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Hypnospace Outlaw (Finally finished!)

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago2,909 words

I've been playing Hypnospace Outlaw: a surprisingly musical game in which you moderate a fake 90's-era psychic internet.

I don't play games as often as I should these days, since I'm so busy making my own and there's an element of being intimidated by 'the competition' as I've described in the past, but that's something I'm trying to change. So I've made this new post category to talk about games! Hopefully it'll motivate me to play more of them.

I started playing Hypnospace Outlaw about a week and a half ago, after Mania mentioned it in the discord and someone I follow on Twitter (who's either a journalist or one of the publishers or something, I don't even know) had been tweeting promotionally about it a lot around what I think was the time of its Switch release, maybe? That's the version I got, since I wanted something I could play while getting away from the computer for a while (I spend all day at it otherwise).

I didn't have a clue what it was, but I think it was popular recently? So maybe you've all played it and I'm late to the party. That'll likely be a common theme as I keep writing these posts!

First Impressions

I wrote this a few days ago:

The first day that I played it - for about an hour - I wasn't exactly intrigued. I wasn't sure what was going on or what to do, and it seemed like an overwhelming amount to figure out and to read before I could make sense of anything. I found myself wishing that I had something more actiony where I could press buttons to do things; I didn't particularly want to read a bunch of dry text tell-not-show tutorials to understand the completely unfamiliar gameplay mechanics, and I quit after a tedious hour...

I mention this because most games are like this for me, right at the start. It takes time to get into them, even if they're of a familiar genre. But I've seen a lot of people commenting that my own games aren't immediately obvious how to play, and that that'd be a death sentence for them, completely off-putting. I wonder then how many other people get this initial frustration but patiently push through it, and how many just quit if they don't understand everything right from the start. This game seems to have succeeded despite not being obvious and familiar... or maybe it is for other people who aren't me, I don't know. Maybe for some of you it was a '[some genre I don't know] game', instead of a unique experience as it was for me.

I've been playing for maybe three or four days now, not for very long each day, and I still can't say that I'm diving in with eager excitement, but I'm definitely finding it quite intriguing! It's an experience unlike any other I've had before.

In case you aren't familiar with the game already, here's a description several paragraphs into this post rather than at the beginning: you explore a version of a 90's-style early internet that people access during sleep, and you're a sort of moderator whose job is to report and clean up violations.

I don't really know what I was expecting from that. Lots of cheap jokes about crappy old websites, maybe old trends or something.

And there is a lot of that ('Squisherz' combine the various Pokemon/Digimon/Tamagotchi/etc monster-pet fads with collectibles and the weird 90's obsession with gunge, lots of backwards caps and ugly, stilted early-3D-animation gifs). But I'm also surprised by the depth and interconnectedness of the world building, and in particular the amount of music in the game!

This screenshot is a perfect example:



(Getting screenshots from the Switch is a pain...)

It's a page where the owner talks about various genres of music - invented for this - and their history and connections. All the pages have background music tracks, and most of these genres - and more - are represented by actual full-length pieces of music. It's so surprising and impressive how much music there is, and how it's all comically low-quality midi-style stuff you'd see on early websites [future note: I know now there are both midi and wave files represented separately!], but at the same time a lot of it's obviously had a lot of thought and effort put into it, and so many different genres have been created and explored.

I get the feeling that a lot or all of the music is mocking certain genres, but I personally think a lot of it is really good, too! It's hard to tell how much of it is just making fun of, say, new age music, and how much of it is an honest, heartfelt attempt to produce pleasing music in that style. I've spent most of my time 'playing' the game just sitting there listening to the music tracks - or even full albums of tracks - in their entirety.

It's somewhat annoying since we typically become fond of game music through its association with gameplay experiences that we enjoyed, while with this I have to unnaturally pause what I'm doing to just listen to the music, which leads to impatience. But it is what it is.

I've said a few times in the past that I make games as something to compose music for, which is largely true, and a big feeling that I'm getting from this is that it's a way of exploring music with some game built around it, or something. I don't know how it was for the developers behind the scenes, maybe they weren't trying to do that at all, but the music's definitely way more intertwined with the whole experience than I was expecting it to be. A lot of the key recurring characters are music creators in some way or another.

