About that ending...[OBV. SPOILERS]

[Rittless]

I have to say I found it a real tonal clash and very jarring that in the space of the ten, fifteen or so minutes between the first antagonisation from Dylan, and his confessional note, that Dylan swaps from being a cover-up threat to atoning for his crimes complete with a game containing apologies worked into it.

That tonal shift makes it feel disingenuous as hell. Maybe it would have been better if Adrian instead was the one to join HAP as the 'threat', and Dylan comes on at the last minute so that his sudden arrival, and atonement seems more authentic.

[deepFlaw]

Very late to the party here, but I absolutely took it as him being completely disingenuous about the entire thing. Taking it as satire of this kind of apology in real life, I found it pretty funny. (Though usually they're not related to video game related murder, I guess.)

Keep in mind that the little we know about current Dylan is that he has a "D-Phone" (iPhone, obviously) and is "@Dylan" (less obviously, Twitter's founder/CEO uses @Jack) - so apparently not only is he heading this universe's Apple, he's also running Twitter. Dude is beyond successful, and wants to stay that way. The email apology definitely comes across just like this kind of real life apology when someone's past behavior starts being talked about, and then in the end, he couldn't resist putting the rest of it in Outlaw, finally getting the game working in Hypnospace. Not easy to buy that he's realized how obsessed he was when he's literally using the game to deliver eulogies for the people he killed with it.

And the stuff in those eulogies doesn't really show that he cared about them or even actually learned about them through their pages; it's really just listing basic facts about them in a way that sounds meaningful, even if wouldn't really make sense in context. He just mentions Carl's wife, he says Zane "could have become someone your mother was proud of", he says Tiff's "little words delighted others", etc. It all reads like he just glanced at their pages for some quick details about them; the closest he gets to something real is for Roddy and it's hard to tell how much of it is really true. Honestly, I laughed surprisingly hard when I got to the letter for Mavis. I'd been wondering what he could have say for her as I went, and... yup, literally nothing.

I just sorta wish we got another news report following up on it one way or another.

EDIT: Actually, one last thing - the bit about Zane hadn't even clicked till I went back to find some pages after posting, and was reminded what the Dec 31st version of his page looked like. He spent so little time thinking about Zane (or even looking at the archive) that he just took the notes Tim left on Zane's page after hacking him as real.

[llefty]

I've played Outlaw 1.0 and seen the credits page, but I never got any follow-up email from Samantha/Chelsea after her "PRIVATE: YOU DID IT" message saying I might end up on the news. Am I missing something, or have I seen it all already? There were a brief news cutscene after the Mindcrash event, so honestly I was expecting something a bit more here; if not a cutscene, at least one more email after Dylan's confession.

[Rittless]

Now see - for me the amount of very good takes in the thread is giving me pause about my judgement of the ending as a whole.

Maybe it was a better decision than I thought...

[Aquillion]

Originally posted by deepFlaw:

It all reads like he just glanced at their pages for some quick details about them; the closest he gets to something real is for Roddy and it's hard to tell how much of it is really true.

Roddy is the only one he actually knew in person, so it makes sense.

[Terpsitur]

I apologize for reviving this very old thread, but the ending bothered me as well, as it felt indeed very anticlimactic:

You finally find all the evidence, present it to Sam, and then you simply get this very lukewarm apology from Dylan, who has the audacity to even hide his lame "sorry"-messages for the victims in the very game that killed them. And of course he only confesses the whole crime when he has no other option, the slimy b*st*rd.

I really hoped that there would be another video or email after the credits, that shows Dylan and Adrian being taken to court and then sent to prison.

And I also really hoped to see an update regarding Tim, who must be very relieved to know that it was not him that killed all those people.

But you get nothing, the game simply ends, so I was indeed quite disappointed. :(

However, after reading through this thread and seeing so many different perspectives about the ending, I really have to agree with Rittless here:

Originally posted by Rittless:

Now see - for me the amount of very good takes in the thread is giving me pause about my judgement of the ending as a whole.

Maybe it was a better decision than I thought...

Without a clear and decisive closure, the ending can be interpreted in multiple ways, and they each fit the overall theme or idea of the game in different ways.

Here are my personal favourites, based on this thread and one other, similiar thread here on Steam:


Dylan commits suicide - proposed by Zeon Twilight:

Originally posted by Zeon Twilight:

So...Was I the only one who got the vibe that Dylan's apology was uh...killing himself there? Like, Outlaw was responsible for the deaths of a lot of people in the mind crash, and he was beamed up just like the rest of them. Now as for if his apologies were genuine or not I couldn't say, but it struck me as a "Well you found me out, I'm not going to prison, sorry I killed everyone now take me out" kinda vibe. [...] I can't shake the feeling that Dylan is the sort that would want to die to hynospace over going to jail.[...]

