Hypnospace Outlaw
Greetings Enforcer, and thank you for enlisting in the Hypnospace Patrol Department! As the corporatocracy sleeps, outlaws are out there committing terrible transgressions all across our beloved Hypnospace, and these virtual streets aren’t going to police themselves!
Hypnospace Outlaw is a ’90s internet simulator in which you scour Hypnospace’s wide variety of weird and wonderful websites to hunt down wrongdoers, while also keeping an eye on your inbox, avoiding viruses and adware, and downloading a plethora of apps that may or may not be useful.
As part of your job as a Hypnospace Enforcer, you’ll be watching out for copyright infringement, internet bullying and more, with reports and rewards coming direct from the Hypnospace Patrol Department to your inbox. In your spare time, you can customize your HypnOS desktop however you see fit, with a variety of downloads, wallpapers, screen savers and helper bots to keep you company.
So slip on your Hypnospace Headband™, and keep these key directives in mind:
- Crawl through Cyberspace: Scour the darkest corners of the Web for scumbag users who violate Hypnospace law!
- Dangers and delights: Download groovy GIFS and MIDI files, but watch out for adware, toolbars and hackers!
- Treasure hunting: Do your job to earn Hypnocoins, or ignore your inbox and go hunting for hidden pages, downloads and secrets!
- Relive your childhood: Equip obnoxious screensavers and skins for your desktop, and wiggle your mouse pointer around to make pages load faster!
Hypnospace Outlaw has 31 accessibility features including text to speech, one-button play and navigation clarity! Read the full accessibility report here: https://www.taminggaming.com/en-us/accessibility/Hypnospace+Outlaw
Steam User 58
Before I replay this again, I'd thought I'd share some thoughts.
I feel like I've either known, or was, every character in this game. If you were online in the late 90's, you will feel it hit on so many levels. It perfectly captures the feeling of the time it was written for.
It was an awkward time, but also a time of pure expression- before the internet was turned into a giant shopping mall. It's a reminder that the internet is ours. Today, it's more straightforward and user friendly, but also a shadow of its former self in many respects.
We spent this time giving shape to something that had no shape. Everything today looks cleaner and more user friendly compared to then, but we lost something along the way.
This game is reminder of the internet's former innocence. It calls to the edgy teenager in me, spending days at a time on chat programs and bulletin boards. The identities we forged, the connections we made, that would only fade into the static of memory.
In short, this game is a classic, and will never receive the appreciation it deserves. It also has a kickass soundtrack. I love everything about it.
Steam User 76
finally I can be what I always wanted. a reddit mod
Steam User 47
Played this for the aesthetic and nostalgia bait, ended up with the dark story line about corporation killing creativity and ignoring safety for profit.... Just like in real life
Steam User 45
if you are concerned about the homogenization of the internet and digital preservation, this game will hit you like a truck
Steam User 46
The game is so immersive that I intuitively tried to hit the turbo button on my PC and accidentally ended up resetting it. Just kidding... but honesty I did alt-tab or alt-F4 out of the game more times than I can count.
The level of detail and references in this game is really impressive, you can't just browse Tumblr for a week and piece together something like this, there's some effort here. Even though it lacks a few key elements from the days of "pre-smartphone internet" (back when it was mostly aimed towards people who would rather spend the weekend messing with a computer instead of going out, breeding an entirely different "internet culture" than what we see today) they've managed to recreate such dense and detailed world that it really feels like browsing the real thing using some high speed connection instead of the cursed dial-up access.
While the game's millennial aesthetic is the first thing to catch the eye it also has a story (which serves its purpose, the real world has enough evidence about how the villains could be more extreme) and puzzles that require you to use your "internet expertise" to solve them which is really cool to see this in a game for the first time, bordering some basic programming knowledge to illegally bypass stuff.
Of course: Play it with a keyboard and mouse instead of a controller... I don't even need to explain why right!?
Steam User 45
I remember the Internet like this. Hell, it was even crazier back in the days. Sketchy .EXEs, flashy pages without JS or even CSS, invite-only communities, etc. This game may not look exactly like web 1.0, but it gives an honest try to revive the spirit
The core gameplay and the story is... Well, who gives a damn?! The most fun thing to do in Hypnospace Outlaw is just to open random pages and follow link after link after link filling yourself with useless trivia and facts about other's personal life.
If you just follow the story and get on to cases you're assigned right away, this game is nothing special, really. But the first time I launched Hypnospace Outlaw, I woke up 3 hours in not even remembering what my objective was. Browsing was just too fun to stop!
If you're here for a detective game or a technological thriller, you'd better give this a second thought. But if you're interested in the old Internet culture and all of peculiarities of web 1.0, I'd recommend this as an immediate purchase.
Steam User 50
first step -> enter in the computer
second step -> start steam
third step -> enter in the game
fourth step -> enter in the computer
fifth step -> report fish fanart