32) Hypnospace Outlaw (2019)

Designed by Jay Tholen, who also handled the visuals, music, and co-wrote the game, Hypnospace Outlaw was funded via Kickstarter and has since garnered a bit of a cult following. The game defies conventional classification, most closely being a puzzle/ point and click adventure game with a simulator backdrop. It's the kind of game that, the more you describe it, the crazier it is to understand. It's a very polarizing experience where you will either bounce off of it hard or absolutely be drawn into it's unique charm. For my part, I was instantly hooked and blew through the game's relatively short runtime in two or three sittings.

The game starts in an alternate version of 1999, one where the company Merchantsoft has created an internet service known as Hypnospace which users connect to with a headband that runs HypnOS while they sleep. Hypnospace is divided into different Zones for different audiences, and allows users to create their own personal webpages and post content. The player takes on the role of an Enforcer, a volunteer moderator tasked with finding and reporting various forbidden activity, such as copyright infringement, threatening or abusive behavior, and worst of all, third party monetization that seeks to skirt around using Merchantsoft's proprietary currency.

The gameplay consists of being assigned cases to look into and then navigating the fictional browser in order to find and report violations, resulting in the offending users receiving strikes and possibly being banned. This is where the bulk of the story telling and charm come in. As you explore Hypnospace, you start to pick up on the personal lives of certain users and, over time, see how enforcing the rules affects them. You also get looped into some of the goings on behind the scenes at Merchantsoft, learning more about the creators and their motivations. All of this is behind a lovingly crafted and hilariously faithful portrayal of early internet culture. The webpages have the distinct feel of late 90's design, and the user made content is of dubious quality. Aside from the purposefully hideous page designs, it was always a treat when audio came in, as it always sounded like it was recorded by a teenager, complete with being way too close to the mic and plenty of amateurish pops in the audio. Again, I can see this turning a lot of people away, especially younger players, but I'll be damned if I didn't find it charming as Hell.

I could gush for hours about the purposefully horrible design, and though my time with the game was only a few hours, I could have explored this simulated internet for days on end. Every so often, after completing your assigned tasks, the game will have a time skip, going through a version of the Y2K nonsense and eventually bringing us to modern day. Along the way, you begin to pick up on the actual plot of the game. Without spoiling too much, you uncover the actions of certain users that try to cover up things they've done. A lot of the storytelling has to be inferred and is somewhat open to interpretation. It is entirely possible to make it through the game with only a passing understanding of what was going on, and I kind of love that.

The biggest drawback to the game is that, at times, your objective isn't incredibly clear, leading to a lot of clicking on things to see if they work. There were things I would flag as violations that, for whatever reason, were incorrect, leading to randomly searching and trying to figure it out by trial and error. I admit that, to an extent, this boils down to my own stupidity, but there were certainly times where the logic behind how one would get to where they were supposed to was lost on me. Not a major problem, as it's sadly common in the point and click genre, but I do feel it worth mentioning. There's nothing as mind bendingly stupid as some of the genre's most notorious examples, and none of them led to instant failure, but I did get mildly frustrated from time to time.

I found Hypnospace Outlaw to be incredibly charming, and the humor was very well crafted, leaving me laughing a number of times at how perfectly bad it was. It's the kind of comedy that's really hard to pull off, as it's easy to make it overly dumb, but the game balances it out wonderfully. It's a game that's a bit hard to recommend, as your mileage will vary depending upon how charming you find the simulated early era internet to be. It's also more than a bit hard to describe or talk about without spoiling the experience or story. I greatly enjoyed my time with it, but it's not for everyone.