I'm also surprised by how many of the themes of the pages - especially the early ones - relate to the Openness personality trait. Lots of talk of third eyes, making fun of spiritual gurus and new agey mumbo-jumbo, but while a lot of it's likely because a lot of crappy websites seem to deal with that kind of stuff, I'm getting the feeling that whoever made it was probably towards the far end of that particular personality spectrum since it seeps into areas beyond the one specifically playing with it. Many creators are though, I suppose. It's interesting to me since I've talked before about how my own games spend so much of their time wallowing in Openness, and how that might be off-putting to people who aren't at the extreme end with that trait, while this seems to have handled it well enough and a lot of people probably liked it.

I suppose it's also balanced out though by coming across as making fun of that kind of thing, and there are communities making fun of other more relatable things like teenage culture and salt-of-the-earth out-of-touch American-conservative old people too, rather than portraying the away-with-the-fairies-ness as actually appealing.

Overall, I'm finding it interesting how there are many similar psychological motivations behind my games and this one, but how this one's turned out is massively different to what I'm making myself!

Final Impressions

I think I've got to the postgame bit now? So some spoilers ahead. I'm not writing these to promote games exactly, just for my own benefit, and I'm expecting the handful of people who read them will already have played these games (so these are less "should you play this interesting thing?" and more "look, I'm finally catching up!!"). So yes, spoilers!

The bit I'm at now is in the far-flung future of 2020, and I'm having to archive the entirety of Hynospace for nostalgic reasons. A clever way of doing a "you can revisit everything and get 100% completion" sort of postgame, seems like. I know I've got some sort-of tasks, pages to find, but I imagine they won't lead to any progression if I complete them? I might dive back in and try later, anyway.

I've been playing the game for around an hour a day - but not every day - since last Wednesday, so it didn't take that long to get through... though I did find myself wishing it was over more quickly then I could be done with it. A big part of that is about my feelings towards playing games in general more than this specific one, though; I seem to have lost the ability to really sink into a world for fun rather than seeing it as a chore to complete, so hopefully getting into playing more regularly should help with that. I definitely started enjoying it more towards the end.

I'd call it a mixed bag. Some strange choices, and a whole lot of really appealing exploration of creativity. I'm glad I played it!

I particularly liked the music - one of the reasons I was looking forward to finishing was so then I could get the soundtrack and add some of its tracks to my regular playlist, which I don't do until the end to avoid potential spoilers - though I still find it odd exactly how musical it was! I wondered when first reading about the game how they might have handled the audio in such a strange experience, and I never would have expected it would have been interwoven through essentially every aspect of it like it was. The invention - and comical evolution - of those musical genres was something I particularly liked, though I've never really seen music that way myself (I don't know what genre, if any, my music would be), so I got thinking about that a bit. Made me wonder how most people assess whether a piece of music is 'bad' or 'good', and how different that is to how my own perception works.

While I was reluctant to play at first and found it a chore, as I spent more time browsing through pages and getting familiar with the users, the sense of familiarity and understanding did start to feel quite warm. A nice experience. There was a bit for one of the... jobs, or whatever they're called, where you had to answer a list of comprehension questions (about the fantasy section I can't remember the deliberately ridiculous composite name of; Starport Dreamcastle Something?), and I got all but one of the questions right the first time, and fully correct the second time. I enjoyed that, knowing that I'd passively absorbed enough about what I was reading to pass a quiz about it!

I can't say I really enjoyed the overall violation-marking mechanics though, because it seemed so vague in places. The stuff with... Gooper Gumshoe, was it?? (I also really liked how that evolved over the 'eras'; a pleasant surprise!) That was obvious enough, but other things seemed like they might be violations but weren't when I tested them, while I likely just skimmed over a bunch of things that were violations and I didn't even realise it. There was also a point where I was given no guidance other than basically "explore the entirety of Hypnospace and find some violations on your own!", and it almost made me want to stop playing because it was like being told to find 'an NPC' in 'Kanto' or something. I pushed through with gritted teeth and was relieved when I finally found a way to progress. Personally I prefer more of a direction than that, though maybe some people would love the free investigation of it.

