Hypnospace Outlaw is, eh. It's not a bad game, but it's much more tedious than I hoped it was going to be.

I am almost the ideal demographic in that I used the internet as a teenager in the 90s, and aspects of this game do evoke a sense of how it used to be back then. Everybody had their own personal site, they were all trying to express themselves in their own way, and all kinds of kooky stuff got jumbled together because big tech hadn't yet figured out how to funnel people into filter bubbles. There was still plenty of problematic stuff going on, but it felt more random and unpredictable than the cynically optimized social media landscape of today.

Unfortunately the gameplay loop is tiresome. There's some hackneyed "glitch out the UI, smash cut some gore, oh no there's a ghost in the machine" horror gimmicks thrown in, but because nothing's really at stake that's just irritating, much like the useless malware you are forced to install to advance the narrative. It all reinforces this game's weakest link: you don't have any agency. You can't send messages, you can't build your own page, you can't create an identity for yourself. All that hinders it from capturing the true excitement of being online in the 90s. It feels like browsing a static archive instead of being part of a community. And if that's all the game is, why not read actual archived Geocities pages instead, pages built by real people with real stories? Hypnospace feels very flat in comparison to the real world.

Yeah, there is a thin whodunnit plot hiding somewhere in there, but I didn't find it compelling enough to appreciate the busywork of hunting around for secret pages or deducing passwords. I should have opened the walkthrough 4 hours earlier. There are more intelligent detective games and there are better-paced walking sims, and if the only thing this has over those is the nostalgia then it's not really enough. I do have to give a nod to some of the (instrumental) music, which is quite good, but overall I don't really feel it was worth the 8+ hours I put in.

Hypnospace Outlaw is, eh. It's not a bad game, but it's much more tedious than I hoped it was going to be. I am almost the ideal demographic in that I used the internet as a teenager in the 90s, and aspects of this game do evoke a sense of how it used to be back then. Everybody had their own personal site, they were all trying to express themselves in their own way, and all kinds of kooky stuff got jumbled together because big tech hadn't yet figured out how to funnel people into filter bubbles. There was still plenty of problematic stuff going on, but it felt more random and unpredictable than the cynically optimized social media landscape of today. Unfortunately the gameplay loop is tiresome. There's some hackneyed "glitch out the UI, smash cut some gore, oh no there's a ghost in the machine" horror gimmicks thrown in, but because nothing's really at stake that's just irritating, much like the useless malware you are forced to install to advance the narrative. It all reinforces this game's weakest link: you don't have any agency. You can't send messages, you can't build your own page, you can't create an identity for yourself. All that hinders it from capturing the true excitement of being online in the 90s. It feels like browsing a static archive instead of being part of a community. And if that's all the game is, why not read actual archived Geocities pages instead, pages built by real people with real stories? Hypnospace feels very flat in comparison to the real world. Yeah, there is a thin whodunnit plot hiding somewhere in there, but I didn't find it compelling enough to appreciate the busywork of hunting around for secret pages or deducing passwords. I should have opened the walkthrough 4 hours earlier. There are more intelligent detective games and there are better-paced walking sims, and if the only thing this has over those is the nostalgia then it's not really enough. I do have to give a nod to some of the (instrumental) music, which is quite good, but overall I don't really feel it was worth the 8+ hours I put in.