Developer: Tendershoot
Publisher: No More Robots
Release: Out now
On: Windows, Mac, Linux
From: Steam
Price: 14, $18, 15
Hypnospace Outlaw, if it can be described at all, is a game about policing an alternate-world dream-based internet browsing system in 1999. Oh yes. Accessed by wearing a brain-scanning headband, users can create their own Geocities-like web spaces, interact via a chat app, and share music and images with one another, all via the HypnOS operating system. Think Compuserve, but you’re asleep. And, because it’s an internet controlled by a corporation, it contains all manner of content violation that cannot be tolerated. You’re tasked with clearing it up. In the most draconian fashion. Which means you’re going to be looking through a lot of very terrible internet pages, wielding a banhammer.
It is, immediately, hilarious. It’s vital I put that up front, because so much of Hypnospace’s core themes are about wading through the deliberately terrible. But it’s wonderfully terrible. A keenly observed pastiche of the early internet, in those days when it felt achievable to eventually know everyone else who was logged in. Online communities, reactionary protests, dodgy “download accelerator” software, pop-ups, it’s got the lot.