I suppose I experienced a kind of satisfaction because I'd found stuff out on my own, though. Reading things like how Chowder Man had lost his leg and drummer in a terrible Chowdercopter accident at Coolfest '99 was appealing because I felt like I'd found these characters and concepts on my own, and cared about them for that reason, rather than them being shoved in my face during some cutscene as part of a linear plot or something.

Playing the brand new Switch version might not have been the best idea, since there were some bugs and glitches! Some just made the game quit to the Switch title screen, so they were obviously actual bugs (one of which was when I tried to play a video file, so I avoided them for a while, though later I tried and they worked, so that's annoying), but others made me wonder whether it was part of the game or not, since some glitches were. After the first time-cut, for example, my title screen was lagging, glitching, and making strange noises, and I couldn't click any of the save slots. I was waiting around for several minutes assuming something might happen before I just gave up and restarted the game! So that was weird.

Oh, and I forgot to comment on the story... which I found strange. I was expecting there to be some build-up to how HYPNOSPACE IS EVIL or something like that, or at least all the conspiracy stuff about it causing harm was actually true, but what I think happened is that some teenage hacker I'd barely noticed previously made some fake 'virus' to impress a hacker group and a girl he was trying to woo, but then a version of the game made by Dylan broke the headsets again and this teenager was thrown under the bus, blamed for it all. Something more sinister was definitely going on (what was Outlaw actually doing?), but I'm wondering if there's some kind of Secret 100% Completion Ending I've missed, or if it's just expected that you read between the lines and it never spells it out for you. It was interesting to see that hacker resurface in the postgame, grown up... and genuinely sad seeing people I recognised being listed as casualties during the disaster (though what killed them? I suppose that's something I'm missing).

Hopefully I haven't just not finished yet! If that's the case, then I'd say that's an odd design decision, to give this working-towards-100%-completion tool and a massive time jump without actually being at the end.

Overall, I'm glad I had the experience, but can I be bothered going back in and looking for a ton of hidden pages (the thing says I've only 'archived' 47% of them)? I don't know! I can't say I'm eager to.

Was this game successful in terms of sales, reviews, etc? A recurring theme in these posts will be that I don't know anything about the game beyond the experience I've had, as I enjoy games more when they're a solitary rather than a collective experience. If it was, then it's interesting to me that it'd do well despite frustrations I might be told would be unacceptable if I were to have them in my games. HMM.

Did you play this? What did you think?

(Also, this is my third post in a day. That's probably too much!! I don't intend to make a habit of it, but I'm busy working all week and I'm using this weekend off to get some other stuff out of the way.)



EDIT - Looks like I've got more to do before finishing! I've done a bit more, and it looks like a much more complete and satisfying narrative is emerging, so that's good, though it seems an odd choice to add something that feels like a postgame when it's not. Maybe it's more like the section in old RPGs where you unlock the airship and can fly around the entire game world before facing the final boss... though in this case I need to actually unlock that final boss and I'm not exactly sure how. So I'll have to figure that out. Next time I'll wait until credits role before considering a game finished!



EDIT 2 - I played a bit more, and reached a much more narratively satisfying ending! That definitely changed my overall feelings about the game, though getting to that point required a lot of annoying snooping and some strange decisions based on a single hint on some obscure page, or in one case guessing that something was worthy of marking as a violation even though it didn't seem like that would be the case.

The way the Outlaw thing came together in the end was well done though, I thought.

Also, it was interesting seeing the credits, where a team of three were credited as the primary creators... but it seems like much of the content of the various pages was by different people. I'd wondered how one composer could effectively make such a wide variety of music! Makes me wonder how fun and creatively satisfying it must have been for all those working together and having their creations included in that way. The main person was credited as a composer, so that explains the music focus of the whole thing!

In conclusion, now that I'm properly finished: It's definitely an experience I'll remember, though the fiddly snooping and frustration from lacking leads about how to move forward weren't my cup of tea really. I had to resist the urge to just quit or look up the solution online many times... though the fact that I resisted that does make the hard-won ending more satisfying, I suppose.

I have some ideas for what to play next!