Board 8 > I bought Hypnospace Outlaw but I'm really bad at (unmarked spoilers only by me)

(+) Yeah! (+)

...the puzzle solving.

This game's presentation is purely 10/10, the Hypnospace world is extremely immersive and relatable. I've just gotten stuck on a few things already that are probably signs of more to come.

-On the harassment case with Zane, I found Corey's anti-Zane page long before I found Zane's Corey page, so I thought that the "plot twist" was that Corey was the main offender and reported Zane out of spite.

-I knew that Professor Helper was adware (this was obvious from the game's Steam trailer and just knowing what it's parodying) but I thought that downloading it and then removing it was required to advance the plot. Also I tried removing it the first time but it didn't work so I thought that the whole uninstaller page was a money scam, so I was stuck with him for a couple hours before I tried it again and paid a second time to remove it.

-In the Tranquility case where you had to locate the pages with the shock images, I completely missed the whole hint that the 4 cards were talking about real people, even though I had seen all of those pages before the case started. Since I had also seen the Tranquility page before the case, I knew that all 4 cards led to the same ending, so I had it in my mind that the flavor text was just for show and I didn't think to reread their text once the investigation started. After I resorted to brute forcing the directory page-by-page (the thing that you were recommended not to do) I went to look up the intended solution (since I knew I did it wrong) and realized what I had missed.

I'm still not sure how else you earn money aside from reporting violations, so I've been light on buying non-mandatory items in case I'm in another Professor Helper situation (either getting ripped off by a scam, or ripping myself off by misinterpreting a solution...).

We'll see what else this game has to throw at me today.

There's a hint page if you need it (search hint.) Using it has to be better than brute forcing it, at least.

I got as far as you are now until i just gave up and started looking up solutions. And when i saw what they were i realized i was never going to figure them out and just stopped playing.

Yeah I liked this game but the puzzles got pretty difficult for me and I had to look up more and more as I went along, it can be pretty brutal!

hockeydude15 posted...

I got as far as you are now until i just gave up and started looking up solutions. And when i saw what they were i realized i was never going to figure them out and just stopped playing.

andylt posted...

Yeah I liked this game but the puzzles got pretty difficult for me and I had to look up more and more as I went along, it can be pretty brutal!

This is actually encouraging to know that it's a common experience and it's not just me.

Finally figured out how to advance the plot from 2 things that I've already seen:

Tiff's page about Zane and Corey creeping on her, I didn't know how to investigate them but I didn't want to report her because she was the victim. But you actually had to report the screenshots on her own page.

After unlocking that I also received the case about the illegal download accelerator, which I already downloaded last night after just exploring around. So I should be able to instantly finish that whole quest,

Some of the puzzles in this game are absolutely brutal and I wouldn't judge you at all if you looked up the solutions

When I reached the point where you had to obtain a password to log in to FLST, I took a hint because it was similar to the virus situation. I saw the wrong way to do it (buy a password from that shady site) and I saw what the game wanted me to do (figure out someone else's password for free), but I couldn't figure out where to find the clues to piece it together. The actual solution (getting the tip guy's personal info from his webpage info in order to guess his password) was a feature that I've seen before but never had to use for anything.

I have some late game discussion points that I want to talk about.

#1. How did I manage to beat the entire game without finishing the SquisherZ quest? Surely I scoured every public page in Teentopia multiple times in the normal course of the game.

Disclaimer, I'm going back to full spoilers now (mod reminder, the warning is in the topic title).

#2. The Eye of Horus quest in the archive project. I actually found that page prior to this point, but naturally I didn't have a password to it, so I didn't touch it until it was basically the last thing left to do. They tell you that Adrian might be linked to it, but I didn't see any eyes on any of his pages. I know that the ministry site had the "SquisherZ is evil" page so I tried looking for hints there. I ended up trying a bunch of random references as passwords, including "satan", which brings up a message saying that the password is similar to multiple existing passwords. Can someone actually tell me, is this just a red herring/easter egg poking fun at multiple Horus members having Satan references in their passwords? Or is it actually possible to get in this way?

So anyway, I ended up looking up the method for how to find the password so I could do it myself, and I'm glad that I did. I never would have figured out to download a desktop pet and feed it an encrypted file to decrypt it and gain access to the hacker eye to progress. I'd be sitting on an uncompletable save file right now. I found Tim's password leak and I noticed that one of the passwords had "horus" in it, so I used that password on the Horus page and it worked. Apparently what they wanted you to do was use Adrian's previously-leaked password to log in, based just on the hunch that he was somehow connected to this page. And if you didn't catch that, they also put his password again in the text leak. We should be lucky that the devs also included the horus password as a secondary login, because if not for that then I wouldn't have even gotten the idea to try ChitChat passwords on the Horus page.