Hypnospace Outlaw sequel Dreamsettler has been cancelled: 'We just way overscoped'

In our Hypnospace Outlaw review, Andy Kelly called it "a cyber-detective adventure set within a fictional computer operating system", with an alternate 1999 setting let you explore a nostalgic pocket internet full of music, animations, and screensavers. "This garish low-res internet, inspired by the digital shanty towns of GeoCities, is fully realised. There are hundreds of pages to click around, split into zones that reflect the personalities of their eccentric creators. In Teentopia you'll find edgy teenagers, nu metal, and drama. In Open Eyed, new age spiritualists and conspiracy theorists. It's a brilliantly observed snapshot of the primordial web."

A sequel called Dreamsettler was announced in 2022, alongside an FPS spinoff with the gloriously mangled name Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer. While Slayers X came out in 2023, Dreamsettler remained in development, with a "Coming Soon" Steam page and No More Robots attached as its publisher.

In the video announcing Dreamsettler's cancellation, lead developer Jay Tholen is at pains to make it clear that No More Robots wasn't behind the decision. "They didn't pull support or anything and they did what they could to keep it going, but it's just time to stop it," he says. Going further into the decision he explains that a central feature of Dreamsettler's alternate 2000s internet would have been "Oomph", a "fake Flash" that would let players make their own looping animations synced to music, reminiscent of Hynospace Outlaw's tune sequencer. When Oomph had to be cut to get Dreamsettler under its budget, it seems like a lot of Tholen's motivation went with it.

"We just way overscoped," he says. "Things were so complicated and fancy." Earlier in the video, Tholen explains his normal creative process—before Hypnospace Outlaw, he created point-and-click adventure Dropsy—as something that sounds intuitive and incompatible with a tightly scoped and deadlined team project.

"It's hard for me to get motivation," Tholen says, "to find motivation to work on anything for a stretch of time. And I've not been able to do it this way where I have a design document and then I follow it. I have to improvise, like in Hypnospace, like I'm pretending to be a character and then making stuff and then following these trails to make new stuff. Things bloom from other things and then it becomes this big holistic thing at the end. And if I had to explain it to anyone or put it in a design document, I couldn't do it. It just comes like a tree growing."

Fortunately, not all of the work that went into Dreamsettlers will be lost. Things that were created for its alternate vision of the 2000s internet are already being revealed, like the "Czechimation" that posits a spread of Czech animation that found popularity in the west like anime did, complete with art, opening credits, and other snippets for imaginary shows like "Golem Master" and "Little Babi" you can see on BlueSky.