Hey there everyone, Pip from No More Robots here to tell you all about our ’90s internet simulator and detective game, Hypnospace Outlaw!
Hypnospace Outlaw sees you donning a headband and drifting off to moderate a bustling community of internet users in 1999. Telling their stories through colourful pages and crunchy gifs, this community becomes your home until the millennium ticks over, and the internet is changed forever. With pages full of repetitive midi tunes and bizarrely written status messages as your only clues, can you work out what the new year brought with it?
Hypnospace Outlaw is a point and click adventure game set in 1999 where you are tasked with taking down bad netiquette and making sure Hypnospace is a safe, happy place for everyone that uses it. Armed with your enforcer’s version, you are sent to remove any copyright infringements, harmful downloads, unauthorised payment systems and much more. The more you remove, the more the community will respond to it, updating their pages and statuses as well as sending you emails.
As you work as an enforcer, the cast of characters really comes to life, each with their own circles of friends and enemies, likes, dislikes, and motives for being on Hypnospace in the first place. Whether it’s a teen boy pretending to have a girlfriend to look cool, or an old lady using Hypnospace as part of her downtime at her care home, each is distinctly different, and in their own way, loveable. Hypnospace is definitely a game about people, and getting to know them through their pages is a real treat, whether you are following the story along or simply diving in to relive the good old days of dial-up.
With hundreds of pages, music tracks, weird viruses, apps and virtual pets to tinker with, there’s so much within Hypnospace Outlaw to get lost in. The entire game works like an old operating system, so there are lots of crazy secrets to discover outside of the main story. While the story is the same, everyone who plays has a different experience based on what they find and what memories unlock for them!
Even if you never experienced the internet in the ’90s, Hypnospace is built so that everything will feel familiar, but there are no real-world references. That way, everyone has a brand-new world to discover, and new favourites from The Chowder Man to Granny Cream’s Hot Butter Ice Cream.
At its core though, Hypnospace Outlaw is a detective game with some real meaty puzzles. You’ll need to get your head around cracking people’s passwords, sifting through archives and using programs to break through errors and into secret, unseen areas of the game. To find out the true culprit and unravel the mystery that Hypnospace’s cheery exterior hides. If you’re a fan of adventure games and a little bit of lateral thinking, make sure you give Hypnospace a look.
We’ve worked hard with our partners at Ratalaika Games to make Hypnospace Outlaw on PS4 the best experience it can be, and we’re so proud of how smooth an experience it is – you’ll almost forget you’re not back in the ’90s with your desktop PC! We’ve also included the Hypnospace Plus expansion for free when you download the game, so you’ll have even more pages to read and tunes to bop along to!
Hypnospace Outlaw will always have an incredibly special place in our hearts. It’s equal parts happy, sad, bizarre and wonderful, and we hope you love it as much as we do! It’s out now at PlayStation Store, make sure to let us know which pages are your favourites!
