You might have seen that £10 will go a long way in the Steam summer sale, but let me do you one better. Indie game store Itch.io has begun its own summer sale, and for those willing to delve into its rainbow-coloured heap of throwaway toys and fun experiments, plenty of deals await.
]]>I'm going to toss out two more of my RPS Christmas traditions together because frankly it's the last workday of the year and I'm in a tizzy. I trust you will pace yourself and enjoy these traditions responsibily, like a Cadbury selection box. Or slam right through them, that's fine too. After playing Skeal got your toe tapping to the beat and your heart pounding with power and pleasure, you're ready to trash Christmas with a catchy tune in Dracula Cha Cha. And after Skeal also prepped you for pain, oh, here we go: it's Christmas Pain In Christmas Town.
]]>It's time to discuss the focus of this month's RPS Game Club, Hypnospace Outlaw! We've spent the last month writing a bunch of articles about Tendershoot's weird and wonderful alternate-reality internet simulator, mourning a time when the internet used to be fun, reminiscing about virtual pets and even having a chat with the Hypnospace creator Jay Tholen about the game's origins and legacy. But now it's time to hear what you think about it.
]]>As a child of the early internet, games like Hypnospace Outlaw can't help but resonate quite deeply with me. This was the internet as I remembered it, goddamnit, and the fact it mixed in a compelling corporate conspiracy story in between its pages was just the icing on an already fine cake (in GIF form, naturally, with a MIDI tune of Vivaldi's Four Seasons blaring out from your internet browser for good measure). But in revisiting Hypnospace for this month's RPS Game Club, there was one page in particular that really brought the rose-tinted shutters down on me. It was beautiful, lovely April, Hypnospace's virtual pet hamster, who can live, snooze and poop on your desktop, and maybe turn a slightly sickly shade of green if you don't pay enough attention to her.
As with most things in Hypnospace, I can only assume that April and her fellow gaggle of virtual pet friends are riffs on real-life virtual pet games Catz and Dogz from the late 90s, which, yes, as a ten-year-old girl at the time, I was absolutely obsessed with. Developed by the now defunct PF Magic, Catz and Dogz 3 were arguably two of my most formative PC games growing up, and cor, I miss those dumb beasts so very much.
]]>A friend recently found her old floppy disks from the 1997, uncovering a treasure trove of poetry, MS Paint art, homework, screensavers, and fanfic. Delightful finds which I feel privileged to have seen. I very much do not have my old floppies. They're all long-gone, chucked along with all my old websites and blogs and CDs and everythings in strict sentimentality purges. I don't know if I now regret that. So with vintage Internet simulator Hypnospace Outlaw being our game of the month in the RPS Game Club, I'm wondering: do you have your old sites and stuff? Dare you share it with us?
]]>Hold on, before you read any further please listen to this video for some appropriate set dressing. Done? Alright, cool. Hello! This is your friendly reminder that we will be discussing September's RPS Game Club pick Hypnospace Outlaw this Friday, September 29th at 4pm BST / 8am PT. Thanks to our fancy live blogging technology, we'll be able to talk about the game together in real-time, not unlike a group of strangers in a late 90s chat room.
]]>Hypnospace Outlaw used to be a very different type of game than the one we know today. The authentic replica of the world wide web circa 1999 was originally designed to be little more than ornate level select screens in a stylish endless runner-style game, for example, providing extra context for your adventures pursuing "outlaws on the Hypnospace Highway".
Games change during development, of course, and it’s not unusual for once substantial ideas to be left on the cutting room floor. But seeing as Hypnospace Outlaw is our pick for the RPS Game Club this month, I wanted to reach out to the game’s creator Jay Tholen to ask some questions about these unlikely origins, its influences and its lasting legacy. What happened to the Hypnospace Highway? And what comes next for the world of Hypnospace?
]]>I am in control of the RPS Game Club this month, so therefore I can do whatever I want - and this time I'm delving into the world of Hypnospace Outlaw's music. No other game sounds like Hypnospace. Featuring a veritable mountain of tracks (most of which was composed by the game's creator, Jay Tholen), Hypnospace’s extensive catalogue stretches across genres both real and imaginary. While Seepage’s Nothing Left For Me is a clear pastiche of Linkin Park, Fre3zer’s Icy Girl is a purposefully poor attempt to mimic Coolpunk, a genre built upon remixes of a jingle for a discontinued soda brand. The most exciting thing about Hypnospace is that its soundtrack is so dense and complex that there's opportunity to hyperfocus on one particular area to an intense - even problematic - degree.
