Hello Neighbor
Hello Neighbor feels destined for the bargain basement.
Hello Neighbor makes for a great elevator pitch. You play as a suburban kid in a Pixar-like neighborhood where something sinister lurks beneath the bright colors and exaggerated lines. In the opening, you witness your middle-aged neighbor behaving strangely, shouting, and boarding up his basement. Your task is to invade his house and discover his secret, using stealth and trickery to evade an ostensibly reactive opponent.
It’s an idea with a lot of promise: Alien: Isolation by way of The ’Burbs and Home Alone. Unfortunately, Hello Neighbor doesn’t deliver: After months in alpha, the launch version is buggy, inconsistent, and frustrating. The initial charm of the art style and premise quickly gives way to trial-and-error drudgery.
There’s no real distinction to be made between the neighbor’s dynamism and his inconsistency. He has no routine that you can plan around or disrupt. Hello Neighbor doesn’t clearly communicate what he can see, what he will be disturbed by, or what will trigger a search. I’ve had him ignore me because I’ve got one ankle concealed in an inch of shadow, and I’ve had him launch at me like a missile from 20 yards away when I was sure he was looking away.
Each level has a fixed solution, with limited room for meaningful decision-making. Once you’ve figured out the sequence of blocks to stack, doors to unblock, tools to find, power switches to flip, and pipes to tinker with, Hello Neighbor devolves into trial-anderror solution attempts. As such, getting reset to the start of the level is a more effective way of shedding the neighbor’s attention than trying to engage with Hello Neighbor as a stealth game—a sign that this isn’t a stealth game at all.
Instead, Hello Neighbor is best thought of as a puzzle game where you’re frequently sent back to the start of a section with little you can do about it. Puzzling also suffers from floaty movement, inconsistent physics, and bugs—such as key items vanishing—that can derail your progress. Some solutions are inventive, but the stop-start way in which you work towards them robs the game of any charm.
Twitchy curtains
As Hello Neighbor progresses it becomes stranger, and the solutions to its puzzles move further away from the core premise. The house grows into a teetering, unlikely labyrinth full of egregious leaps of logic—think full-on Gabriel Knight 3 cat moustache territory.
There’s potential here, and when you’re creeping through the neighbor’s kitchen listening for the sounds of him moving about in another room you get a sense for the home-invasion adventure this could have been. But then something goes wrong and the illusion breaks. An enthused YouTuber might be able to summon it back for the benefit of their audience, but for the regular player, Hello Neighbor doesn’t earn that kind of investment.
The house grows into a teetering, unlikely labyrinth