Hypnospace Outlaw is a game in a weird genre - fake Internet exploration. There are a few of these types of games, but HO is probably the most famous. It's a love letter to late 90s and early 2000s Internet culture, and a nice adventure/puzzle game too.I really like these types of games. This one is just a tiny bit before my time - I grew up more in the mid-2000s Internet culture than I did in the late 90s - but it hits many of the same beats. It captures the feeling of discovery, of having your own little corner of something that other people aren't 'in' on yet, perfectly. In today's world, that feeling is pretty much gone. The Internet has been homogenized into a dozen gigantic sites, and individual blogs, fansites, and so on are pretty much a relic. There are pros and cons to how the Internet works today, but one of the definite downsides is how soulless everything feels nowadays.

As far as gameplay goes, you play as an "enforcer", a volunteer on a company's internet platform that works a bit like Geocities, where everyone can have their own webpage. You get assigned cases, and have to trawl through pages looking for copyright infringement, harassment, and illegal content. It's pretty basic, and really an excuse to get you exploring the dozens of unique pages, but it works well enough.

I'm really enjoying my time with the game. I feel almost nostalgic while playing it, which is kind of hard to describe since it's a time I never really experienced. It's resonating with me in a similar way to the Emily is Away series of games, though those are much more of a visual novel type game than this. If you like "computer simulator" games or grew up on the internet between 1997-2005, you'll find a lot to like here.

Verdict: Keep Playing

Part of the Game Library Project