Hypnospace Outlaw is an early internet simulator, a recreation of the world wide web from the 1990s – a thing not everybody used all the time. But it’s also a detective game with a story rippling through it, and there’s a mystery here to solve. And you solve it by surfing – rifling through the internet as it once was, looking for clues.
It’s remarkable how different things were. Incremental change is hard to spot day-by-day but when seen all at once, in some kind of dieting Before picture, it’s brazen. Oh, those halcyon days! The music blaring from every page! The fields of animations twirling in a never ending dance! The chaos, the garishness, like a teenager’s bedroom over and over again.
It was a bold new frontier and an innocent one, a high street with no chain stores, no ubiquity. There was no discernible Google, no Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Twitch. Back then, dial-up modems were the norm. Netflix was a DVD-by-post company, broadband still a fledgling thing. The internet was slow. Dialling download speeds of more than 3.5kbps was respectable – I nearly had a heart attack when my friend topped 60kbps with broadband.
Source: Eurogamer Hypnospace Outlaw review: resurrecting a forgotten internet, warts and all