LogFAQs > #932797792

8. Hypnospace Outlaw (Tendershoot)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb4Jul496QE

A look at a few screenshot, and part of the appeal is apparent. Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in an alternate universe 1999, where you play a moderator for an internet accessed with a headband while you sleep, navigating a web directory of geocities/angelfire-type sites. Looping MIDIs, "Under Construction" signs, Winamp skins, a BonziBuddy pastiche it's got it all. Beyond the nostalgia trip, the game is very much its own thing. It being an alternate universe, a lot of fun comes from seeing a different development of 90s culture both internet and broader, some of which is recognizable as pastiche, but always developed in enough detail within the fiction itself that it doesn't feel like a reference hunt.

The nostalgia trip aspect is far from the most interesting aspect for me, but on that front it's well-realized. A big part of what makes it work is how seamless and faithful the interface is, with no modern concessions, and nothing like a stray menu or achievement to betray its world. There is an overarching plot which develops over multiple acts, but it emerges organically through e-mails and a few other tricks, without feeling like it's wrestling control away from the player. My process for these write-ups usually start with looking at screenshots I took as a memory aid, but turns out I didn't take any screenshots of this game. When I was in it I was in it, like falling out of our world into another. As such, perhaps it did not occur to me that I should take anything from Hypnospace when I left, as appropriate of the dreamscape it's supposed to be. Actually, that's not entirely true, because for at least a week after, I did take from it the reflex to shake my mouse to make stuff load faster, because that's a thing in HypnOS. This, to be clear, makes me feel like a rube, so your mileage may vary on whether or not this is a point in its favour.

At its core, it's a detective game. The game doesn't give you much direction beyond introducing types of violations to moderate, allowing you to freely explore as you wish. Another reason I forgot to take screenshots, a reason I can better live with, is that often the significance of what I might have wanted to remember would not have been obvious immediately, but accumulated from a series of pages encountered over the course of several hours. It feels a lot like the moments of revelation in Her Story, except here those moments can also come back as an unexpected puzzle clue. As mentioned, there is a plot progression which has plot triggers, but the necessary information is spread out, and hidden well enough beneath in-character writing that is funny and amusing in their own right. Exploring new pages and solving puzzles are both enjoyable, and work in service of each other.

This gameplay loop also expresses a theme, which is that despite the old internet looking a lot scrappier, it was, of course, still ruled by corporate interests. As an enforcer, you have a foot in both worlds, seeing both the fallout in a community you've immersed yourself in, and the corporatespeak e-mail which doesn't care. The enforcer has a clear vantage point to see how capital ruins everything, while, sure, playing a small compartmentalized role in the process. A constant tension is how the corporate can never fully anticipate the users. As such, a lot of the puzzle solving involve finding the ways users subvert the feature set of HypnOS. You spend a lot of time trying to get to hidden pages, which are responses to both moderation and the inadequacy of the pre-set zones. What you encounter aren't just neat easter eggs for the player, but emerging out of the needs and developments of community, which gives the archeological feel of tracing footsteps in a lived-in place. The time period, more than just being nostalgia, marks Hypnospace as not only a spectre of the past but of lost futures. The early internet was a tech utopian vision projecting a fake future that will never arrive. The excitement over the newness and the limitless potential are on display, but increasingly it turned out to be a massive nothing as just corporate messaging after all, and revisting the past turns up mostly defunct commodities.

Of course, we don't need a headband to go back to the 1999, because it never actually died. You absolutely do not need to have been on the internet back then to recognize this game, because the aesthetic still exists even if mostly as kitsch. Kids know vapourwave. There are music videos created in 2019 with digitally-created VHS degradation. Remember a decade ago when everything from the 80s was back, possibly because that was the group with the disposable income, with the assumption that in 10 years we'd be inundated with 90s nostalgia? Turns out, sure, but also the 80s are still fucking here. Nothing ever dies, only shorn of meaning and subsumed into the eternal present. The aesthetic is all that's left. Hypnospace Outlaw is more haunted than that, though. It opens up the past not because it was better, but to remind ourselves that it doesn't have to be that way.

Now, the real internet experience I need captured is an AsianAvenue page full of chibi Final Fantasy gifs and AzN pRiDe.

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