The visuals and music are basic, but they’re fine. Whether they chose this path due to budget or an artistic design choice, it works without beating you over the head. There is an effort to communicate a deeper meaning that still has me guessing, and they do all of this with zero spoken dialogue. Over several acts and a finale, you do see more of the story. I lost items that did not respawn in the lost and found box, and I could not find in the house, forcing me to restart an entire act. Sometimes, I would survive a fall, and other times I would die immediately from an equivalent distance. Among other places, I was stuck in the wall, forcing me to restart. Instead of catching me, the Neighbor was stuck in place doing the Running Man dance a few times. It might also make a sound like you put silverware in the blender and wobble across a wall or through the floor. I would try to put something down and have it fall through the floor. You cannot ignore the glitches in the game. You can overcome all of these issues or ignore some of them, but it was a cool idea. He may put security sensors that make noise when you come too close in areas you frequent. He may also put a bear trap under the window to slow you down. If you keep breaking a window to enter his home, he boards up the window. I didn’t enjoy restarting, but the security changes were a great design choice. If you keep having to replay the same area, it becomes increasingly difficult. The second problem is that he increases security wherever you keep going. If you were in a difficult place, it could take a couple of minutes. First, you have to go back to where you were, before he caught you. If he is close, time will slow down, giving him the advantage. He will spot you and make a bee line for you.
The Neighbor isn’t waiting around for you to solve puzzles or try a jump from a slightly different angle for the thirtieth time. I often struggled with understanding whether the fault was with what I was trying to do, or if I was continually fighting the game itself. Sometimes, I was catapulted away from something I was trying to climb. Other times, it would fly out of my hand like a catapult forcing me to begin again. If I stacked boxes to reach a higher place, sometimes the box would stack neatly where I wanted. I died a lot while trying to land some jumps. The physics in the game made trial and error a chore. It could be that I am just not very bright, and I have never made a secret of that.
It led to a lot of trial and error, and it felt unnecessarily complicated. A mini game had me guessing what I needed in my shopping cart to leave a creepy grocery store. Other things need a sequence of events to happen to move forward. In frustration, I was just throwing boxes at things in one room until a secret switch activated. Some of these rooms are filled with nothing but guesswork. There are puzzles inside and outside that will open a valve to power something, open doors, or give you a key you need to move to the next act of the game. I kept checking the game for a gamma adjustment, but it doesn’t exist.Īlthough billed as a stealth horror game, Hello Neighbor is really a puzzle platforming game that keeps you ducking and outrunning an unbeatable boss. During the night, I could hardly see anything inside. There are four times of day from morning to night with different amounts of light, and you advance to the next time of day after each capture. Most of the time, the things that you did and items you had are still with you.
When he inevitably captures you, you wake up at the beginning of the level or back in your house. If he sees you, he will chase you, throw things to blur your vision or slow you down, and try to grab you. He is relentlessly patrolling inside and outside the house. The Neighbor is not going to sit back and watch you play home invader. Instead of calling the police on the mustachioed lunatic across the street, he decides to sneak into the home and see what’s in the basement for himself. There is a curious kid playing ball outside when he sees his neighbor drag a screaming person to the basement. The game is set in your typical suburban neighborhood. Just like in real life, sometimes avoiding the neighbors is best. Occasionally, you see these glimmers of greatness as you play, but I was more often frustrated by the design, bugs, and general inconsistency in the experience. Hello Neighbor is a broken game built on a great premise.
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