If you’re old enough to clearly remember the old internet, you probably have some amount of nostalgia for it, flaws and all. Sure, it was slow as hell, full of auto-playing music and garish gifs. It was hard to find anything, and a total lack of standards made it just as difficult to navigate and read pages even if you managed to dodge the popups, scammy ads, and malware that were basically everywhere. But social media wasn’t yet designed to infuriate and radicalize us, and the internet hadn’t had its every pixel colonized by planet-destroying corporations, so it’s easy to see why it was preferable.
Hypnospace Outlaw, available free to Amazon Prime subscribers in May, captures the freedom and the aesthetic chaos of that era, or at least some surreal version of it. The 2019 game is seen entirely through a computer interface like something you’d see in the ‘90s, complete with a Winamp-like music player and desktop pets cluttering up the screen.
But Hypnospace Outlaw presents a literally dreamlike rendition of retro tech, centered on a web browser you visit in your dreams by strapping a computer to your head while you sleep. You play as an enforcer for HypnOS, the company that runs the dream version of the internet called Hypnospace. Falling somewhere between a forum moderator and a private investigator, your job is to slink through the dark corners of the internet, rooting out infractions to keep its users — and more importantly HypnOS — safe.
At first, you track down minor internet crimes. People share copyrighted images or just act like jerks to each other, and you swoop in to put a stop to it. Eventually, your cases escalate to stamping out viruses and hackers, revealing along the way that maybe this corporation selling equipment that gives them access to its users’ dreams isn’t entirely to be trusted.
More than the cases themselves and the story that unfolds around them, the joy of Hypnospace Outlaw is just inhabiting its bizarre but familiar digital world. Hypnospace has all the frustrations of the early internet built in. Nearly every time you open a new page, you’re assailed with popups and left to navigate its totally bizarre structure once you’ve closed them all. Pages load slowly, and uncovering the information you need often means searching over and over until you land on the right query or find buried in the unordered masses of websites one with details crucial to your case. Hypnospace Outlaw can be a slog in the way that the old internet was, but that’s also a part of its charm.
Along with period-accurate irritations, Hypnospace is also full of exactly what made the internet so fascinating back then. Rather than chasing clout or angling to become internet celebrities, the users of Hypnospace spill their guts, pouring out the feuds and crushes of their real life, unwinding conspiracy theories to anyone who’ll read them, and debating endlessly over whether the latest Coolpunk musician topping the charts is the real deal or a sellout. More interesting than the larger tale that unfolds, the personal stories of these internet users are what makes Hypnospace Outlaw digging into, along with its surprising extensive soundtrack and the sheer glee of seeing the way it recreates and distorts the experience of life on the internet before social media made us all lose our minds.
Hypnospace Outlaw might be best experienced by people who were actually around for those barely regulated days of the early internet, but that’s not a requirement. While anyone who grew up without making a Geocities page or setting angsty song lyrics as their AIM away message might not relate to Hypnospace as personally, delving into its digital recesses can still be rewarding. Maybe the internet was always a nightmare — Hypnospace Outlaw just lets you go back to a time when it was at least a more interesting one.