Enter The Chowder Man, a stetson wearing Kid Rock analogue who makes frequent appearances throughout Hypnospace. A prominent rock musician in the 80s, Erik Helman (portrayed beautifully by musician, comedian and inventor of the Rick Roll Hot Dad) is attempting a last-ditch revival after his music career flatlined, transforming him from Jagger-esque superstar to sold-out jingle writer. The Chowder Man’s in-game discography is strange and varied, spanning from glorious rock ballads to 22 second earworms about a microwavable butter-based dessert. Totalling ten tracks, I have decided that it is my duty - nay, my fate - to rank and review them in their entirety. So let us commence this spiritual journey together, my friends, into the complex mind of The Chowder Man.
]]>The internet isn’t fun anymore. Actually, that statement isn’t severe enough to reflect how bad the internet is these days, so let me try that again: being online in 2023 is a fucking nightmare. There are only three websites. They are all designed to make you angry because it’s the most profitable emotion. Your aunt was indoctrinated into fascism by a page called “This country used to have real bin men” after she liked a meme about glass milk bottles in 2012. Every boy you went to school with has a podcast about football now. Your Mam once warned you about spending too much time on the computer but now spends eight hours a day playing Hay Day on her phone. AI was meant to let us lie in fields and read books, but instead it’s being used to show you what Breaking Bad would have looked like as an anime.
But it didn’t used to be like this! Obviously I don’t need to remind our regular readers about the glory days of the information superhighway because some of you are old enough to be my Dad (and I’m thirty-one) but just in case a member of Gen Z has stumbled upon this article by accident: the internet used to be fun. Like, really fun, and Hypnospace Outlaw is living proof of it.
]]>Now that we've all emerged from the subterrean labs of Aperture Science and popped our Steam Decks back into their cases, it's time to crawl into bed and dream of the internet superhighway. That's right, this month's RPS Game Club pick is the alternate-reality detective adventure Hypnospace Outlaw!
Released in 2018 and developed by Tendershoot, Hypnospace Outlaw takes place in a warped version of 1999 where accessing the internet is done via a headband you wear while you sleep. You play as an enforcer - a moderator of sorts - tasked with keeping the users of Hypnospace in check by reporting any violations you discover on their personal web pages.
]]>I put olives in my bolognese. Olives, objectively, do not belong in a bolognese. But without fail, I’ll dunk half a jar of those salty little bad boys into my bubbling wok without hesitation. Peppers? Why not. Carrot? Absolutely. Spinach? Don’t mind if I do. My bolognese is about as authentically Italian as Super Mario, but it doesn’t matter. I’m not trying to make Massimo Bottura cry by reminding him of his nonna’s cooking. It’s a dreary Tuesday night and I’m craving my olive-laden concoction. I’m making this bolognese just for me.
Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer reminded me a lot of my bolognese. It’s a game created for particular tastes, a unique proposition that sort of defies conventional thinking. A big, bold swing that - if you have the palate for it - is absolutely brilliant.
]]>Microsoft have announced what’s coming to Game Pass for the first two weeks of June, which includes games about cute childhood summers (Dordogne), a bunch of stacking dolls (Stacking), and a horrifying monster chasing you in the shadows (Amnesia: The Bunker). Something for every type of person, then, from those that suffer from summertime blues to sun-loving extroverts.
]]>Take a deep breath! Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance Of The Slayer is releasing on June 1st with a simultaneous Game Pass drop. It’s an old-school shooter set in the same retro-futuristic universe as Hypnospace Outlaw, but this time the focus is on fan-favourite character Zane Lofton, who actually “made” Slayers X in the fiction of the game.
]]>Whoooo we’re officially in the double-digits gang! We’ve somehow managed to make it to episode 10 of Indiescovery without going completely feral and wrecking the joint. I say that, but this week’s episode is a little, shall we say, unhinged? Rebecca, Liam, and Rachel hadn’t really had a proper chat all week so there’s a lot of Friday energy and catching up, and the energy levels only increase when we start to talk about our main topic of this episode: Eurovision! And indie games, of course.
]]>It’s episode five of Indiescovery and we'd like our listeners to get to know us a little better, so this week we picked our ultimate favourite indie games and then had a big old natter about them. Talking about all our favourite games would take us into 3023, so we’ve kept it to two games per person, which actually wasn’t as hard as we thought it would be.
As always, you can also listen and subscribe via your podcast provider of choice! Find us on RSS feed, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Amazon Music, TuneIn, and Deezer.
