The Hangars Liquides sim, home of the French music label Hangars Liquides, also known as HL, isn’t yet complete, but it’s already amazing. Djehan Kidd, creator of the sim, describes it as "Post Cyberpunk deconstructions… a huge and tangled cyberpunk city, home of RL avant garde music label Hangars Liquides."

When you first teleport there, you will be in a pitch black room. Before doing anything, look for the floating text "HL readme + free flight assistant". It will give you a notecard with some information about the sim, and most importantly, it will give you a flight assistant. The sim is around 1600 meters above sea level, far above the elevation at which avatars can fly. Immediately look in your inventory and select "Flight Feather" and attach it to some part of your body. It serves two purposes: keeping you from falling when you step over an edge in the darkness, and it illuminates your avatar, a huge help in the darkness that permeates this sim.

One other thing you should do is set your Draw Distance to 512 meters. You’ll find this in Edit/Preferences/Graphics with a checkmark in Custom. Don’t leave it there after you leave the sim, however. It will probably substantially slow down your computer.

If you wander along the dark hallway, you will eventually find yourself in HL’s mysterious city, a place teeming with electric energy yet no life, a haunting place where you can never quite get your bearings. Make sure you have your audio on. HL describes its music as "flashcore"; Wikipedia describes it as hardcore techno experimental music. Their music is an essential component of the experience.

If you don’t wear your Flight Feather, at some point you will walk off an edge or fall through a hole and fall 1500 meters or more to the bottom of the sea, where you’ll find a conveniently located teleporter for easy transport back to the start. This sim is already impressive. I can’t wait to see what it offers after it’s been completed. If you’re a Second Life member, you can teleport there by clicking here.