Hypnospace Outlaw Beta Impressions on Steam

Being born in 1996, I was sadly too young to really experience the birth of the 90’s internet boom; however, I do still recall the clunky, low-fi, rough-around-the-edges charm of the younger world wide web. This is an online atmosphere that Hypnospace Outlaw, the newest game by Dropsy creator, Jay Tholen, actively seeks to replicate and, frankly, it’s incredibly endearing. I just played through the short demo I had access to, clocking it at around 80 minutes. The experience—and it indeed was more an experience than a game at this stage—was charming, funny, and evoked genuine engagement. It’s a departure from any type of game I know how to classify, and proved astoundingly refreshing.

          It is admittedly a little tricky to describe precisely how the game plays. You need a backstory even to process why you’re doing things in the game, since very little is naturally intuitive. But that’s why I’m here. The game takes place within a virtual internet that the player can log into while asleep, and thus surf with their unconscious (but still very much aware) mind. This nocturnal net is called HypnOS, and the player takes on the role of a new Enforcer for the Hypnospace Patrol Department (HSPD for short). Enforcers are users tasked with maintaining the standards policies and rules of this online community. You must curb bullying, keep trolls at bay, manage to delete viruses and malware, and keep the HypnOS running smoothly. Successfully flag appropriated content, instances of online harassment, or extralegal monetary exchanges and the HSPD rewards you with HypnoCoin, Hypnospace’s non-transferable currency. You can use this to purchase Hypnospace desktop backgrounds, music, and even audio files of spoken word poetry. All in all, it creates one of the most interesting, surreal, and laugh-out-loud charming game atmosphere’s I’ve ever experienced.

          Speaking to the environment of the game, while surfing Hypnospace, you will stumble across personal websites—an online commodity long forgotten by this internet user—band promotional websites, and secret web pages you must navigate through weaving connective links to locate. These pages, and the people who created them, lend a sense of astonishing personality to what could have been stale walls of text or just basic, pulsing images. While you never have any in-game discussions with anyone besides messages back and forth with HSPD higher-ups, these characters feel almost real, and while they don’t always come across as wholly realized, they remain charming. You feel as though you could easily know someone like them. It leads to every web page having real personality. While this is an achievement, what proves most impressive is the game’s music. Not every webpage has custom music, but most do. Not all the music is something I would actively listen to, some of it is downright grating, but for the most part, the music is stellar! Fake bands, as well as individuals, provide audio files the player can download onto their Hypnospace desktop and listen to, and most of it is not only phenomenal, it reminds me of the 90s. One faux band, Seepage, I liked so much that I just hung out on their webpage for a while to listen to the music that automatically played. I’m not ashamed to say that I was jammin.

          For all this fantastic content, right now I’m a little anxious. This gaming space strikes me as one that will be incredibly hard to conform to a narrative. There is the beginning of something like a narrative forming through the Enforcer’s early interactions with other HSPD officials, and through different web pages and characters responding to the player’s actions. But this is frankly a weak frame at best. Most information is conveyed to the player through walls of text or small screens set in other windows that contain dumps of information. The story doesn’t exist yet, though a message from the developer at the end of the demo promises a whole suite of future content—most namely a “coherent story.” As someone who loves a strong story, I admittedly struggle to see how one could materialize. I will be the first to admit this stance may be adherence to old-fashioned vehicles of narrative, and I would love to be proven wrong, but right now the game feels like something geared far more towards a playable experience rather than a playable narrative. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, it does mean that the attempt to plant a story on top of this charming game environment may be even trickier than it might first appear. And already, from my outside perspective, I don’t know how Jay Tholen will do it. Here’s hoping it will be every bit as trippy, nostalgic, and exploratory as this demo has proven the experience to be already. All I can say for sure is that I am significantly more excited for this game, and will be eagerly watching for future progress on the beta.

Take a Look at the Hypnospace Outlaw Trailer:

Hypnospace Outlaw will launch later this year on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam, with potential console plans to be announced soon.

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