90s-era PC and internet browser, is unique and curious in equal measure. Players take on the role of a Hypnospace Enforcer hired on to moderate an online network of user-created web pages. The user base of Hypnospace is abnormal. Each user logs on to the Hypnospace network via a Hypnospace Headband, which allows them to go online while they sleep. Yet as bizarre as Hypnospace Outlaw‘s premise is, it proves an evocative opportunity for exploring the transient nature of our online existence.
Dreaming On the Job
As a Hypnospace Enforcer, the player exists outside the community of Hypnospace itself. All interaction is handled indirectly via email through Merchantsoft, the developers behind Hypnospace, who will assign tasks and respond to the player’s progress. Tasks include hunting down copyrighted material or reporting incidents of harassment for moderation. It’s a cold distance between the player and both their employers and the world of Hypnospace entirely. From the first moment of the game the player is put into a role focused on maintaining this distance, a role finding transgressions within the community, a role looking past the individual users that make up Hypnospace.
It’s in this divorce, to be an Enforcer above the community, apart from the community, and yet to be immersed in the community, that Hypnospace Outlaw is most impactful. As the player is given more and more tasks, they are pushed to explore the depths of Hypnospace in increasingly complicated ways. It’s inevitable that the details of these people’s lives grow pronounced, because it’s in these details by which progress is made on each task. Finding hidden offenses more often than not requires pulling back the personal layers of a user’s life that they’ve weaved into their online presence.
That description may be over-dramatizing the moment-to-moment experience of actually playing Hypnospace Outlaw, however. The game is incredibly silly, absurd in the same ways that one might imagine when trying to recall the internet in the 90s. Its denizens are exaggerated, each web page rich in the flamboyant culture of the era when the internet was new and cool and so very strange. The ridiculousness of Hypnospace can be overwhelming, with its range of oddball 90s-era advertising and weirdos that are on one hand laughable and on the other uncomfortably familiar. It does take time to see past the dancing pizza gifs, the government conspiracies, and the obsessive fandom, to see the humanity underneath. And through that realization comes awareness, an acknowledgment that Hypnospace is an eerily familiar reflection of the internet of today.
Any Given Task
In order to complete their tasks as an Enforcer the player is given a PC desktop complete with web browser, email, and assorted applications. In-lore the player is technically asleep, using their Hypnospace Enforcer Headband to simulate using a computer in their dreaming mind. A task will see the player opening their HypnOS web browser to peruse through an assortment of communities placed under the Enforcer’s power to moderate, check individual users web pages, and search for individual terms that will bring up an array of related pages. After finding the task’s goal, whether it be an image, file link, or block of text, the player uses their Enforcement tools to report the material and thereby complete the task before moving onto the next.
This process of combing the internet can require a very deliberate approach, but in practice is very chaotic. Any given task can require visiting an assortment of web pages, downloading files and images for reference, or even picking up applications that may or may not be useful. Like the internet, Hypnospace is messy and loosely held together. Hypnospace Outlaw capitalizes on that chaos to turn its tasks into puzzles of a sort. The game creates difficulty by challenging the player to discover on their own what specifically to look for from task to task. The users of Hypnospace go out of their way to avoid having their offenses discovered and uprooting their secrets requires creativity and determination in equal amounts.
As the game progresses the player will be required to explore the corners and depths of Hypnospace, with difficulty increasing appropriately. There’s much more to Hypnospace than meets the eye, secrets in plain sight and unlisted web pages to sniff out. And finding Hypnospace’s secrets will require thinking beyond the browser.
Breadcrumbs
Describing Hypnospace Outlaw as a puzzle game would be a shallow representation of it, however. The Enforcer’s tasks are puzzles, yes, but these puzzles are just a means to an end. Every task is a trail of breadcrumbs across the web of Hypnospace, a trail of web pages, of users, of secrets and clues. Hypnospace Outlaw is telling a story, after all. The individual tasks are arranged to create a longer narrative and to build a world around it. These layered trails of breadcrumbs are gameplay and narrative in Hypnospace Outlaw, making playing the game artfully haphazard.
For example, say a task pushes the player to find a specific type of illegal content being hosted somewhere in Hynospace. This process could begin with combing a related community. Visiting each page in a community could potentially reveal a clue towards completing the given task. That clue would lead to another user in another community and then back. A small story involving these users would be told in the process of completing this task, a view into these users’ relationships or the personalities behind the pages. In completing the task, a story is completed. In reporting the user’s transgressions, their story moves forward.
That’s how any given task should go on paper, at least. In practice, not everything works out so linearly. The solution to a task may accidentally have popped up during a search on a previous task, allowing the player to skip over a part of the story without even realizing it. It’s possible to skip over virtually all game just by knowing the right keywords to search for, for that matter. Alternatively, the player might go astray and discover stories they missed earlier in the game. Imagine Hansel and Gretel losing their breadcrumb trail and becoming lost in the forest. It’s just as easy to get lost in Hypnospace, just as easy to arrive home safely without having visited the witch and her candy house at all, so to speak.
In Hypnospace Outlaw‘s case, however, this should be considered a feature and not a bug.
Lost in Hypnospace
As described, it’s possible to completely lose the narrative thread on any given task in Hypnospace Outlaw. Getting lost in Hypnospace comes highly recommended.
By only following the narrative in Hypnospace Outlaw, it’s entirely possible to miss the beauty of the game. To only see Hypnospace Outlaw as a series of clever puzzles, a series of clues leading to clues, with a backdrop of funny 90s-era websites, would be a grand disservice. The heart of Hypnospace Outlaw is those websites and the users behind them. The puzzles are just a way to encourage the player to consider Hypnospace beyond their role as an Enforcer.
The users of Hypnospace are more complex than their web pages will imply when visiting for the very first time. The pages can belie their humanity, but Hypnospace Outlaw manages to explore these characters meaningfully beyond of the gifs and rants in surprising ways. Not every user may have as much depth as one might like and the ones that do can be amusing, confounding, and more, but that’s also true about knowing anyone online. There’s more to anyone than a username. Online relationships are more meaningful than they seem. As impermanent as our lives and actions online may seem they undeniably have profound effects and consequences on ourselves and others.
In all honesty, it’s unclear if Hypnospace Outlaw‘s more thoughtful themes are intended to be a prominent focus or if they’re a happenstance product of the game’s open structure and absurd premise. It wouldn’t be surprising if most players burn through the game’s puzzles without pause, never leaving the trail of breadcrumbs, thinking it funny and clever, but not so expressive. It’s not even clear if incidentally growing “lost” was ultimately much more different than following the breadcrumbs. Or if an assumption of being lost simply led to a deeper consideration of what deserved more attention in the first place.
What is undeniable is the value of these thoughts and feelings in the context of our modern online lives. Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in dreams, told from the perspective of a dreamer viewing lives play out through the internet. What happens when they log out and what happens when they wake up are both questions worth experiencing for yourself, as yourself.
Hypnospace Outlaw is available now on PC. No More Robots provided a copy of the game for this review.