I never considered that, but it does make sense. Maybe you actually do kill Dylan once you capture his car in the Outlaw game. We already know that Outlaw can indeed kill people, so programming it to melt his brain should be no issue for him. It would also explain why he had this version of the game already on hand and held it back until the very last second - it was only meant as his final, desperate escape from being convicted. And finally, it would also explain why he used this game in the first place to deliver his (lame) apologies and not simply attached a formal letter to his email or something.

With this ending, you actually do get closure, and it emphasizes the "Enforcer"-theme of the game. After all, your job is to report crime and catch the criminals, and the ending being you apprehending the worst offender of them all in a virtual car chase is a nice touch. Bad guy dead, final case closed, job done. Time to finally give up your badge and retire, after all, aren't you too old for this sh*t after 20 years? :)


Dylan is a highly successful guy in the future, delivers a lame apology, and gets away with it - proposed by deepFlaw:

Originally posted by deepFlaw:

[...]Keep in mind that the little we know about current Dylan is that he has a "D-Phone" (iPhone, obviously) and is "@Dylan" (less obviously, Twitter's founder/CEO uses @Jack) - so apparently not only is he heading this universe's Apple, he's also running Twitter. Dude is beyond successful, and wants to stay that way. The email apology definitely comes across just like this kind of real life apology when someone's past behavior starts being talked about, and then in the end, he couldn't resist putting the rest of it in Outlaw, finally getting the game working in Hypnospace. Not easy to buy that he's realized how obsessed he was when he's literally using the game to deliver eulogies for the people he killed with it.

And the stuff in those eulogies doesn't really show that he cared about them or even actually learned about them through their pages; it's really just listing basic facts about them in a way that sounds meaningful, even if wouldn't really make sense in context.

In this interpretation of the ending, Dylan is a rich, successful guy and thus only admits his crime when he has no other choice in order to save face. He is definitely not remorseful, and his apology is only meant to actually show of his own work and/or persona, and he does only the absolute minimum acknowledgment of fault.

This ending would also fit all the evidence we see in the game: He delivers a lame apology in a showcase of his work, which also allows him to finally be the first and only one to have programmed an actual 3D-game for Hypno-OS, a milestone he wanted to achieve for a long time. His peers and fanboys will probably cheer him for this deed alone and gladly look over his past crimes. You thus already know what all this scandal will actually do to Dylan, don't you? It will probably do nothing. And the game gives you exactly that: Nothing.

With this ending, you feel powerless and empty, but if you think about it, it feels right: Hypnospace attempts to be a very real version of our own real world after all. And since you very likely will not get a nice happy end to a similiar corporate catastrophe in our world, you will not get one in the world of hypnospace either:
Dylan will get away with his lame apology and an army of lawyers covering his a** for eternity. And thus, hypnospace simply sticks to its distorted reality-like setting with this ending, when it does not give you actual closure. It hurts, but it feels real. :(


An explanation for the default ending without closure - proposed / inspired by Luuthian in another thread:

Originally posted by Luuthian:

[...] You know the game's done it's job when it actually pains you that you can't the bad guy to justice. You can't undo the deaths, you can't go back and catch Dylan ahead of time, you can't make up for Tim's lost time or fix the guilt he's suffered through. It's a painful, but appropriate, ending. At least you're able to get the truth out in the end as some consolation. [...]

For this interpretation of the ending we just take what we see at face value: The game simply ends after Dylans final email. That is it, no further assumptions are made.
It is thus the "default" ending, that I initially had and found disappointing, and it begs the questions:
Why do we not get closure? Is Dylan being convicted or not?

Only after reading Luuthians post above I came to the conclusion that the whole point of this ending is that you feel like something is missing. You feel loss.
And this fits, because the feeling of something lost is actually the driving force of Hypnospace Outlaw: It is, after all, a giant loveletter to the early internet. It is a nostalgia-simulator. And you can only have nostalgia if you miss something, if you have lost something:

We have lost those early days of the internet. They won't be coming back.

Thus, just as easy as the game captivated you in the beginning with its nostalgia, it spits you back out to the real world with this open, missing ending: It does not matter what actually happens with Dylan in the end, because by then you realize you are actually missing something bigger than that.

