It’s been five years since Hypnospace Outlaw, Tendershoot’s brilliantly wacky 90s internet simulator, and this spiritual sequel was announced two years ago. In the intervening time, with tech moguls snapping up social media giants, Reddit getting monetised (and in effect, censored) against the wishes of its user base, and the ever-growing presence of AI, the millennial generation’s yearning for the algorithm-free wild west days of the early internet has only become more intense. At least that’s how creative director Jay Tholen feels.
“I thought it was already bad then, but I didn’t know how bad it could get,” Tholen says on the current state of the world wide web.
Hypnospace Outlaw and Dreamsettler are both set in an alternate universe where people browse the internet while sleeping. The first game made you feel like a forum moderator, stamping out copyright infringement, harassment and illegal activity to keep netizens safe. Dreamsettler, set between 2003 and 2005, gives you more power: this time you will be playing as a private investigator trying to make your name.
It begins with players setting up their own page and choosing which neighbourhood of the net to make their home; for instance, Camp Rowdy, which Tholen describes as “kind of like Good Time Valley, but with a little more redneck subculture”. Low-stake cases help to build your reputation. Eventually, Sleepnet, the company behind Dreamsettler, will ask you to dig something up for them – and other powerful corporate entities will start seeking your services, too.
Let’s say you’re asked to investigate a murder that’s possibly connected to some conspiracy theorist’s personal webpage. Well, you scan the news article to find the date when the accident happened, and then investigate that character’s page around that date, trying to see if you can spot any breadcrumbs connecting your lead to the case.
There’s no release date in sight yet for Dreamsettler, after two years of development. “No game I’ve ever made has been in a state like this,” says Tholen, only half-joking. “Our publisher kind of gave up on giving us a deadline … I hate planning with too much specificity because it becomes very boring to work on. And it doesn’t allow for iterative design.”
Besides increasing the game’s resolution from 480 by 270 to a princely 960 by 540 pixels – those who remember Windows 95 will know that this was once a huge amount of screen real-estate for a web page – one of the more challenging things for Tholen has been trying to please everyone. He hopes Dreamsettler will appeal both to people who were once denizens of the early internet (many of whom played Hypnospace Outlaw), and those who are too young to know what a dial-up modem used to sound like.
“There’s this rule I always cue in my head,” he explains. “Anything that you need to know to enjoy any part of Dreamsettler, you also have to be able to find in the game. There are no ‘if you don’t get it, you don’t get it’ references. The game needs to have that information accessible somewhere so that any player can enjoy it.”
