Games Like Hypnospace Outlaw: 9 Games on a Fake Screen
What are the best games like Hypnospace Outlaw?
Updated October 2026.
The best games like Hypnospace Outlaw are Secret Little Haven, Emily is Away, VIDEOVERSE, KinitoPET, Welcome to the Game, SIMULACRA, Her Story, Telling Lies and Do Not Feed the Monkeys. In each one the interface is the whole world: a 1999 operating system, a chat client, a console’s social network, a desktop assistant, the deep web, a found phone, two police and spy video archives, and a PC wired to hidden cameras. The best of them is Her Story. The nearest to Hypnospace’s own web-crawling is Secret Little Haven, and the nearest in mood is Emily is Away, which is free on Steam (as of October 2026).
A fake-screen game is a game played entirely through an imitation computer or phone screen: you read messages, search files and open apps, and the story or the puzzle lives in what you find there.
Hypnospace Outlaw is set in an alternate 1999 where people browse an early internet while they sleep, through a headband (Wikipedia). As an Enforcer you crawl home pages for copyright infringement and bullying, dodge viruses and adware, and decorate your HypnOS desktop with screensavers and helper bots (Steam).
My test for this list: the whole game has to happen on a screen inside the screen, and the verbs are reading, searching and choosing. Hacking games where you break into systems for yourself did not make the cut.
What do you browse in each game, and is it a puzzle or a story?
| Game | What you browse | Puzzle or story | Main story, HowLongToBeat |
|---|---|---|---|
| Secret Little Haven | A 1999 operating system: web browser, chat client and a fan forum | Story: a teenage trans girl finding herself online | 3.5 hours |
| Emily is Away | A Windows XP era chat client, buddy profiles and away messages | Story: you pick your replies to Emily across five chapters | 0.7 hours |
| VIDEOVERSE | The social network of a fictional 2000s game console | Story: friendships, fan art and the network’s own fate | 5.2 hours |
| KinitoPET | An early 2000s virtual assistant that walks, talks and browses on your desktop | Story: psychological horror | 1.7 hours |
| Welcome to the Game | Deep web sites hiding the keys to one URL | Puzzle: horror, with kidnappers who may come for you | 5.9 hours |
| SIMULACRA | A missing woman’s phone: messages, email, gallery, a dating app | Both: a horror story with image and text decryption puzzles | 4.1 hours |
| Her Story | A police database of interview clips from 1994 | Puzzle: you type search terms to find clips and rebuild what happened | 2.4 hours |
| Telling Lies | A stolen NSA database of secretly recorded video calls | Puzzle: the same search mechanic as Her Story, across four people | 4.2 hours |
| Do Not Feed the Monkeys | Surveillance cameras, compromised webcams and a PC inside the game | Both: you investigate strangers and decide whether to interfere | 3.8 hours |
| Sam, We Talked About This (ours · unreleased) | Nothing: you scrape sites and train models on the data | Neither: an idle incremental game | none yet |
| Game | Released | Regular price (as of October 2026) | Steam reviews (as of October 2026) | Positive | Platforms on Steam |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Secret Little Haven | 2018 | $4.99 | 501 | 98% | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| Emily is Away | 2015 | Free | 32,331 | 89% | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| VIDEOVERSE | 2023 | $12.99 | 253 | 95% | Windows, macOS, Linux |
| KinitoPET | 2024 | $5.99 | 14,796 | 93% | Windows |
| Welcome to the Game | 2016 | $4.99 | 2,596 | 84% | Windows, macOS |
| SIMULACRA | 2017 | $4.99 | 4,691 | 90% | Windows, macOS |
| Her Story | 2015 | $9.99 | 10,424 | 89% | Windows, macOS |
| Telling Lies | 2019 | $19.99 | 1,326 | 63% (Mixed) | Windows, macOS |
| Do Not Feed the Monkeys | 2018 | $15.99 | 12,796 | 94% | Windows, macOS, Linux |
Prices are Steam’s regular US prices; several of these were on sale when I checked, so you may pay less. Lengths are HowLongToBeat’s “Main Story” averages for Secret Little Haven, Emily is Away, VIDEOVERSE, KinitoPET, Welcome to the Game, SIMULACRA, Her Story, Telling Lies and Do Not Feed the Monkeys. Four of those averages rest on thin samples: Welcome to the Game on 6 player submissions, Secret Little Haven on 10, VIDEOVERSE on 22 and KinitoPET on 54.
