Ever since the release of Her Story there’s been a lot of releases which approach the investigation adventuring in a different way, essentially simulating the work of looking through archives. While there were earlier examples of that that worked more like ARGs, like In Memoriam, and other titles that experimented with alternative ways of how a mystery can be solved in an adventure game and what mechanics can it use for doing so, I feel that Her Story was an exact point where people became more open to the idea and started experimenting with it more often. Hypnospace Outlaw in particular is simulating the experience of working as a moderator (Enforcer) inside an Internet-like network called Hypnospace. And it’s more curious than actually fun.
It’s both hard and easy to describe what you do inside the game, as it’s emulating something that we tend to do every day – browsing the internet. The concept is extremely simple – in this alternate history of the world there were several virtual reality networks in the late 90s and Hypnospace was one of those The Dot-com bubble was at its peak, network entertainment was popular and internet pages were ugly and loaded very slowly. And that’s what this game is emulating. As an “enforcer” in the HypnoSpace, your job is to moderate the activities on the network, browsing and searching for potential violations of the service. Anyone with experiences of moderating/supporting modern Software as a Service products today, owning a forum closer to the 2010s or helping clean up the livejournals or the GeoCities and the like in the 00s will find the gameplay oddly familiar.
There are rules and ToS that must be upheld and you’re the person to comb the net to find the violators. Some pages are part of the catalogue in the “zones” they are in and some are not logged and can only be found using the search and correct terms. You get your “cases”, you deal with the violations and you also see situations and lives of several people reflected through the events on their pages. Which is, in many ways, the real core of the game and the real story that’s sucking you in.
And it didn’t really grab me. It was fun to see the “old internet” visuals, the slow pages full of playing audio files and simple clipart animations. To remember how easy it was to download malicious software or be scammed, seemingly without even doing anything (though, real IE loading ActiveX components was far more dangerous in reality). Both visuals and the tunes are brilliant. And there are tons of different characters participating in the events of the game story, and said stories are pretty interesting on their own. But somehow, all of this just didn’t grab me at all. Maybe, there’s just way too much stuff to truly get invested in any of it. Maybe, it’s the fact that browsing the content in the game is far far less fun than with modern browsers (and, actually, with the period browsers as well). Maybe it’s something else, but I couldn’t help but be curious about what’s going on, but never truly enjoying any of it.
Perhaps, you will enjoy Hypnospace Outlaw more than I have. It is a very curious title and it captures the spirit of a certain time on the Internet well, even if in a simplified and more dramatic way. It keeps changing and evolving as you play, so you don’t necessarily do the same things all the time. And the story goes far far deeper than you might first expect. It’s not just a cute recreation of the “web 1.0”. I found it interesting, but not as enjoyable as I hoped it would be, personally. But it sure is nice.