Check Out Hypnospace Outlaw

The following blog post is unlike my previous two, which were meant only for people that had already played the game. This time, anyone is free to read it. Also, this time, every image, video, and gif directly from the game is provided by me rather than someone else. Anything else is otherwise clearly credited and linked to the source.

If the blog post wins you over, buy the game at:

itch.io: https://jay-tholen.itch.io/hypnospace-outlaw

(I'd prefer if you bought it on Itch because the developers receive a bigger cut of your purchase than they would on Steam, but it is available on Steam if you really want it there for whatever reason)

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/844590/Hypnospace_Outlaw/

There are also console ports, most notably the Nintendo Switch port which supports full mouse and keyboard functionality if you plug them in to the Switch dock. I replayed the game this way. Available digitally on the eShop or physically via Fangamer.

Nintendo Switch eShop: https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/hypnospace-outlaw-switch/

Fangamer (Switch physical copy): https://www.fangamer.com/collections/hypnospace-outlaw/products/hypnospace-outlaw-nintendo-switch-physical-game

PS4: https://store.playstation.com/en-us/product/UP4256-CUSA19129_00-HYPNOSPACEOUTLUS/

Xbox One: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/hypnospace-outlaw/9pm3nvb3pxg0?activetab=pivot:overviewtab

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Aretove

The world today is the most connected it has ever been with itself, literally. If someone in America wants to talk with someone in Saudi Arabia, then generally all they need is a common interest, a way to communicate, and a wi-fi or ethernet connection. Thus, me and Waft can talk (in real time!) about Omori, over Discord, on our smartphones. People connecting to and expressing themselves to each other over long distances like this has been a longstanding appeal of the internet.

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Much ado has been made over the possible ramifications of everyone having access to the internet 24/7, and whether this many people being connected to each other is a good thing or not, but either way, big tech companies have historically been paying attention to the internet’s simple pleasure of letting people talk to each other through text on a screen. In recent years, they more or less monopolize this connection. If someone wants to put up a personal page of themselves on the internet, generally they won’t make a webpage themselves through HTLM, they’ll sign up for Facebook and make their own page there. If someone wants to talk with a large group of people about a shared interest in real time, generally they won’t join a custom IRC chat, they’ll make a Discord account and join a server. As convenient as these services no doubt are, there’s something uncomfortable about how much of it is owned by a handful of Silicon Valley giants, and how there is less room to express yourself creatively compared to the days before Web 3.0. Any content that isn’t directly hosted by Facebook or Twitter generally only gets popular by crafting itself in such a way that it is palatable to users on those sites, for instance.

Blogger makes images very small, so click them to enlarge them so you can read their text

Hypnospace Outlaw is a 2019 video game that harkens back to an internet that wasn’t always like this. Modeled after the age of Geocities and Angelfire, Hypnospace is a fictional 1999 internet service accessed entirely while asleep with the use of a headband hooked up to a modem, sending signals to the sleeping person's brain. It’s full of page after page of completely individualized webpages detailing the user’s personality, interests, and relationships with other Hypnospace users, each of which are hosted in a different “zone” where other pages with a similar feel all come together. For example, everything related to Hypnospace itself is hosted in Hypnospace Central, whereas middle-aged and elderly users put up their pages in Goodtime Valley. Other zones are considerably more interesting, but I won’t talk about them here.

It is also, of course, extremely faithful to a certain kind of look that the internet had back in the late 90s. Everything is dithered to reference old computer monitors, GIFs are absolutely everywhere, low-quality 3D art is in abundance, and people do all kinds of things with text, like flashing colors or having it race across the screen or having giant individualized 3D models of letters and numbers adorn their pages. Photographs uploaded to Hypnospace are blurry and dusty-looking, too. And to top it off, Hypnospace is hosted on HypnOS, so the player has an entire operating system’s worth of stuff to play around with, meaning this game lets you find and download things like wallpapers, images, soundscapes, and music files. Even as someone who has no firsthand experience with this age of the internet, it’s utterly captivating and easily pulled even someone like me into the charm of an age gone by.

Of course, Hypnospace Outlaw is still a video game, which is where the premise comes in. You are an Enforcer, meaning you do volunteer moderating for Merchantsoft, the corporation behind Hypnospace. Your job is to scour Hypnospace for five different kinds of violations, which come in a handy acronym, CHIME.

Once you find the offending content, you click the gavel icon in the upper left part of your browser, select a CHIME violation, and use it to report the content. Should you report correctly, you’re rewarded with in-game currency for Hypnospace users called Hypnocoin, which you can use to buy things. It has no cash value, of course, which is why “extralegal commerce” is a reportable violation as users will try to find ways of moving real money around.

The coolest part of this system is that it requires some serious sleuthing and deduction to find the violations you’re looking for. A simple example early on in the game is finding harassment violations in a zone for kids called Teentopia, as a kid keeps putting pages depicting another kid they don’t like as a gross smelly loser. However, these pages are unlisted, which, in in-game terms, means that you can’t simply find a link to it by going to the front page of any of the zones you have access to. Instead, you have to find another way of finding the page, which, for me, meant paying attention to the tags listed on the right of every page in Hypnospace. While the kid didn’t link to the offending page anywhere, they still tagged it with a term relating to a different unlisted page that the kid idolizes, which is a Something Awful equivalent for Hypnospace. Clicking on any tag will bring up every other page on Hypnospace that is also tagged with it, so this is how you get access to this page you’ve heard about at this point but haven’t been to yourself. The Something Awful-equivalent dislikes the kid’s page harassing the victim, and they directly link to it with the purpose of mocking it. Thus, you can finally view the page and swing your mod hammer all over it, succeeding in your mission.

