That's right, I played that Cursed GeoCities game finally. Tendershoot's Hypnospace Outlaw is a game set at the end of the last millennium on an internet browser that operates while the user is asleep via a special headset. The player is a community member that has recently volunteered to be an Enforcer - a moderator that essentially performs hard graft for free, but what else is new - whose task it is to scour the various webzones and dark web pockets to find undesirable materials, ranging from harassment and copyright infringement to malicious software. Upon completing the assignments that Merchantsoft - the developers of the hardware and of Hypnospace itself - sends the player's way, they'll get harder assignments that require a little more digging and investigative work. It's not necessarily a game that requires you to be all up on your HTML, VRML, and ActionScript, though some basic web-design knowhow goes a long way. Beyond these moderation tasks Hypnospace has something of a multi-part story arc behind it also, one that makes itself known after a few assignments and continues to be a growing, ominous presence throughout the remainder.

I'll have to admit to not being a huge part of the homegrown internet culture this game is steeped in while it was still active, though I was certainly a visitor to many such pages (mostly for video game codes and, later, edgy internet humor and scrappy Flash cartoons) so there was some small wave of nostalgia in seeing that '90s-ass web design on every page. The pages in question are often a cross between the poorly formatted Geocities/Angelfire sites that might cover any number of hobbyist topics of the creator's interest and the slightly more contemporary MySpace domains we used to pour all our social details into before Facebook made it apparent how foolish an idea that was - the latter is felt strongest in how every page has an integrated music file that auto-plays the moment you log in (more on the game's great soundtrack later, but it's almost worth looking up completely devoid of context). Mixed in with all the user stuff are the (slightly) slicker looking domains attributed to in-universe companies and the more net-savvy amateurs who will often lend their support to their fellow struggling Hypnospace neighbors, though they're all still beholden to a very '90s aesthetic: that sort of all-too-busy brutalism that made it hard to discern where anything was. The developers must've scoured hundreds of sites on the Wayback Machine (or just had very good memories) to get the details right on a lot of these webpages, from the expected spinning skull .gifs and visitor trackers to the more subtle stuff like how backdrop patterns would vanish 90% the way down a page because the website's creator neglected to consider that they would be eventually add more text than the image template they'd used (probably without permission) could hold.

However, the superficial verisimilitude to "internet 1.0" is a distant second to the personalities that fill the hallowed digital halls of Hypnospace. The service is roughly broken up into zones or webrings connected by a certain theme: there's one for old folks to reminisce about the good old days; there's one for teens where there's no adults allowed (except for resident "cool guy" Counselor Ronnie and his video game connections); there's one for occult nonsense and conspiracy theories (back in those halcyon days when the latter was mostly benign UFO and Bigfoot sightings); one for gatekeepery sci-fi and fantasy buffs; and one dedicated to the runaway appeal of the freshest musical genre "coolpunk," complete with a soda company sponsorship and a Milli Vanilli prettyboy act to draw in the impressionable youths. Each page has the exact right mix of insane, tryhard, pandering, or wholesome depending on the source and with a little digging you can eventually find your way onto these users' FTP pages for even more info and madness. Download links are everywhere, and you can spruce up your own desktop with any number of wallpapers, custom cursors, stickers, virtual pets, and themes while jamming to (maybe stolen) music files on a Winamp equivalent. I'm sure I don't need to remind anyone how many memes were floating around when this game was still in the zeitgeist: just poking around to see what was there was enough of a draw for the first few hours of the playthrough before getting to the thankless work of actually moderating the place. Sadly, the one thing that you don't have access to as a Hypnospace Enforcer is the oft-referenced in-universe chat program ChitChat, though it feels like something the developer intends to leave as DLC.

I've actually had quite a bit of difficulty with the game's puzzles, which probably sounds strange coming from someone who moderates a big internet site for real (the GB engineers are a lot more helpful than Merchantsoft's, to be fair). The first few cases are deliberately simple, though they keep you guessing by allowing you to leave cases open in case you find any extra instances in unexpected places: the very first task is to copyright-strike a fish detective cartoon character from the '60s called Gumshoe Gooper that is all over the oldies network, and you can decide whether or not to also flag the pictures that a teacher had her first-graders draw for an assignment. You could fill the required quota from this woman's site alone, but there's several others Goopers out there if you are meticulous enough to find them (and wanted to earn more pretend currency). Later cases might require finding a secret webpage, or gleaning a user's password from guesswork, or scooping in on an underground BBS messageboard; there's a point where you're left to your own devices to find something to moderate, rather than given any direction, and the story only progresses once you've found a certain amount to clean up. It's another excuse to scour these wonderful pages for misdemeanors, and there is an in-game hint system if I really want to give up, but I'll admit to spending much of Hypnospace Outlaw perplexed as to where to go next.

Even so, I'm enjoying my time with the game more than I expected after initially struggling with the Switch controls (PC version might be the way to go, given the game has keyboard parsers and very small UI icons to click). The aesthetic is perfect in recreating a very specific place and time, as previously discussed, and the soundtrack similarly has the right mix of "made in someone's bedroom on a Casio" and "genuinely catchy" (and you'd better believe those two overlap). It can occasionally be a bit glitchy, and not in the deliberate "oh god what is this a virus" sense that the game utilizes every so often to shake things up. Parts of the browser will sometimes become unreadable until you close and reopen it and one time the game crashed for real when it was pretending to crash. It does add to the immersion, I'll give it that, but these instances don't seem to be on purpose and might reflect some issues converting the game's computer interface to the Switch platform. Cases like these have been fairly rare, at least. A more deliberate dubious decision is this floating head dude who encourages you in garbled text-to-speech and will constantly annoy you if you leave the game idling for more than twenty seconds; I half suspect that getting rid of him is one of the game's many hidden "hacks" you can learn from the more tech-literate webizens of your corner of Hypnospace. I didn't want to talk about the story too much for the sake of spoilers but there are some real big shifts between each "chapter" of the game that serve to move time forward; each timejump heralding all sorts of changes to extant pages and new additions alike. I feel like I'm close to seeing everything, but there's a handful of deeper mysteries that must be solved before the game is done: I'm not quite sure where to start figuring those out but at least I'll enjoy getting lost in Hypnospace in the meantime.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (Though I'm sure it'd be 5 out of 5 if I'd played the PC version.)

Post-Playthrough Edit: Just a couple things really. Without saying how the end-game is structured for spoilers' sake, I really enjoyed the final act of Hypnospace Outlaw in part because it encourages thorough exploration of Hypnospace without necessarily demanding it. There's still much I haven't seen yet, so I might be logging in a few more times to look for those secret pages while jamming to The Chowder Man.

The second thing I wanted to bring up is that at least two developers of the game, including the lead designer Jay Tholen, proposed some more Switch-ideal control methods beyond using the D-pad or analog stick in response to a Community Duder tweet highlighting the review. So my thanks to all those involved, the developers and ZP alike, and my bad for not poking around the control systems more - for the record, I was playing undocked with the touchscreen for a while but found the stick controls slightly more accurate due to that snap-to-place. The game also does have some in-universe, appropriately heavily-compressed "helpful hacks" video guides for improving the UI such as boosting the size of the icons, which was a funny (if a little obtuse) way of relaying that info.