5 minute read
hello neighBor
Publisher tinyBuiLd / DeveloPer dynAmic PixeLS / format xBox one / release Date out now / cost £24
It turns out home InvasIon Isn’t that much fun after all tom senior
You’re a kid playing in your neighbourhood when you spy your neighbour across the road acting strangely. You hear muffled screams and see him strapping padlocks to a door in his house. Do you tell your parents? Call the police? No, of course not – in this deeply troubled first-person stealth horror game you sneak in and snoop around for the key while the neighbour stalks the corridors of his own home waiting to lunge at intruders.
Lunge is an understatement. If the neighbour spots you at any point as you’re slipping through doors and picking locks, he shoots towards you like a rocket, smashing his own windows in an effort to grab you and end your game. You can run and try to hide in a closet, but he’s so fast and the house is so small you’re almost certain to be caught, over and over again. It’s frightening the first few times, but very quickly becomes annoying because there is so little finesse to the sneaking. The neighbour’s ability to hear or see you seems completely arbitrary and he runs around erratically between rooms. You can use loud noises to manipulate him a little bit, but in most cases getting caught feels like a matter of pure chance.
If you’re caught the game resets and you start again in front of the house. Some of the changes you make to the house carry over to future restarts, and the neighbour starts laying traps to protect entry points you’ve used to get in before. In the beginning he might balance a bucket of water over a door that soaks you and makes a loud noise if you try to get in. As he becomes more paranoid he starts laying bear traps, and in later acts he builds his house into a huge fortress with an even more contrived layout.
It’s a creepy setup, and the cheerful, sunny visuals start to seem more sinister as you move deeper into the house. In practice, though, Hello Neighbor (note the stateside omission of the ‘u’) is more of a trial and error puzzle game than a stealth game. In the opening act you have to get upstairs to grab a basement key, which sounds simple enough, but requires you to climb around the place, smash windows, get other keys, steal lockpicks and wrenches, and eventually grab the prize. But the first time I made it all the way to the prize, I peered through the keyhole and the key I needed vanished, frustratingly. With no way to progress I had to start the game from scratch, only to have another vital item disappear as I was grabbing it through a window. Forget the neighbour, game-breaking bugs are your true adversary here.
short cut
What is it?
A stealth horror game set in a sunny suburban neighbourhood. What’s it like?
Like trying to solve a Rubick’s cube while an angry man runs around trying to hug you. Who’s it for?
Sadists who love restarting games over and over and over again.
Out of control
Technical difficulties and an annoying villain aren’t Hello Neighbor’s only problems. The moment I picked up the controller the game felt wrong. Movement feels like surfing around on a wet bar of soap and you hurtle around at woozy speed,
Hello Neighbor may be pants, but it’s hard to think of a clearer case of stranger danger in games
left those gloves might have done some bad things…
far left the house where evil dwells. Possibly. Probably.
rIght the villain comes at you at an extremely fast speed.
shooting frictionlessly up ladders and performing giant moon jumps to hop across the rooftops. You pick up objects using the right bumper and place them with right trigger, but the placement system is incredibly clunky. Performing a basic task – stacking up boxes to reach an entrance – is infuriating, especially when there’s a chance the neighbour might interrupt and restart you again.
The puzzles become increasingly complex and bizarre, but aren’t especially satisfying to solve. The idea of sneaking around a suburban home full of secrets is great, and visually the neighbour’s place is an interesting and disturbing place to explore, but the house’s layout becomes so alien it’s impossible to work out which switches to pull where without repetitive guesswork. The house is full of systems of wires and pipes that lead into rooms you can’t access right away and the stylised art can make for unreadable puzzles – it took me ages to realise that the jagged shard of metal I’d found was a lockpick, and then it took a while again to discover it only picked one particular padlock in the house.
SuSPiciouS BehAViouR
there are plenty of signs that your neighbour is bit of a wrong’un. first of all, there’s the intermittent screaming coming from his house, then there’s the black rubber gloves he definitely hasn’t murdered anyone with. he goes to sleep in the middle of the day with all his clothes on for two minutes at a time, and he watches tV tuned to a dead channel. the massive prison basement is also a giveaway.
Bad dream
It’s a mess, then, but a genuinely disconcerting mess. By accident or design Hello Neighbor is something of a nightmarish experience. Occasionally when you’re caught by the neighbour you wake up in the dark, in a dream-like memory sequence that tells you a little more about the strange story. The neighbour’s labyrinthine basement is a deeply unpleasant and unsettling mashup of brickwork and chain link fences punctuated by little couch and telly arrangements, set up like pools of suburban calm in a dark, confusing world.
Sadly, Hello Neighbor fails utterly to deliver on this potential. If more games would try to break away from the typical gloomy horror environments as Hello Neighbor does, it’d be a welcome thing. It doesn’t matter here, though, when the game is deeply frustrating, slightly nauseating to interact with, and generally a bit broken.
Avoid it like you would a weird neighbour wandering around with murderer gloves on. n
oXm verDict
A stealth game with frustrating enemy Ai, horrible controls and gamebreaking bugs.
