Neighbours from Hell (PC)

While I’ve certainly heard tales of nasty neighbors, I don’t really have any personal experience with any, so the revenge fantasy presented by Neighbours from Hell doesn’t really resonate with me. Despite not being on board for the premise, the marvelous thing about video games is that the gameplay can still make any game idea interesting if it is executed well, so because of that, Neighbours from Hell shouldn’t be immediately discounted by less vengeful gamers.

Neighbours from Hell is all about Woody getting revenge on his neighbor Rottweiler, and while Rottweiler is certainly visually designed to evoke a stereotypically scummy neighbor, you don’t really get any context in-game for what sins this man has committed to deserve such strong retaliation. The game’s trailer puts things into perspective a bit, showing some slovenly and selfish behavior, but I’m fairly sure I’d rather have Rottweiler as a neighbor rather than the man Woody turns out to be. Enlisting the help of a T.V. show that specializes in neighbor revenge, Woody sneaks into Rottweiler’s house and begins laying traps to punish Rottweiler, the neighbor getting poisoned, burnt, electrocuted and more thanks to the dangerous pranks Woody can set up. As the player, you are the one in charge of setting up these Home Alone style hazards, having to do so without getting caught. Rottweiler will instantly end the level and beat Woody up if he catches him, further trying to convince us this man is worse than the home invader who is laying potentially lethal traps. Not everything Woody can set up is so dangerous, but there are also times where Woody will do something like desecrate a heartfelt gift Rottweiler made for his mom, further making things seem a bit more mean-spirited than the developers likely intended. Quite appropriately though, the game does use the plural “Neighbours” in its title, so perhaps Rottweiler and Woody are both meant to be these Neighbours from Hell.

If you have no real life analogue to make this a cathartic experience, picking on a neighbor might seem cruel, but the game tries to soften things to be more like a Tom and Jerry cartoon. With an art style resembling a more demented Wallace and Gromit animation, the violence depicted is all the sort characters can easily recover from. No blood or obvious suffering is present, the neighbor simply wearing a shocked expression before he begins to angrily babble in frustration at his situation. While I did highlight how Woody certainly seems the more malevolent of the two characters, the game is trying to be silly with its concept and the lack of self-awareness is not a point against it, just a fun angle to consider as you play. A bit more sadistic though is the premise of the T.V. show Woody signed up for, and this ties into the gameplay goals of Neighbours from Hell. The success of your pranks is important, but to get the best scores and clear some of the harder levels, you must reach a certain rating based on the reactions of the audience at home. Every trap will earn you a certain percentage out of 100, but by chaining traps together as best you can, you can earn a few extra points so long as your neighbor is still fuming by the time he hits the second one.

Here though, we hit the first actual problem with the game. While it is not impossible to set up these chains and earn 100% viewership ratings, the anger meter that represents how furious your neighbor is seems fairly unhelpful. Right after hitting a trap, you first get whatever silly reactionary animation Rottweiler has tied to it. Shortly after, you can usually expect the same exact animation of him roaring in anger and nearly giving out his back to play. The anger meter is already draining by now, and he usually spends a short time undoing the trap and completing whatever task he was trying to do before he was interrupted. Unless all the traps are in a small space, it’s difficult to reliably maintain the meter, and even seemingly empty meters didn’t prevent the combo bonus at times. You can usually lay out a fairly reliable setup that will win the level regardless, but perfectionists might be frustrated by the game’s poor visualization of this mechanic.

For the most part, every stage starts the same. The neighbor will have a set schedule he’ll follow, usually consisting of three or more tasks that will send him walking about his house. Woody must sneak around to find tools to sabotage his activities with and covertly set up his pranks without being caught by the neighbor.  Essentially, Neighbours from Hell is a stealth puzzle game, the two main limiters on your ability to complete a stage being avoiding the neighbor and doing it within a time limit. You can turn off the timer to make things easier, but the game discourages it and honestly, the game doesn’t need anything else slowing down the action. Your neighbor moves at a plodding pace as he goes about his business, which does mean you have enough time to set up traps, but it also makes it agonizing to wait on him to move out of a room you need to get into or to even move into your traps once they’re put down. Levels never really go on that long technically, but through replaying stages to figure out the layout and long periods of down time where you can’t do anything, it does feel needlessly slow at times.

Each level has a set amount of traps to set, and they can take a bit of creativity to figure out. Each item can only be used for its intended purpose, meaning you won’t be able to make many damning mistakes, but there are some that have multiple uses or places they can be put. The items that fit that bill the most are the ground hazards like banana peels and marbles that can be placed on the floor of most rooms, making for a decent way to keep your neighbor’s temper hot before he hits the next trap. Some traps do repeat themselves a bit too much; you’ll be clogging toilets and drawing on pictures with marker across a few levels. The repetition mainly comes down to the fact that the entire game takes place in Rottweiler’s house, meaning that you’ll be covering the same ground for most of the game. While more setting variety would have kept things fresh, the game does shift around what can be found inside rooms and gradually opens up the basement and top level of the house to add some new territory to explore. Most stages have a cute theme to them that will influence how you hurt Rottweiler, like levels themed around exercise or doing the laundry. Neighbours from Hell also eventually brings in pets that serve as alarms if you aren’t stealthy around them, and while they mostly mean you have to tiptoe through the rooms they’re in, you can use them as alarms to bait Rottweiler into a specific room as well, giving you some control over his path for a change.

Even with a few things working against it, Neighbours From Hell’s gameplay is still pretty interesting. Trying to find out how you can sabotage the proceedings with whatever is on hand is a fine style of puzzle, and trying to lay it out best so that Rottweiler will trigger them all in a row makes for quite the rewarding show. The animations of the traps springing into action is always more comical than cruel, and their set up will require some problem solving as a decent chunk require proper timing, multiple steps, or knowing how to upset your neighbor’s schedule in the right ways.

THE VERDICT: Cartoon graphics and over-the-top animations help soften the premise of Neighbours from Hell, allowing the player to better enjoy the strategic planning of laying down pranks to best earn points and comical reactions. Too many familiar and repeating elements in this fairly short game keep it from being as interesting as it could be, but there is enough variation that each new level is a new puzzle and you’ll always have a different schedule to upset or trap you haven’t placed before.

And so, I give Neighbours from Hell for PC…

An OKAY rating. Constrained by the need to contain all the action within a single household, Neighbours from Hell is not able to keep its gameplay consistently fresh. Waiting around in the same rooms loses its luster quickly, even if your activities do a fairly decent job of changing between stages. The strategizing is still solid though, and it’s definitely rewarding to watch all your traps spring in sequence, even if it can be hard to please the game’s scoring system. 100% is a hard goal to reach, but hitting close to it just requires ingenuity and experimentation, making levels possible to complete with a good score but not so easy that the score is meaningless. The recycled content is hard to ignore though, and it’s a little less satisfying to see a trap go off when you know your neighbor is going to do the same animation he’s done twenty times before as his reaction to being duped. Being able to speed up play and adding some more visual and animation variety would allow the action to feel more rewarding, but it’s still got enough going on that completing a level feels like a job well done.

The silly concept of Neighbours from Hell and the gameplay of sneaking around to set up traps is a pairing that could make for a fun puzzle game, but the premise imposes a few too many limitations on it. With a bit more polish and creativity to work around the slowness and repetition, Neighbours from Hell could have come closer to being heavenly.