Why Hypnospace Outlaw is my game of the year
0Reported today on The Verge
For the full article visit: https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/17/20993857/hypnospace-outlaw-game-tendershoot-alternate-reality-internet-simulator-y2k-90s-game-of-the-year
Reported today in The Verge.
Why Hypnospace Outlaw is my game of the year
If you've frequented certain older web forums, someone may have once told you to "lurk more." The command admonishes newcomers to immerse themselves in a strange new digital environment until they understand its quirks and topography - to become part of a culture specifically by not participating in it.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a game for lurkers.
In Hypnospace Outlaw, you are a new user of the super-futuristic '90s Hypnospace network, a virtual world that is accessed through a headband while dreaming, yet is effectively composed of GeoCities pages. You're not an ordinary user; you're a moderator hunting down pirated music, malicious software, and abusive users. With a little hard work, you can earn enough HypnoCoin to buy a new desktop theme or your very own virtual pet squid. And you'll be really helping the founders of Merchantsoft: Adrian Merchant, a strait-laced entrepreneur looking to take Hypnospace mainstream, and his brother Dylan, an irreverent hacker type who seems a little uncomfortable with his own success.
Hypnospace Outlaw is a sort of detective game. Your first moderation case comes in via email. ("You've got Hypnomail," a strange robot-skull version of Clippy will intone.) A cartoonist's estate is complaining about copyright violations in one of your designated zones, and your job is to browse Hypnospace until you find the offending imagery, then use a virtual gavel to hit the content and report it. The images disappear, and your next case comes in.
The jobs get more complex from there. Sometimes you're just clicking around your zones like a cop on the beat, looking for mean kids or banned payment processors. But often, you're hunting down a specific piece of malware or disturbing im