It’s been several days since I finished playing Hypnospace Outlaw. I recommend that you don’t read this until you’ve 1) Finished the game’s main storyline and reached the game’s credits. And, 2) Formed your own opinions on the ending.
This write-up isn’t to try and change your opinions on the game. It’s my way of getting my thoughts on it straightened out, and to throw a different perspective on it to pause for thought on. Hypnospace Outlaw is a game I really enjoyed and highly recommend to people who, like myself, have been looking for a detective game that really lets you think for yourself and doesn’t hold your hand at every step. It’s funny, it’s smart, and it makes you invested in the characters’ lives. And there are quite a lot of them!
However, the ending is something that (while not souring my impressions) really changed the way I interpreted the game as a whole.
I’ve finished watching Folding Ideas’ and Lindsay Ellis’ video essays on Annihilation and Beauty & the Beast, receptively. And… you know that essay I wrote years ago about nitpicking in storytelling and the importance of CinemaSins? Discard it. Bin it. It is not needed now.
Katy’s Everything Wrong With Bob’s “Everything Wrong With CinemaSin’s ‘Everything Wrong With Sherlock Holmes’”
Hello, and welcome to the Behind the Scenes article for my game, The
Heart of Tales.
Quick intro here. This will contain spoilers for the game.
I’ve sorted this article into different parts: WRITING, ART, MUSIC, and the
POST MORTEM. Each of those parts has different sections, and so on. You can
skip ahead to the sections you want to read about.
Also, I’ll refer to the player character by her default name, Hiro.
I tried to keep everything short, but it ended up being this long.
Okay, so I’ve been seeing several articles, academic thesis essays, Twitter threads, and thought-pieces on the idea that TV geniuses in stories these days are smart, and use this as an excuse to act like a jerk. Works like BBC Sherlock, House MD, and Rick and Morty were mentioned.
@NaomiNorbez asked: Do you think people want an adult cartoon that’s just about adult subjects? Like, a cartoon that doesn’t glorify sex or violence, or swear a lot. A cartoon that uses its premise to talk about mature questions.
Does/Should an adult cartoon ask adult questions while also swearing and drenching itself in blood? Or can it go without, & still succeed?
I mean, in the adult cartoons I’ve seen, all of them asked tough questions, but sex, violence, and swearing seemed to be a requirement too.
Can an adult cartoon *just* ask hard questions? & use those other elements only when the story needs it? Would the audience accept that?
Since you asked me to, I’ll give my thoughts on this subject. :)
(Stephen Megan’s) Dirk Gently:
I think you’ll find all good detectives drive classic cars.
Richard MacDuff:
I’m not sure an Austin Leyland Princess quite counts as a classic, but, um…
In the original books, Dirk drives a Jaguar that was “built at that very special time
in the company’s history when they were making cars which had
to stop for repairs more often than they needed to stop for
petrol”. Douglas Adams was most likely referencing the 1980s-era Jaguar. Dirk often complains about the car giving him trouble, as well as him having trouble affording to keep it filled with petrol.
In the 2010 series, Dirk drives a brown 1970s Austin Leyland Princess. A car notorious for having a poor build quality, as well as being “the go-to motor to suggest your hero is broke”. A running gag throughout the series is that Dirk has trouble starting the car at the worst possible moments. According to flashbacks, he’s had the car since his university years.
In the upcoming 2016 series, Dirk appears to drive a blue 2010s Chevy Corvette. It’s an expensive sports car with a high-performance. This is most likely due to the cultural differences between the UK and US in regards to heroes’ cars (in the UK, the protagonist tends to drive an unreliable car that they refuse to replace, whereas in the US, the protagonist either has an expensive car or is striving to get an expensive car by the end of the story).
Three things I really like about Dirk Gently:
1 - Dirk Kinda Breaks the Fourth Wall:
While Dirk doesn’t know that he’s a fictional character, he’s genre-savvy enough to realise that “everything’s connected”. That means that, say, there’s a subplot about a woman looking for her lost cat, he knows that that detail is going to be important to the main plotline later on in the story. This writing staple is refered to by writers as “Chekhov’s Gun”.
I can’t explain why, but this meta-element in Dirk’s character is such a Douglas Adams-y thing to include. :)
2 - Dirk has a Revolving Door of Companions/Partners/Sidekicks:
In every adventure, Dirk partners up with a different character (of varying genders, hierarchy, usefulness, and personality) who helps Dirk solve the mystery. So you’d think that since the companions helped Dirk so much, they’re going to stick with him on more adventures, right?
However, once the mystery’s solved, that companion always has a reason as to why they don’t want to keep going on adventures with Dirk (ie, they don’t like danger, they think Dirk’s a jerk, etc.), similar to how Doctor Who has had many different companions on his adventures. Considering that Dirk Gently was written by Douglas Adams, who wrote several Doctor Who episodes, this isn’t too surprising.
3 - The series is made up of detective stories with supernatural elements:
According to Ronald Knox’s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, one of the rules is to never write a mystery where supernatural elements are involved. The Dirk Gently books take that rule and rip it apart: There’s elements of time-travel, Norse Gods coming to life, aliens, and invisible cats!
I hope the new 2016 series keeps these things in mind. The 2011 series kept elements #1 and #3 in the spirit of the original books, but seemed to completely ignore #2 (though maybe they would’ve gone through with eventually replacing MacDuff with a new character, had the series not been cancelled).
6 YouTube Channels and 3 Podcasts I Listen to While Drawing
Here’s another “Recommendations List”-type article!
There are other YouTube channels I like, but I tend to listen to these while drawing because the videos are longer and I can follow along to what’s happening, even without ever looking at the video; I’m just listening to it.