[Bookish]

Originally posted by Terpsitur:

I apologize for reviving this very old thread, but the ending bothered me as well, as it felt indeed very anticlimactic:

You finally find all the evidence, present it to Sam, and then you simply get this very lukewarm apology from Dylan, who has the audacity to even hide his lame "sorry"-messages for the victims in the very game that killed them. And of course he only confesses the whole crime when he has no other option, the slimy b*st*rd.

I really hoped that there would be another video or email after the credits, that shows Dylan and Adrian being taken to court and then sent to prison.

And I also really hoped to see an update regarding Tim, who must be very relieved to know that it was not him that killed all those people.

But you get nothing, the game simply ends, so I was indeed quite disappointed. :(

I just finished the game a couple days ago and have similar feelings. I kept waiting for something else - an additional email, new messages in the present-day discussion area, something.

Tim's growth I could believe, even though we didn't actually get to see any of what he went through in the years after the end of Hypnospace. Dylan, though? We get a vaguely threatening email from him in the present, his only communication with us before that gross "apology" (which I was convinced was going to contain a virus - that's how much I distrusted him). Part of the issue, too, was that I could remember his response when I flagged him for music copyright infringement - it was the same smirking "you don't think you can do this to me?" reaction as that present-day "hey I noticed you're flagging pages" email.

I really would have liked more closure, something to keep my last significant experience in the game from being that slimeball's weak apology.

[a bitch of culture]

the only thing i really dislike is how there are some casualties no matter what you do. it sort of casts an unnecessarily grim shadow over the rest of the game for me... i wish they'd just suffered some kind of non-fatal health problems instead.

[Terpsitur]

Originally posted by Bookish:

[...] I really would have liked more closure, something to keep my last significant experience in the game from being that slimeball's weak apology.

Since we felt the same about the game ending, did any of the many interpretations in this thread help you to get some sort of closure?
Because as described in my post above, it did help me a lot.

Originally posted by tryptamine d:

the only thing i really dislike is how there are some casualties no matter what you do. it sort of casts an unnecessarily grim shadow over the rest of the game for me... i wish they'd just suffered some kind of non-fatal health problems instead.

I don't know if the ending would work, or if I would be happy with that.

I mean, yes, if you just want to give players a 90s internet simulator, you can definitely do that without any murder or weirdness and also have a happy end for whatever story you come up with, sure.

But the way they designed this game with the whole creepy hypnospace setup, this dramatic ending actually works, despite killing beloved or innocent characters for the sake of the story being such a common trope.

To me at least, it does not feel cheap or hacky, as it does in other stories, and the fact that they all made it work around the Y2K-scare also fits just so perfectly.

[Bookish]

Originally posted by Terpsitur:

Since we felt the same about the game ending, did any of the many interpretations in this thread help you to get some sort of closure?
Because as described in my post above, it did help me a lot.

I wouldn't say "closure" exactly, but they did make it feel a little less like I'd been dropped off a storytelling cliff. I definitely agree with deepFlaw's interpretation, and Zeon Twilight's was one I hadn't considered (part of me gets some satisfaction at the idea, but then I get angry that Tim spent years having to process the idea that his obsession over a girl he liked resulted in her death while Dylan avoided all that hard stuff by killing himself).

I just don't think I'm the sort to really appreciate "painful but appropriate" endings, unfortunately, especially since I got a bit attached to a couple of the people who died.

[Sammun Mak]

I could not agree more. I think both in substance and delivery the ending falls FAR short of everything that came before it.

Dylan was a sociopath. I get that he actually did feel guilty about the deaths he caused, but that didn't result in him coming clean in the 20 years since then. Him trying for some amount of redemption after he got caught out just didn't feel true to his character. Maybe if there was some foreshadowing before then; even in the 20 years later stuff he was still a narcissistic ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

It never felt like "Wow, what a nice character arc", it felt like "Um, is this guy trying to kill us? No, I guess. Ok. Well, the game's over now" The fact that he used his murder-game to apologize really threw off the fact that he was apologizing.

We didn't *need* to know if got convicted or killed himself or whatever. The ending just needed to follow logically and thematically, and the rest can be left up to imagination. Unfortunately, it failed to do that.

I also think loading the "credits" or end-game text as a webpage really did the ending a disservice. Even the same slowly scrolling text in a real credits sequence would have given a much stronger sense of finality. Credits are a great way to cap off an experience. It cleanly delivers the message of "You've reached the end", and, with that message in mind, gives you time to think about your experience with the piece of media.

I wouldn't say it left a sour taste in my mouth, but it did give me a weird, unsatisfied feeling, and that's not ideal when it's the last thing you do in a game.

Really wish they'd change the ending. It's literally the only thing about this game I dislike. Cuz otherwise it's one of my favorite games.