Finding the solution to a lot of these puzzles makes you feel extremely smart. Trust me when I say that the example I discuss up there is barely scratching the surface, you eventually do even cooler things that require navigating the wonderful world of Hypnospace while paying very close attention to users' habits, connections with one another, personal projects, and tastes, along with many other things.

As you find pages to report violations on, you'll notice something very quickly, which is that almost every page has music automatically playing. If Hypnospace Outlaw was only able to accurately portray the look of the early internet, that would be an accomplishment by itself, but what makes the game even better is the incredibly precise way it utilizes music. The internet, when it debuted, was one of the most exciting ways to share music, and the way this game fully reflects that in its own fictional version of the internet is nothing short of phenomenal.

For example: Hypnospace Central is a corporate zone showcasing everything about the service, so the song playing over most of it, while fun and catchy to listen to, also sounds "corporate".

Since Goodtime Valley has lots of middle aged and old people, the song playing over it is a relaxing country instrumental.

Of course, it's not just zones. Individual pages often have their own music playing. For example, a Goodtime Valley user made a page to honor the deceased loved ones of other users who have passed away, and she chose to put this song up on it.

Teentopia, of course, has lots of kids who want to express themselves, so they have a lot of unique page music tracks. One user, DarkTwilightTiff, is something of an upbeat goth girl, so she has this moody music playing on her page.

One page details a supposed Bigfoot analogue called Tall Green, and they have a cheesy "mysterious" song playing on their page while showing "proof" that this creature exists. It's not "good" in the traditional sense, but it shows how the devs understand how cheesy these early internet documentations of things like Sasquatch and alien crop circles could be since the people who made them had a flair for the dramatic.

If you've noticed that these tracks seem to use a lot of similar samples, that's because Hypnospace has two different kinds of audio files that play in the browser music player. One is .hsm, which uses preset digitized samples to play music. You'll hear a lot of .hsm files all over Hypnospace. The other kind is .aud, which is direct music from the source without going through a converter.

 

Left: YouTube (Hot Dad - Topic) / Right: YouTube (Jay Tholan)

For example, the first YouTube link here is a theme song for an in-universe Pokémon clone using .aud, and the second is the accompanying .hsm version that another user puts up on their page.

Of course, music's presence on Hypnospace isn't limited to users putting songs up on their pages or Hypnospace administrators assigning themes to zones. Actual in-universe bands and music groups put up ways of selling albums, and if you pay the Hypnocoin, you'll be astounded by how good the fictional music is. The game devs very clearly understood what the music scene must have been like in the 90s and early 2000s, because it all sounds contemporary to the time and yet, it's almost all completely original. In fact, there's an entire zone dedicated to music, which I won't spoil because it's both amusing and cool what the game devs do with the concept and I'd rather you see it for yourself.

All of this is to say that Hypnospace Outlaw has one the best soundtracks a video game could possibly have. Every single "best video game soundtrack" list on the internet should have this game somewhere on it.

Of course, a lot of soundtracks are fondly remembered because of how they elevate the story, which leads me to my last big point: Hypnospace Outlaw actually does have a story, believe it or not. This is accomplished through time skips. At certain intervals, you'll log back onto Hypnospace at a later date, and when this happens, you can go back to pretty much every single page in Hypnospace and see something updated. Some users' free trials expire, other users start and exit relationships, users react to current events, old trends go by the wayside to make room for new trends, that sort of thing. Seeing Hypnospace, as a place, evolve over time is incredibly mesmerizing, as you shift through all the different pages to see what's new and how users change.

And yet… in the background of it all, something is lurking.

Since I wrote this to get other people to play the game, I won't get into specifics, as much as I would love to. I'll say this: if you were somewhat uncomfortable with the premise of "there's a big beautiful internet out there, and it's your job to police it", then don't worry. Hypnospace Outlaw is a game concerned with what it means to moderate a lively community of interconnected users, and it examines that idea from different angles.

Just as users' pages get updated after time skips, some of them update as a result of your moderation work. Some people simply aren't going to understand why you do the work that you do, and this frustration is something you can see in some of the users pretty early on. That said, despite starting this blog post talking about communication over the internet, you, the player, are a silent protagonist, literally: Enforcer headbands are different from the regular kind in that you can only receive communications, you can't talk to anyone. This includes the people you work for at Merchantsoft, so expect a story where you have to deal with a company doing as it pleases while you can't say anything about it. While many of Hypnospace's users love the service, they don't have the highest opinion of Merchantsoft itself. As the game progresses, expect yourself to be surprisingly interested in what everyone in the "About Merchantsoft" page of Hypnospace Central gets up to. It's one of the very first pages in the game that you can read, after all.

That's all I will say on the matter, and I do hope it hooks you. Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that is at once a pastiche and a love letter to an internet age gone by, while also reminding everyone that many issues with the internet today have sadly been around for longer than Web 3.0 has been. If you want a glimpse into a highly individualized and expressive internet broken free from the standardization and homogenization of how it is today, do yourself a favor and check this game out.