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Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Hypnospace Outlaw, including endgame spoilers. You have been warned.
If my constant bringing up on Broken Reality didn’t clue you in, I have a significant fascination with old consumerist technology aesthetics. Old digital garbage fascinates me, so Hypnospace Outlaw had been on my radar for a long while, even if I did bounce off the dev’s previous game, Dropsy. I like the idea of that clown simulator, but I just did not gel with its take on point and click adventure game mechanics (mainly using images to communicate information instead of text or speech).
Now that I’ve finally gotten around to this wacky exploration of geocity nonsense, I can safely say that not only do I love this game, it may be a contender for my favorite game I played in 2020, and I may have to tie it in somewhere on my fave games list. I have many positive things to say about it, but what I decided to focus on for now is how ridiculously good the story is, and how it emotionally wrecked me in a way I don’t think any game I’ve played has ever done before.
The game has you serving as a mod for a late 90s brain internet service called Hypnospace, which people access with a headband that lets them browse with their sleeping mind. Over the course of a few months, the majority of which you spend away from Hypnospace due to time skips, you see the company behind the service, Merchantsoft, botch things and everything begins to spiral out of control. It’s a mess of wackiness as you explore kitschy net pages and navigate the relationships of the various users, revealing surprising secrets and a seven minute long prog rock power ballad about shaving.
Something the game is very good at is telling small stories through these glimpses of these web pages, learning more about these users by looking back the memeing and seeing the real world stuff they have to deal with. There’s a guy who decorates his page with extremely loud butt rock and a flaming skeleton on a motorcycle, but most everything he writes is about how much he misses his dead wife and how he tries to cope with things. An old woman you copyright strike that later starts a protest to post old comic strip characters also has beautiful memorials for passed away loved ones, trying to do a memorial service for the rest of her friends. Everyone feels human, down to mundane things like a young christian girl who never finds out she won a fan art contest because her parents disapproved of the game she liked and took away her hypnospace band.
Things all come to a head on New Years and the dawn of the new millennium, as Dylan Merchant, one of the company founders and the head tech guy, tries to load his new game on the new 2.0 OS, only to cause a mass crash that kills multiple people using the service, effectively killing the future of the technology. He gets off blaming a hacker who was doing a flashy but harmless hack of the teen board, then twenty years pass. You get recruited to an archive group to search through Hypnospace to record every page for historical preservation, and a former Merchantsoft employee has you look for evidence that the Merchants were aware of the health risks that came with the service and their role in the crash.
Up to this point, Hypnospace Outlaw was mainly a quirky adventure game paying respect to a particular point in time, but once you gather all the evidence and Dylan confesses, the game’s big theme is cemented. He sends you a finished version of the game he was working so hard to push out, and it’s very different than what you experienced in previous builds.
The game’s final moments are another memorial, for Dylan’s victims and for Hypnospace itself, as a sad remix of the reoccurring Millennium theme plays. New lyrics are put in as you capture the cars, all named after the users who died during the crash, with the repeated phrase “let me down,” drowning at a slow pace alongside the silly early 90s sound effects. In reality, what you’re experiencing doubles as a memorial for the early 90s internet and the creativity it allowed, the expression everyone took part in that’s now so much harder to find. Even Dylan, arguably the game’s villain, is showing genuine remorse for what he’s done, not just for those who died because of him, but for this incredible new thing he helped ruin.
The ending credits song is played from the perspective of the little girl who’s parents forbid her from every using Hypnospace again, a melancholy piece about how everything she cared about is now gone and Y2K let her down, wanting the world to end if she can’t have those experiences back. It’s an incredible piece that captures that sense of finality we all feel in childhood and youth, as things start to change and you begin to realize you can’t live like you have anymore, and how horrible that feels in the moment. Tying it into how this new era that was built up for all of us for so long didn’t meet a single expectation was such a brilliant move. It is composed with chinsey 90s web sound effects, and that actually adds to the feel its going for.
After I finished the game, I turned it off and felt satisfied.
About thirty minutes later, the sheer emotional weight finally hit me, and I nearly cried in my kitchen while I was getting ready for work. Games have made me cry, but they have never made me get there some time after. Hypnospace Outlaw is working on a lot of levels, it has this emotional honesty about it that I have so rarely seen in just about any work of fiction. It captures something so strange and raw we wrote off as childish long ago, and then dug those feelings back up and made me remember a sensation that had long been erased from my memory.
The game isn’t just an aesthetic exploration, like Broken Reality was, but a historic tragedy that gets you to revisit a point in time and explore what that meant to so many people. Then, it ties it into this universal experience we all try to forget, and taps into a vein I’ve never seen explored like this before. It’s both an ode to the death of the old internet, swallowed by capitalist gentrification and figureheads that either fell to the wayside or sold out, and our collective childhoods.
If Hypnospace Outlaw wants you take anything from it, I think it’s a reminder that those childish feelings are important. They made us into who we are, that innocence and imagination, and we shouldn’t forget them and the joy that came from just expressing ourselves. Even the angst we felt when things ended up being different than what we wanted are treated as perfectly valid, and I can’t remember the last time a work just let you wallow in those embarrassing but still important feelings. It started as such an ironic joke, only to make you care about something so ridiculous and irrational. At least that’s what it did for me.
That pain of the world not being what was promised to us remains, and we should remember that pain to try and correct the mistakes the former generations made. An era ended on such a sad note, but if we remember what we learned then, maybe, just maybe, we can make something even more amazing. Despite how much we feel like our youthful frustrations are just something we outgrow, I don’t think that’s true – we just wish we could.
