It’s been several days since I finished playing Hypnospace Outlaw. I recommend that you don’t read this until you’ve 1) Finished the game’s main storyline and reached the game’s credits. And, 2) Formed your own opinions on the ending.
This write-up isn’t to try and change your opinions on the game. It’s my way of getting my thoughts on it straightened out, and to throw a different perspective on it to pause for thought on. Hypnospace Outlaw is a game I really enjoyed and highly recommend to people who, like myself, have been looking for a detective game that really lets you think for yourself and doesn’t hold your hand at every step. It’s funny, it’s smart, and it makes you invested in the characters’ lives. And there are quite a lot of them!
However, the ending is something that (while not souring my impressions) really changed the way I interpreted the game as a whole.
First off, I love “The Dog Bites Back” trope of a protagonist who starts off as a tiny cog in a huge machine, but slowly becomes part of the inciting incident that takes down the whole thing. It’s the Butterfly Effect embodied into a protagonist and I love it! The Enforcer goes from being Merchantsoft’s dogsbody, to having it’s co-creator arrested.
- We don’t really get any closure with Adrian Merchant. We don’t know if he’ll be arrested. We don’t see his reaction to the Enforcer’s actions. Adrian was the one providing the money for Hypnospace, and we know from reading the ChitChat messages that he agreed with the idea of hiding the possible medical risks of the headbands to the public.
- Dylan definitely knew that he was doing the wrong thing, from the outset. This was not a “I didn’t realize what my creation was capable of" type situation. He knew he had created something dangerous. It’s why he tried to hide the medical tests. It’s why he joined HAP only after he learned that the Enforcer had a working headband. He was trying not to get caught. Even after 20 years, he still never admitted to having done anything wrong, and it’s only after being shown damning evidence that he apologies.
-He didn’t even do anything to try and fix things when Tim–who was 16 years old at the time–took the fall and served several years in prison for something he didn’t do. Twenty years later, Tim actually believes the lie that it was all his fault.
- Dylan THREATENS the Enforcer: After he joins HAP, one of the emails he sends the Enforcer can basically be interpreted as a thinly-veiled threat to dox our name. Not our Enforcer username, mind you. Our real name. Because it’s written in our headband (“Your name sounds so familiar… Did we used to ChitChat?”).
- Having Dylan apologize at the eleventh hour really changes the dynamic of the ending. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it takes the game out of the black-and-white “We defeated the great evil and took down the baddie” (a trope I like) to a more bittersweet “We took down the villain, but he’s shown to be human and he’s sorry for what he did.” Again, that’s not inherently a bad thing (bittersweet endings are my favourite), but for it to work, it requires us to believe Dylan has changed.
- Dylan gives us a finalized version of Outlaw to play, where he gives himself up to us to arrest. From a game mechanics standpoint, this works, because it’s exciting. But from a storytelling standpoint, it’s a man who writes in his apology that he knows he got too preoccupied in making his dream project. But if that’s the case, why put the apology in that project(the project that basically killed several people) as hidden game files?
- I think it also doesn’t help that Dylan (unintentionally) shares parallels to recent public apologies people in power (specifically in the animation industry) have made to workers who were mistreated by them. Dylan and Merchantsoft as a whole definitely have misogyny going on behind the scenes (the way Samantha is dismissed in conversations and how, if you’re roleplaying as a female Enforcer, the Merchantsoft Survey will say that you are “not qualified” to complete it, abruptly ending the survey).
These parallels make you wonder, “Was he really sorry? Or was he just sorry that he got caught? He did have twenty years to do the right thing after all, but didn’t until the Enforcer came back…”
And, from the way the game framed the apology, I don’t think that was how we were meant to interpret it. I think we are meant to take the apology as genuine. But how can it be genuine if the Enforcer had to move this many mountains, and provide this much evidence, to get that apology twenty years too late?
For all the moments I laughed at the game’s sense of humour, was impressed by the game’s art and music, and felt genuine “Eureka!” moments of deduction, the ending left me feeling hollow. Almost haunted. A kinda“I don’t know what to make of this” feeling.
But at the end of the day, I would much rather a game leave me feeling like this, than play a game where I explore it, finish it, and completely forget about.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a game that I will remember.
-Katy133
