YoIt’s been five years since Tendershoot’s brilliantly zany 90s internet sim Hypnospace Outlaw was released, and this spiritual sequel was announced two years ago. In the interim, with tech moguls buying up social media giants, Reddit being monetized (and, indeed, censored) against the wishes of its user base, and the ever-increasing presence of AI, millennials’ longing for the algorithm-free Wild West days of the early internet has only grown more intense. At least that’s how creative director Jay Tholen feels.
“I thought it was bad, but I didn’t know how bad it could get,” Tholen says of the current state of the World Wide Web.
Both Hypnospace Outlaw and Dreamsettler take place in an alternate universe where people surf the Internet while they sleep. The first game made you feel like a forum moderator, rooting out copyright infringement, harassment, and illegal activity to keep netizens safe. Dreamsettler, set between 2003 and 2005, gives you more power: this time you play as a private investigator trying to make a name for yourself.
It all starts with players creating their own page and choosing which neighborhood on the network they want to live in – for example, Camp Rowdy, which Tholen describes as “kind of like Good Time Valley, but with a bit more Southern subculture.” Low-stakes cases help build your reputation. Eventually, Sleepnet, the company behind Dreamsettler, will ask you to dig up something for them, and other powerful corporate entities will start seeking your services as well.
Let’s say you’re asked to investigate a murder that’s possibly connected to some conspiracy theorist’s personal website. Well, you scan the news article to find the date the accident happened, and then you research that person’s website around that date, trying to see if you can find any clues that connect your lead to the case.
There’s still no release date in sight for Dreamsettler, after two years of development. “No game I’ve ever made has been in a situation like this,” says Tholen, only half-jokingly. “Our publisher gave up on giving us a deadline… I hate planning too specifically because it’s so boring to work on. And it doesn’t allow for iterative design.”
Aside from increasing the game’s resolution from 480 x 270 to a princely 960 x 540 pixels (those who remember Windows 95 will know that that was an enormous amount of screen real estate for a web page back in the day), one of the biggest challenges for Tholen has been trying to please everyone. He hopes Dreamsettler will appeal both to people who were once denizens of the early days of the Internet (many of whom played Hypnospace Outlaw) and to those who are too young to know what a dial-up modem sounded like.
“There’s one rule that I always keep in mind,” he explains. “Everything you need to know to enjoy any part of Dreamsettler, you also need to be able to find in the game. There are no ‘if you don’t understand it, you don’t understand it’ references. The game needs to have that information accessible somewhere for any player to be able to enjoy it.”
