Buy Hello Neighbor

A highly suspicious neighbor, a deadly secret and a curious kid set us up for a stealthy adventure in Hello Neighbor. This first-person stealth adventure with mild horror elements blends puzzle-solving with a life-and-death game of hide-and-seek. Rated E10+, this title hopes to bring a little horror to players of all ages.

Spanning three acts over several years, Act 1 opens with our child protagonist running down a street in his neighborhood to chase after his ball. The ball rolls to a stop in front of a dilapidated house. We go to pick it up, but screams from the run-down house catch our attention.

We spy through a window that the neighbor is chasing an unknown person or thing. We can see the neighbor running around the house, but whatever he's hunting down is out of view. We hear some final screams before he throws his query into the basement and locks it. He takes the key upstairs to the attic, and thus begins our adventure. Our goal is to grab that key and find out what's being held in the basement. Immediately, we're greeted by bright visuals and a cartoonish art style that creates a very interesting dynamic for the game's horror elements. It's a title that's proved very popular with younger players due to its art and gameplay.

The first-person view brings us into the action and gives the title an immersive quality. We must scope out the house and avoid the neighbor at all costs. The horror elements come into play as we hide in a closet or under a bed as the neighbor approaches. His presence causes the screen to go fuzzy, and a loud heart-pounding audio cue surrounds us. While this may not be terrifying to mature fans of the horror genre, it's enough to give younger audiences a scare. This is especially creepy when given a false sense of security that the area we are exploring is clear, but this antagonist has the ability to appear out of nowhere. He even has no problem breaking through his own windows to catch you if he spots you. If the neighbor does see you, it's not all over. Players are able to run away and hide from him until the heat dies down. It definitely keeps players on edge the entire time while we search through the house.

To retrieve the key to the basement, we must find objects in our surroundings to help us. These puzzle elements create more depth in the title and make it more than just a survival-horror experience. There are multiple avenues that can be taken, and those add nice elements of choice to the title. This also helps when the neighbor catches you and learns from your tactics. The game employs a self-learning AI that reacts to player strategies, which adds depth to the horror elements when a computerized antagonist can learn from the player. It makes our enemy more unpredictable. For example, if he catches you going through an open window, the window will be boarded up. It creates a challenge and forces players to think outside the box. With all of the environmental possibilities, Hello Neighbor does hit some gameplay snags.

While the first-person view is immersive and amplifies the horror elements, the gameplay can be incredibly clunky. Shaky camera work and awkward controls make it difficult to navigate the game. While attempting to stack boxes so that I could enter through a window, it took me a frustrating number of tries to get the boxes on top of one another. There is no precision work that allows us to neatly place objects. We can place them and throw them with a different combination of inputs, but placing things gently is barely a step below a throw. Because of this, I found it difficult to solve the puzzles I needed to advance. Not only does gameplay make it difficult to solve puzzles, but the title also isn't set up to help the player.

Through a large amount of trial and error, we're able to put things together to solve puzzles. I'm a fan of puzzle games and solving trials, but Hello Neighbor is not intuitive at all. Instead, it simply relies on the player trying everything (including the kitchen sink) to move further. This creates some frustrating gameplay, as players have to run around and avoid the neighbor until they can figure things out. The title prides itself on being open-ended with various combinations, but I wondered if it was almost too open-ended. One of the important elements of puzzles titles is the ability to provide some cues to players so they'll have some success in what they're doing. Hello Neighbor relies heavily on player intuition with little reinforcement. While more things fall into place after attempting numerous strategies, it creates a frustrating experience that new players have to trudge through until they can make sense of their surroundings.

Despite its gameplay flaws, Hello Neighbor creates an immersive experience with a surprisingly human story. The title tells the neighbor's story across three acts spanning several years. We begin the story as a child and end as an adult who's haunted by the neighbor. As we progress, we find that there is more to this antagonist than meets the eye. A story of loss makes the neighbor relatable and creates more depth to the characterization. He isn't just a boogeyman; he's a person who's expressing his emotions through some terrible choices. The more we progress, the more we learn about the neighbor's story and his motivation. It was surprising to see such storytelling in a title like this. It creates a multi-faceted title that can be experienced by anyone.  

Hello Neighbor's vibrant visuals adorn a stealth adventure game that's suitable for everyone, even younger audiences. The game may come off as campy, but the puzzle and horror elements make it one of the few horror titles that can be catered to kids. The title doesn't provide a deep horror experience for mature fans of the genre, but it serves an important role in opening up the horror genre to all audiences. The advanced AI system adds more life to the game and enhances those horror moments. Puzzle elements create multi-faceted gameplay, but the title relies completely on player intuition without any support. This can lead to some frustration when trying multiple strategies with no success. Gameplay can be rather choppy when it comes to interacting with the surroundings. It boils down to a good concept with a mediocre execution, but despite its gameplay flaws, Hello Neighbor provides players with a touching story about human emotion and some fun scares along the way. We learn that the antagonist is more than meets the eye, and sometimes, snooping around isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Score: 6.0/10