]]>Who among us hasn't wished to be a cool hacker from the movies, like Hugh Jackman in Swordfish (a classic)? In real life hacking things is apparently quite dangerous and hard, but in video games we can crack the system and mutter "I'm in" under our breath as often as we want. Naturally, there have been some fabulous hacking games on PC over the years, and we've collected what we think are the cream of the crop of the best hacking games to play on PC right now.
]]>As I lay in bed at 6am today, crying, I knew: it's time. They say Christmas is a season for cheer and goodwill towards all but that's not an observation, it's an imploration. Christmas can be difficult for so many reasons, and that is why we must offer people cheer and goodwill. So truly, genuinely I find great comfort and joy in Christmas Pain In Christmas Town, a novelty Christmas song by a fictional washed-up musician from 90s infobahn detective game Hypnospace Outlaw. May this music video bring you cheer too.
]]>Earlier today we posted about a bundle on Itch.io raising money for reproductive rights. Well, it's not the only one. The Indie Bundle For Abortion Funds is offering over 750 items, most of them games, for a minimum donation of $10. All the money raised will go directly to National Network for Abortion Fund's Collective Power Fund.
]]>If you played Hypnospace Outlaw, there’s a high chance you’ll remember Zane “Zane_Rocks_14” Lofton. He’s one of the more memorable characters you meet in Tendershoot’s alternate reality web simulator, an angsty teenage boy whose home page is slathered in camouflage textures and GIFS of exploding handguns. Since release, Zane has become one of Hypnospace’s de facto mascots, a beloved dweeb that is abrasive but also kind of painfully relatable? It’s hard to laugh at Zane’s baggy trousers and love for Linkin Park-esque rap-metal when you grew up in the mid-2000’s. I mean, we all bought a dog lead from Wilkinson’s and hooked it between the belt loops on our jeans at one point, right? …right?
Ahem. Anyway. Announced earlier this year alongside Dreamsettler (a proper sequel to Hypnospace), Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer is an FPS spin-off that stars the fan-favourite teen. Slayers X is framed as being an in-universe project that Zane worked on as a teen, and has been uncovered by his now 37-year-old self, who is determined to finally see it released. There’s a short demo available as part of Steam’s most recent Next Fest, and I’m delighted to say it’s exactly what I hoped it would be.
]]>Along with announcing a spiritual sequel to Hypnospace Outlaw, named Dreamsettler, the alt-reality webmasters at Tendershoot today revealed a curious spin-off. Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance Of The Slayer is an FPS 'made by' one of Hynospace's netizens, the rude 'tude dude Zane "ZANE_ROCKS_14" Lofton. It's a retro-styled shooter overflowing with that trademark Zane 'tude, and you can see a bit in the trailer below.
]]>After jacking into an alt-reality 90s Internet in Hypnospace Outlaw, creators Tendershoot are now jumping forward a few years with a "spiritual sequel" named Dreamsettler. Announced today, Dreamsettler will once again send us into an unconscious alternet, this time set from 2013-2005. Watch the trailer below for a peek at the wonders awaiting.
]]>Like many people, I've had a difficult year. My dad died, an uncle died soon after, and everything is a lot, you know? Even in the best of years, I find Christmas challenging. That's why I'm filling my ears with the maximalist sounds of a song which knows true suffering, a song from a fictional musician in a video game. Reader dear, it's that time of year: if you've not already started, pour a cocoa and join me for Christmas Pain In Christmas Town.
]]>Ah, the internet. It might be a cesspool of fibre optic-fuelled hate and anxiety these days, but back in ye olde dial-up times of 1999 it felt like a new frontier of hot information. It was a place where people were just trying to share their art, thoughts, music and other assorted paraphernalia with like-minded folk half way across the globe, and where today's trolls were but mere gnomes in a forest of cobbled together home pages and horrifically bad graphic design.
It's this early version of the internet that Hypnospace Outlaw captures down to the pixel, only here you surf the web while you sleep via a special headband. Part museum piece, part detective thriller, it's a wonderful reminder of happier times when all you had to worry about were turds called Zane and making sure your virtual hamster doesn't die of loneliness while you solve online crimes.
]]>The Geocities-esque internet of Hypnospace Outlaw is silly fun until you see the tragedy beneath the surface, so it's fitting that the game produced one of the all-time-great Christmas heartbreak songs. Last year its washed-up rocker, The Chowder Man, gave us the present of Christmas Pain In Christmas Town - a straight banger with a delightful music video. I wept, and vowed to listen every Christmastime. I guess I'm not asking you if it's too early in the Christmas season to cry to this song as much as I'm telling you I already have.