Which game like Hypnospace Outlaw should you play first?
Start with Secret Little Haven if what you miss is crawling a 1999 internet from a fake desktop. Start with Emily is Away if you want the era in one sitting: it is free on Steam (as of October 2026) and its main story averages 0.7 hours on HowLongToBeat. Play Her Story if what you miss is the detective work, the part of Hypnospace where you dig through pages to hunt down wrongdoers and hidden secrets.
Secret Little Haven: the 1999 desktop
Secret Little Haven is the nearest thing here to Hypnospace’s own desktop: it is also set in 1999, and it also hands you a whole fake operating system to poke around in. You play Alex Cole, a teenage trans girl who spends her free time on a fan forum for her favorite magical girl show and chatting with her friends (Steam). The in-game system, SanctuaryOS, has nearly a dozen applications, among them a web browser, a chat client, a doll maker and a text editor, plus an entire web forum to search through. The store page lists parental conflict, gaslighting and flashing visuals as content warnings. It is the best-reviewed game on this list at 98% positive (as of October 2026), though that score comes from only 501 reviews.
Emily is Away: the chat window
Emily is Away is the pick for the era itself: it rebuilds an AIM-style messenger down to the lime-green text color its store page promises. You create a screen name and talk to Emily, a fellow high school student, across five chapters that cover five years (Steam). Every conversation is a choice of replies, and the branching decides where the two of you end up. Two paid follow-ups (as of October 2026) continue the series. Emily is Away Too keeps the messenger and adds YouTube links, Facebook profiles and file transfers. Emily is Away <3 moves to Facenook, a fake 2008 social network of wall posts, tagged photos and poke wars.
VIDEOVERSE: the console’s social network
VIDEOVERSE is the pick if your early internet was a game console’s forums. It is set on Videoverse, the social network of a fictional console called the Kinmoku Shark, and the store page names Miiverse, MSN Messenger and early internet forums as its inspirations (Steam). You play Emmett, a young video game fan and aspiring artist, who shares fan art, browses the communities and makes choices that decide how his friendships and the network itself turn out. It comes from Kinmoku, the developer behind One Night Stand. Its content notes list swearing, online abuse and non-explicit sexual imagery, which the developer says are there to show a real depiction of the internet.
KinitoPET: the desktop assistant
KinitoPET is the pick if you liked Hypnospace’s helper bots and wondered what one would do if it wanted something from you. The store page calls it a psychological horror experience that takes place through Kinito, an early 2000s virtual assistant that can walk, talk, browse and play games. It sells Kinito as your “virtual friend and personal helper”, with the words “hiding a dark secret” struck through in its own description. Steam lists upsetting imagery, flashing lights and distressing computer effects in its content notes, so read those first. It is Windows only, and the developer notes it was designed and tested for Windows 10.
Welcome to the Game: the deep web
Welcome to the Game is the pick if you want the browsing itself to be dangerous. You sit at a computer and search the deep web for 8 hidden keys that together build the URL of a Red Room, a site that, in the store page’s words, lets you see and participate in interactive torture and murder (Steam). Along the way you solve puzzles hidden on the sites and play mini puzzle games to keep from getting hacked, and the store page warns that kidnappers may come for you. Of every premise on this list, this one is the darkest, so know that before you buy. It runs on Windows and macOS.
SIMULACRA: the found phone
SIMULACRA is the pick if you want the digging to turn into horror on a phone. You find the lost phone of a woman named Anna, open a video message asking for help, and go through her texts, emails, gallery, dating app and social media to retrace her last steps (Steam). The phone starts behaving strangely the deeper you go, and recurring image and text decryption puzzles stand between you and the next fragment. Its characters are played by live actors, and the store page counts 5 possible endings. It is a spiritual sequel to the same studio’s Sara is Missing.
