1/31/2024 0 Comments Hypnospace outlaws dreamscoured archives and the remains of dusty webpages to strike at an authentic tone. Tholen says that he and his fellow writer Xalavier Nelson, Jr. It was awful, and I eventually grew out of it, but I wanted to depict that through Zane.” I was low on the totem pole at my high school, and when I discovered the Something Awful forums, it was like I had this identity for the first time that was entirely based on taking down other people. I went through that phase myself when I was 14. He thinks they’re his friends That’s based on Something Awful, and how they used to make fun of people they deemed inferior. He’s lashing out and making fun of a guy named Corey, but if you look around, there’s a whole group of people making fun of his page, too, and he doesn’t even realize it. For example, you look at the bully, Zane. “I think there’s a tendency for people to group other people on the internet into stereotypes,” Tholen says. As the game progresses and you begin to see the effects that your policing has on these communities and their denizens, you start to get a deeper appreciation for who these users are, and how this virtual world helps them escape from their very real problems. At first, it’s easy to dismiss the users you’re moderating as cardboard cutouts of the era: the goth girl who loves to write ghost stories, the bully who makes a sockpuppet account to pretend to be his girlfriend, and so on. While it’s a very different sort of puzzler, you can feel that influence throughout “Hypnospace,” as it strikes that same balance of goofy charm and black comedy. Before “Outlaw,” Tholen was arguably best-known for the deeply strange adventure game “Dropsy,” which stars an innocent clown that just wants to hug people, yet is rebuffed by most due to his anguished appearance. But while there’s plenty of homages to the detritus of that era – including several terrifyingly-accurate nu metal songs performed by a first-rate Chester Bennington impersonator – the game wants to be more than just a series of easy punchlines. Given the obvious effort that went into its AOL-core aesthetic, you might expect “Outlaw” to be little more than a nostalgia-trip, playfully poking fun at the corpse of yesterday’s culture. “I just thought it was a funny idea.”) You play as a newcomer to Hypnospace, a volunteer “Enforcer” trusted with removing posts that violate the manufacturer’s terms of service, defined by the less-than-helpful acronym “CHIME.” While scrubbing the various “zones” of adware, hate speech, and copyrighted images forms the core of the game’s story and progression – with some light point-and-click puzzles sprinkled in for good measure – these tasks are mostly just a pretext to plumb the depths of this wonderfully fake Internet. (“I don’t even have any idea how it’s supposed to work,” Tholen says. But unlike a lot of other internet simulator games, “Hypnospace” manages to recreate not only the retro-art trappings of its desired vintage, but also the bizarre stream of diaristic, vapid, and otherwise pointless content that users put up back when nobody had any idea what the internet was actually for.ĭespite its uncanny accuracy, “Outlaw” presents itself as more of a parody than a documentary effort, with users surfing its proprietary Web as they sleep by putting on headbands that plug into their chunky PCs. Released earlier this month, Jay Tholen’s “ Hypnospace Outlaw” recalls the millennial malaise of late 1999, when the flashing banner ads stretched from here to the horizon, and you had to trust your index finger to close all those troublesome pop-ups manually. But for the legions of teenagers who know the Web as a glossy, corporatized space full of targeted ads and elegant landing pages expertly-crafted to part you with your money, there’s a number of ambitious indie games that hearken back to those wilder eras. Most of us don’t have to revisit gloriously-hideous artifacts like the official Space Jam site (vintage ‘96) to know that the internet has come a long way since its formative years as a haven for cranks, weirdos, and idealists – after all, we were there for it.
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