]]>Now that Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed again until December 10th, what are you to do? You've grown a lurid blue mohawk, your leather jacket is almost worn in, and your prescription mirrorshades are ready for collection at Specsavers - but for what? You might as well use this time to explore all games cyberpunky, from edgy and nihilistic griping about how the future sucks to wacky cyberjapes that make you wanna jump up and shout HACK THE PLANET. I have some recommendations.
]]>If you tuned into Nintendo's Indie World stream yesterday, you'll no doubt have seen that the excellent Hypnospace Outlaw is finally beaming its way onto consoles in all its faux late 90s glory on August 27th. Its arrival on other platforms also brings with it a whole host of neat updates for those of us who have already enjoyed it on PC, too, including over 60 new pages to scroll through, two hours of additional original music, new HypnOS apps and games to play, and new custom HypnOS cursor themes.
But the best and probably most unintentional new addition to Tendershoot's Bestest Best internet sim adventure is that it's finally turned my Switch into the ultimate console. With its new mouse and keyboard support, the Switch is finally the portable PC of my dreams.
]]>Despite being delayed, then later moving entirely online due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, Summer Games Done Quick is still preparing for some awfully fast gaming next month. The schedule for this year's event has just gone up, kicking off the annual week of charity speedrunning on Sunday, August 16th. Expect your usual bouts of boundary-breaking and donation shouting, of course, but can you really call it GDQ without the couch banter?
Yeah, probably.
]]>2019 was a great year for PC games - aren't they all? - but you might not yet know what the very best PC games of 2019 were. Let us help you.
]]>The biggest musical surprise of this Christmas is not the back-to-back Christmas Number Ones for songs about sausage rolls but a monster jam coming in hot from Hypnospace Outlaw. The Chowder Man, a faded rockstar you might have encountered when surfing the information sleeperhighway, released a Christmas song over the weekend. It's named Christmas Pain In Christmas Town and here's the thing: it's an absolute banger. A proper great Christmas song. A friend who doesn't know Hynospace likened it to a Carly Rae Jepsen song, which is one of pop's highest compliments. And the Hynospace-y music video, oh my!
]]>Hypnospace Outlaw is a game about surfing a fictional 1999 internet, a web of GeoCities-like pages made by a community of weirdo artists, rock stars, scammers, edgy teens, pastors, hackers and spiritualists. It’s funny, bizarre, poignant, and sometimes dumb, just like the early internet that it spoofs.
But it’s also a game, so its wild thickets of pages, all written by distinct personalities, are also navigable and carefully laced with puzzles to figure out. How did did the three-strong team behind Hypnospace Outlaw make something so playable out of something so chaotic? The answer lay in looking at how the early internet worked.
]]>Summer. The heat age. Scorch season. Spring's hangover. It's the mid-point of the year and you know what that means. No, not "mojito time", Geoff, put those away. It's time we told you what the best games of the year are so far. There are quite a lot of them. Just look how many videogames have escaped from their developers in the past six months and are now running amok through the blistering streets, getting stuck in the melting tarmac, like ants in jam. It's unsanitary. So allow us to round up these unruly games and trap them in a handy list. Here are our favourite sword swingers and space 'splorers so far this year (and a couple of DLCs for good measure).
Okay, Geoff, now bring the mojitos.
]]>Hypnospace Outlaw, if it can be described at all, is a game about policing an alternate-world dream-based internet browsing system in 1999. Oh yes. Accessed by wearing a brain-scanning headband, users can create their own Geocities-like web spaces, interact via a chat app, and share music and images with one another, all via the HypnOS operating system. Think Compuserve, but you're asleep. And, because it's an internet controlled by a corporation, it contains all manner of content violation that cannot be tolerated. You're tasked with clearing it up. In the most draconian fashion. Which means you're going to be looking through a lot of very terrible internet pages, wielding a banhammer.
It is, immediately, hilarious. It's vital I put that up front, because so much of Hypnospace's core themes are about wading through the deliberately terrible. But it's wonderfully terrible. A keenly observed pastiche of the early internet, in those days when it felt achievable to eventually know everyone else who was logged in. Online communities, reactionary protests, dodgy "download accelerator" software, pop-ups, it's got the lot.