[alicia, sun's nemesis]

I felt this way too, and there's no point reiterating what others have said, other than to agree that there are multiple possible interpretations to Dylan's personality (and he seems like a, well, not normal, but believably complex human in his inconsistencies and the way MerchantSoft changes him. His M1nx posts really sell his character for me).

I just wanted to add that, even though the sincerity of the apology can be called into question, playing it still made me cry. It was a lot of things, like it feeling very hollow ultimately that the eulogies were stuck in the game that killed them, the weird cheesy inauthenticity of it, the details about Roddy's family, the lack of details about Mavis, beaming them myself and essentially reiterating the effects I had on Hypnospace as an enforcer. (That was also pretty dark when I was doing the Archival Project and saw all those infringement notices...) The gap between how real those characters felt to me through their pages and how surreal their send-off felt (and the reminder they were, uh, fictional) was honestly very powerful, in a way that I guess I would call 'tragicathartic' Interesting experience.

[Zodiakos]

Maybe I mistook it, but I took the note about Roddy's family to have have a self-reflective tone, as if to say, "I felt this way about your family members at the time, but after 20 years, I am ashamed that I felt that way and will make it right". At least that's how I interpreted it. As for the other notes, I think they would have been far more disingenuous if Dylan had elaborated - he did not know those people and it shows. He still apologizes to each of them regardless, individually.

I don't think there was even any proof that Dylan invited *himself* into the HAP team, sounds like Artie invited him (probably thinking it would bring closure, which was technically true).

The email leading up to the final one from him though does have that kind of "I know what you are both up to" kinda vibe that seems at odds with a legitimate apology, so who knows. I enjoy that the ending can provoke a meaningful discussion like this.

[Rittless]

Originally posted by Sammun Mak:

I wouldn't say it left a sour taste in my mouth, but it did give me a weird, unsatisfied feeling, and that's not ideal when it's the last thing you do in a game.

And yet, in hindsight, I'm figuring that's probably the most appropriate way to end a piece of media that calls back to the time, and includes the same trappings, as the vaporwave genre. An entire genre about the unfulfilled shoot-for-the-stars crazy dreams before the dot-com bubble went pop.

[Humanesque]

Dylan only put out his elaborate self-aggrandizing apology once he was fully and truly caught. This is exactly how you'd expect a character like him to behave, to paint a narrative as him being this tragic repentent character when he had 19 years to apologize and never took a single opportunity before he was forced to, even though clearly he was ready to. The ending of the game doesn't make Dylan suck any less.

[KristopherVector]

Sorry to bump this thread a year later, but I couldn't find a more recent thread and I didn't feel like making yet another one, so here's my 2 cents I guess.

The ending definitely needed more. I think speculation and theories are great, but having the story just kind of end with Dylans apology feels strange. It didn't even need to be an ending cutscene of Dylan and Adrian getting arrested or whatever. I think their fates being a mystery is fine, even if seeing or hearing about them getting arrested would've been pretty satisfying. What I don't like is that there is absolutely no acknowledgement of Dylans apology anywhere. I instinctually checked the archive project pages to see if the mindcrash page was updated or see Tim say something about it, and was a bit surprised when I saw nothing. I think this wouldve been a good way to send off the story and give more closure, while also leaving Dylans fate a secret.

I also find it kind of odd that dylan even apologized. Considering his kind of passive aggressive email (or at least I saw it that way) and that he felt the need to join ONLY after the player does, to be consulted on MerchantSoft related stuff and provide "context", made me feel like he was going to try and stop us. But no, he just folds after we find all the evidence we need, self-admittedly not even sure if we had found anything. Felt strange. Would've been better if he joined and immediately apologized, or if he actually tried and stopped us by sabotaging us. I kind of disagree that he was completely backed into a wall. I mean, considering he's still alerted by us flagging people, he clearly still has access to all his Hypnospace admin powers. Wouldn't he have sizable enough power to try and shut down the archive, or even kill us?

Dylan also doesn't come off to me as the type of person to just let himself get arrested. Granted, it's been 20 years, but I don't have much reason to believe he changed much at all. For a little, while playing the outlaw apology game, I wondered if he would kill himself.

Also, I felt like Adrian didnt get enough attention. It's a lot about Dylan but very little about Adrian, who is just as responsible for knowing about it all and doing nothing, even defending Hypnospace against the health risks.

Also, I find it strange nobody immediately investigated the whole situation after the first buggy Outlaw encounter.

Either way, still a great game. But a strange ending, Sorry that I probably regurgitated a lot of what others have already said, it has been 3 years after all. But I wanted to get it off my chest.