Hypnospace Outlaw

[h2]Hypnospace Outlaw[/h2] [hr][/hr] [✔] — Flashing (4th case, end of third day +) [✔] — [minor] Jumpscares (pop-ups, mall game) [b][u]Others?[/u][/b] — disturbing imagery (4th case +, visual glitches, fake computer crashes) [b][u]First run[/u][/b] - 14,3 hours (8/14 achievements) [b][u]All achievements[/u][/b] - 19,6 hours [hr][/hr] [h3]Overview[/h3] HypnOS is a sleeptime OS of the fictional late 90s setting, and you're hired as a moderator to work on keeping its users in check. To do so, you'll receive e-mails from the higher-ups giving you cases to solve, where you'll then have to look for those infringements before reporting them. By entering "zones", you're given (almost) full permission to explore users pages and meet the people behind those sites, allowing you to decide when to continue with the story. [i]Definitely [/i]not a game for everyone, and your enjoyment of the adventure will be highly dictated by your enjoyment of point and click games, exploration games and, in a certain way, visual novels. I truly believe you cannot experience the entire game if you're not willing to get lost in rabbit hole after rabbit hole of reading the pages present in the game. However, if you enjoy any of those three genres, chances are you'll love Hypnospace Outlaw if you're willing to give it a chance. It is not a [i]pricy [/i]game. And while I do know lots of people prefer to watch others playing, be it a gameplay on youtube or a friend going through it, if interested I [i]really [/i]recommend going through it alone and blind for your first experience. I don't think watching this game through someone else gives the same feeling as actively exploring the hypnospace yourself. [hr][/hr] [h3]Personal review (spoilers past this area!)[/h3] I was not even born in the time this game is set, so who's to say I [i]experienced [/i]the 90s internet. However, exploring the setting created for Hypnospace Outlaw made me [i]crave [/i]that experience, made me feel a [i]nostalgia [/i]I didn't even know I could feel for something I wasn't around for. Every page you click, every page you read through has so much personality packed on them that, no matter which one, I really do look at them and go "yeah, this is a page I'd expect to see from a teenager in the late 90s" filled with gory cartoons and vaguely punk music or "yeah, this really reads as something i'd find in a teachers blog" sharing artwork of her students and creating a memorial page for loved ones. I'm not necessarily someone hard to please with characters, however, seeing them as [i]believable [/i]people, who I could see around, does take a bit more and Hypnospace Outlaw [i]excels[/i] in that. Character after character, the more I met and read about them, through each of the 3 days this story is set in, the more I saw them as someone I really could just find in real life. There were lots of times those fictional characters reminded me of people I genuinely knew and couldn't help but [i]cheer [/i]for. From seeing an old man not knowing how to use the internet and slowly getting the hang of it to teenagers being, well, teenagers, or a couple playing the universe equivalent of D&D and, as you explore, learning that the guy sucks. At points you can't help but cheer and care for those characters, wanting Sarah to leave her husband or Tiff to get some peace from most people surrounding her, hoping the five zones are reinstated or to [i]please just stop making me have to flag the damn fish cartoon.[/i] After the "third day" working there, we get a singular case to stop a hacker attack in Teentopia. And by doing so, we're finally led to the ending of the game. Years go by and we find ourself in the present days, learning that this same attack caused the same thing we've been told to be a "hoax" since the start of the game to actually happen and fry the brains of a few people. We are now part of a restoring and archiving project, trying to retrieve information from old pages to help people we [i]did [/i]meet (if you explored the pages) before! Seeing Tamara actually got some success after some people making fun of her for "being in every zone" or Tim, now reformed and trying to make some good was great, but I think the best feeling for me was seeing Samantha who was undercover, knowing something was wrong and wanting our help to really find out what exactly happen in the 2000s crash. And it goes smoothly for a little. We find some things the other people in the project are looking for. And suddenly Dylan, one of the two creators of the Hypnospace, joins the group. Seeing the notification Dylan had joined us for the first time sent a shiver down my spine. After the "second" day we already know there's something more going with him, so seeing his icon and name pop-up again was horrifying at first. Because it meant he [i]knew [/i]not only there was something else, but he also knew what we were trying to do. You get some more fun time to explore the pages, finding out documents that showed us that, indeed, Dylan knew all along about the issues with Hypnospace messing around with sleep quality and not being safe. That the CEO himself was aware, but neither did anything to stop or improve, choosing to continue working on side projects for the OS. And, through Tim's attack, they found a perfect excuse to wash their hands of any guilt. Thiiis is where the game falls off a bit for me. After all that time enjoying myself in the space, learning about those characters, the ending just feels... Lacking, personally. It isn't necessarily bad or anything, and I didn't expect some big "yes let's expose the big bad evil in Dylan and get punitive justice!" moment. But at the same time it felt rushed, it also felt like there was a lot missing to me. We get Dylan to confess to knowing about the effects, yes, and Tim now knows he did nothing bad. We get some notes from Dylan apologizing to the people who have died... And then what? Nothing. After such a fun time with the game, it felt incomplete after that. I expected at the very least a small video like the one we got after the 2000s crash showing the victims, what happened etc, but we get [i]nothing[/i]. We play Outlaw, we "get" Dylan, and that's it. Now we can go explore the rest of the pages we never saw before. After such a surprise meeting all those people I've met in the past again, now in the present, having them so quickly taken away with no more talking or elaboration left me frustrated, in a way. We don't know what happened to Dylan afterwards, we get no words from Samantha, we don't know how Tim felt learning that he spent those 6 years in prison for nothing. The post-game is also... Eh? Seeing that I had so many pages I had not seen before left me excited to see what is it I had missed! What I didn't find or look for in those three periods of time, believing there most definitely was more! Only to learn that, for most of those, it was either repeats of the same page or pages with veery few changes. Not bad, still gave me a chance to explore this world more (and spend my hypnocoins, now that I had been able to hack and get a infinite number of them) and spend my last few hours with this game, but not what I first expected by seeing so many empty pages basically calling for me. It is not the perfect game, but very much an enjoyable one. There's so much going on that you can't help but want to know more, which is exactly the one criticism I have with it. At the end of it all, we can't know anymore. It's alright and doesn't take much away from the experience to me, but at the moment itself it definitely left me annoyed. Overall, Hypnospace Outlaw isn't something I'd go around recommending for everyone, however, if I know someone who'd enjoy any of the aspects that made me entranced by this game (and I know wouldn't be as annoyed by the ending as I was), it's definitely something I'd suggest playing. [hr][/hr]