]]>Players and nostalgic netizens (wow, I feel older just writing that word) will be able to dive into the deliciously 90s dream-internet of Hypnospace Outlaw next month on March 12th. The latest from Dropsy crew Tendershoot, it's a game about exploring a hallucinatory future-past vision of the internet that exists in people's shared dreams. You play - at least initially - the role of 'enforcer', shutting down copyright infringement, family-unfriendly imagery and whatever else the moderators say you should. Still, I'm expecting there's a few twists waiting in the full game next month.
]]>The finalists for the 2019 Independent Games Festival award ceremony on March 20th have been announced, and they remind me just how joyful a challenge it is to keep up with indie development. Every category is packed with exciting, creative endeavours both complete or still in development - a reminder that 2018 was a great year for games, and 2019 stands to be even better. Now I've just got to keep track of all of them.
Among the headliners for the Seumas McNally Grand Prize are RPS favourites like low-fi groundhog day adventure Minit, the excellent maritime mystery Return Of The Obra Dinn (which Andreas Inderwildi picked apart earlier today) and the bizarre Hypnospace Outlaw, a deep dive into a fictional 90s internet dream-world. Also in the running is virtual voyeur sim Do Not Feed The Monkeys, and the upcoming physics-driven platform roguelike Noita. Every category is full of exciting games, though - check out the full list on the IGF page here, or below.
]]>Whew, Thursday already? How did we get here? For those of you who enjoy our video matinees, or for those who didn’t even know we had a YouTube channel (you can subscribe here, by the way), here’s this week's. Yeah it’s a bit late, but we’ve been pretty busy -- you’ll see why on Friday -- and Matthew’s off trying not to get killed in the Scottish highlands. If we're ever super late with an update or matinee, you can always check out our video corner on the site, which is updated every time we post a new video to YouTube, especially useful if YouTube isn’t your thing, but Rock Paper Shotgun is.
]]>Matt: After four days of hosting panels, interviewing developers, streaming games on camera and poking at as many as we could on the show floor, Team RPS has returned from the hallowed halls of EGX. Now that we’ve nestled back into our treehouse nooks, it’s time to talk about the best things wot we saw.
So, Katharine, Dave and Alice 3.0. Which game won the show?
]]>There's just one week left until a borderline-biblical plague of developers descend upon Birmingham to showcase their up-and-coming games to all. This great gathering shall be known as EGX 2018 and starts on September 20th, running until the 23rd.
There's going to be hundreds of games on show there across all platforms, featuring developers of all shapes and sizes - both physically and business-wise. While I'll be sadly missing out on the fun (someone's got to man the news desk), here's a few choice PC games that'll be at the show, and everyone should be checking out.
]]>It's sometimes hard to believe that the internet of the late 90's wasn't some sort of bizarre techno-dream. Floating GIFs, embedded MIDIs and mouse cursors that transformed from site to site. Hypnospace Outlaw (from Dropsy developer Jay Tholen) is a game about exploring a fictional internet the likes of which we just about remember, keeping the peace when trolls and malware rear their ugly heads, or just getting lost in a sea of pop-ups and spam.
]]>Good news: it seems we will get to surf the GeoCitylicious future-Internet of Hypnospace Outlaw [official site]. Dropsy developer Jay Tholen's Kickstarter for his new game has passed its goal, see.
Hopeful news: the icing on the cybercake would be hitting a stretch goal to recruit the musical talents of Hot Dad. I've got it bad for Hot Dad. For three chuffing weeks, several of Hot Dad's fake TV theme songs, corporate anthems, and political cheers have been stuck in my head. They're the worst and most wonderful earworms and I would be so happy to hear him in Hypnospace.
]]>"Uplinklikes" is the term our Adam suggests for games presented as another computer's desktop. "Uppies." Whatever you call them, Hypnospace Outlaw [official site] has one of the nicest I've seen. It's an AOL-y peek into a pastel-tinged, GeoCities-ish cyberspace with silly animated GIFs and plingy-plongy midi music. Lovely! Jay Tholen, creator of the clownventure Dropsy, wants to take us to the Hyponospace to cruise the dreamtime cyberspace as an Enforcer in search of outlaws. He'll need a little help on Kickstarter to get us there, though. Watch this aceness:
]]>Sadclown adventure game Dropsy may not have lived up to its excellent character design, but it had enough ideas in its strangely shaped head that I was curious what its developer was going to do next. The answer is Hypnospace Outlaw [official site], a "Future-Geocities/Angelfire Detective Cop Car Chase Game?" (the question mark seems important) that now has a devlog.
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