If you’re old enough to clearly remember the old internet, you probably have some amount of nostalgia for it, flaws and all. Sure, it was slow as hell, full of auto-playing music and garish gifs. It was hard to find anything, and a total lack of standards made it just as difficult to navigate and read pages even if you managed to dodge the popups, scammy ads, and malware that were basically everywhere. But social media wasn’t yet designed to infuriate and radicalize us, and the internet hadn’t had its every pixel colonized by planet-destroying corporations, so it’s easy to see why it was preferable.
Hypnospace Outlaw, available free to Amazon Prime subscribers in May, captures the freedom and the aesthetic chaos of that era, or at least some surreal version of it. The 2019 game is seen entirely through a computer interface like something you’d see in the ‘90s, complete with a Winamp-like music player and desktop pets cluttering up the screen.
