Rather than lazily pastiching the ugliness and awkwardness of turn-of-the-century web pages, it really conjures that time, when the internet was a place to go rather than a liminal omnipresence. The subtle humour and surreal aesthetic of this alternate-history tech-detective drama suggests an immense amount of effort. A pretty elaborate story unfolds as you work through your cases and explore the dark recesses of the web, which raised questions for me about online control and censorship that have become even more essential in 2019. Things that you try to stamp out quickly multiply and proliferate across the web, becoming impossible to track. Even within the first hour, it’s apparent that there’s something uncomfortable about being an enforcer there’s some satisfaction in reporting a teen’s cyberbullying, but dobbing in a first-grade teacher for posting her kids’ copyright-infringing drawings of a famous cartoon character feels off. This is a puzzle game, really, casting you as an internet detective searching for clues and following leads. This is a dead-on parody of the internet of my late childhood, and sometimes exactly as unpleasant to navigate: slow to load, garish and cumbersome, afflicted with malware that can make your screen sway sickeningly or subject you to endless pop-up ads. When I found secret sites with mysterious logins or link-trails, I’d feel the thrill that comes with knowing I shouldn’t be there. There are communities of music snobs, nerds and Christians, all causing online drama. Edgy teens’ personal pages are full of self-absorbed quibbles with classmates and soundtracked by unbearably compressed nu-metal. Online storefronts are festooned with ugly animations and misspellings. Hypnospace Outlaw would be boring if the websites themselves weren’t so bizarrely compelling. Assignments drop into your inbox and you flit around the net looking for things to smack with your ban-hammer, following links and typing in searches to find unlisted pages with dodgy material, downloading mysterious software and accumulating a collection of downloaded tracks for your RealPlayer-alike music program. You play an enforcer for the growing corporation that runs the web, stamping out copyright infringement, harassment and illegal activity to keep people safe. In this alternative-history version of 1999, the internet really is somewhere you visit when you’re asleep, browsing idly while your body rests. It’s like browsing a half-remembered amalgamation of GeoCities, Angelfire and random Myspace pages. Hypnospace Outlaw constructs an entire fictional internet from the Y2K era, replete with low-resolution videos, dancing gifs, virtual desktop pets and forum drama. This constant change means that “the internet” of previous decades becomes something like a dream, existing only in the vague memories of the people who experienced it. T he very nature of the internet means that things are constantly vanishing from it, as websites, social networks and communities emerge, evolve and dissipate over the years.
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