Her Story: the search box
Her Story is the best game on this list, and the purest detective game here: everything you learn comes from what you choose to search for. You sit at an old desktop computer logged into a police database of video footage, seven interviews from 1994 with a British woman questioned about her missing husband (Steam). You type a search term, watch the clips in which she says it, and use what she says to choose the next term. Its main story averages 2.4 hours on HowLongToBeat, built from 655 player submissions.
Telling Lies: the bigger database
Telling Lies is Her Story scaled up, from the same designer, Sam Barlow. You sit at an anonymous laptop loaded with a stolen NSA database of secretly recorded video conversations, covering two years in the lives of four people linked by one incident (Steam). The search mechanic is the same: type a word, watch the clips where someone says it. It is the weakest-reviewed game here: Mixed, 63% positive across 1,326 reviews (as of October 2026). I keep it because it is the only other game here built on Her Story’s search box, but play Her Story first and move on only if you want more of the same.
Do Not Feed the Monkeys: the cameras
Do Not Feed the Monkeys is the one that shares Hypnospace’s job: you are also watching other people’s lives through a network and deciding what to do about what you see. You join the Primate Observation Club, which watches strangers through surveillance cameras and compromised webcams, and you work on a PC that sits inside the game (Steam). The club’s one rule is never to interfere, and the store page asks whether you will help, extort, expose or sabotage the people you watch. It also appears in our list of games that satirize big tech, next to Hypnospace Outlaw itself.
What does this list leave out?
It leaves out games where you watch people on the state’s behalf. Hypnospace has a little of that, since you police other users for the company that owns the network, but if that is the part you want, our games like Orwell list is built around it: files, phones and checkpoints, with the state as your employer.
It also leaves out the other side of the screen. In every game above you are a person reading what the machine shows you. If you would rather be the machine, that is a different list: games where you play as the AI. And if the late-90s pages are what pulled you in, we looked at why nostalgia works so well in video games, and why old pixels alone rarely do the job.
Where our game fits
Our own game, Sam, We Talked About This, sits beside this list rather than on it. Hypnospace has you read an internet page by page; in Sam, every sentence, image and video on it is feed for Sam’s bottomless hunger. It is an idle incremental game. An incremental game is a game built around numbers that grow faster than you can spend them: you buy something that makes more of the resource, which buys more of that thing, until the scale changes and new systems appear. In Sam you scrape sites, train text, image and video models on what you collect, put the models to work winning subscribers, and spend the cash on more storage, bigger machines and a bigger crew, until AGI is waiting at the end. It is unreleased, due on Steam in Q1 2027, so there is nothing to point at yet beyond its Steam page.
Frequently asked questions
How long is Hypnospace Outlaw? 5.9 hours for the main story, averaged from 171 player submissions on HowLongToBeat (as of October 2026). Finding the hidden pages and downloads takes longer: the main-plus-extras average there is 9.7 hours.
Is there a Hypnospace Outlaw sequel? No. A planned sequel called Dreamsettler, set between 2003 and 2005, was cancelled on 20 June 2025, according to Wikipedia. The only other game from that world is Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer, a first-person shooter spinoff released in June 2023 (as of October 2026) and presented as a game made by Zane, one of Hypnospace’s characters. It plays nothing like Hypnospace.
Is there a game like Hypnospace Outlaw where you browse fake websites? Yes, three on this list. Secret Little Haven gives you a 1999 browser and a whole fan forum to search, VIDEOVERSE a console’s social network, and Welcome to the Game a deep web of sites hiding the keys to one address.
Which of these games run on a Mac? Eight of the nine list macOS on Steam (as of October 2026), and so does Hypnospace Outlaw. KinitoPET is the exception: it is Windows only.
Key takeaways
- Her Story is the best game here. Secret Little Haven is the nearest match for Hypnospace’s 1999 desktop, and Emily is Away is free (as of October 2026) and takes about 0.7 hours.
- VIDEOVERSE, Secret Little Haven and Welcome to the Game are the three where you browse fake websites, from a fan forum to the deep web.
- KinitoPET, SIMULACRA and Welcome to the Game turn the fake screen into horror; check their content notes first.
- Telling Lies is Mixed at 63% positive (as of October 2026); play Her Story first and treat it as more of the same mechanic.
- Hypnospace Outlaw itself has no sequel coming: Dreamsettler was cancelled in June 2025.
