Hypnospace Outlaw

There's much less outlawry than the title led me to expect, and most of the outlawry is copyright infringement. I think my expectations were a little miscalibrated, the alternate 90s where they feed the internet directly into your brain (Not to mention the title) had me thinking of a kind of cyberpunk thing, but think less Shadowrun, more "Unpaid reddit mod". Also, the first time I played the game I found copyright striking a little old lady's website to teach her first grade students about hand washing made me feel dirtier than any video game that made me blow up a planet or shoot an old friend in the head, so I stopped playing for a while. Eventually I got back into it, and it is a delightful pastiche of the turn of the millenium internet. Honestly if you are too young to have experienced it you can simulate it by playing this game by turning off your phone and waiting half an hour every time you download a song because back then we had 56k modems, not brain internet. There is a truly amazing amount of text and also a ton of music, which really made me nostalgic for the days of legally downloading things off MP3.com and illegally downloading them off Napster. You can also make your desktop deliberately hideous and remind yourself that virtual pets were actually kind of annoying. Personally, I've found the puzzles not too difficult, but then my point of comparison for difficult puzzles is, like, Dark Seed. Occasionally it can be difficult to tell whether you are having trouble with a puzzle because you are doing something wrong or because you just don't yet have the tools to solve it, but I have seen way worse in that department and I generally found that by just browsing around and enjoying the humor I eventually figured stuff out.