The Haunted Hoard: Hello Neighbor (Xbox One)

There seems to be a common feeling of suspicion around a neighbor you don’t know. The idea that someone is living their entire life nearby that you have no information about can lead to wild imaginings about what dark secrets they might have, and fiction has used this feeling for a few different story setups. In children’s media it is often used as a way of teaching kids that you shouldn’t judge someone without knowing them… but in horror, it’s often completely justified, that strange neighbor proving to be just as twisted and sinister as first imagined. Hello Neighbor, despite its cartoon art style, is definitely going for the horror route, the game wasting no time on establishing that it’s main antagonist is in fact unhinged as you see a scene of him cramming someone down into his basement as they scream in anguish.

Playing as a boy from the neighborhood, you go to investigate the disturbance at your neighbor’s house and try to find a way into the locked basement, but your neighbor will be lurking around his house ready to catch you and throw you out. The formula for the horror here really comes from the constant threat of a more capable enemy always chasing you, there even being a distortion effect that darkens your screen whenever he’s near. However, something quickly becomes apparent about our antagonist, and that he’s really not too much to worry about. If he does catch you, it resets you to a certain spot, but the house has an open and interconnected design that means you can often get back to where you were easily enough. He won’t take any important objects away from you like keys, and sometimes he’s a pretty decent form of teleportation if you want to get out of a deeper area quickly after completing your work there. There can still be moments of tension because of his ability to surprise you, and tools like the bear traps he uses to snag you can impede your progress, but he seems far less threatening as well when the boundaries of his AI become clear.

The neighbor can be pretty easy to outmaneuver at times, ladders especially leading to him needing to complete a long slow animation so you can just pop off while he’s climbing and easily get around him. Other times, he might get stuck doing something unusual. One time I watched him repeatedly kick a chair against a desk for no reason as I stood nearby, another he was stuck in a stretching animation that made a mazelike section of the game extremely easy since he wouldn’t pursue me through it. The AI can swing entirely in the opposite direction though, becoming so hypercompetent at times that he’s basically unavoidable. At the start of Act 2 you spawn from a location near to the house, and since the neighbor’s position after a reset isn’t guaranteed, he can often be in the immediate area and detect you almost instantly, the exterior of the residence not really having any effective means to escape him until you’ve done some work in the area. Rather than being terrifying, he can end up frustrating as his actions are entirely unreliable, switching from a bumbling buffoon to an unstoppable force on a dime, the difficulty settings not seeming to really influence the way he behaves in the slightest.

So much of the experience hinges on the neighbor as your main threat that the failures in his design already tank a lot of the game’s potential, but even outside his behavior, there’s not much to the man’s secret life to uncover. The game doesn’t have any notes to find or spoken dialogue, so you infer his past and current activities based on things you see over the course of the game. What you’re given doesn’t really paint too complex a picture with what’s solid but can be confusing with its more abstract ideas, some things seemingly disconnected entirely from the course of events. Sometimes after being caught you might see flashes of his past such as a moment involving a car crash, but then you might also end up in an area where you need to sneak around a grocery store to buy meaningless foodstuffs unless his history really does hinge on purchasing orange juice. There are some moments with surreal imagery that do work for the horror aspect of the game, but the story only becomes more confused as they appear and strange details suddenly enter the story. Sorting out the mishmash of ideas presented could certainly be possible, but it feels like a lot of extra work for an inevitably unexceptional end result.

While the neighbor might be the face of the experience, his home is just as important to how the game plays, and over the course of the game it will continue to evolve. Beginning as a fairly normal residence, as you make progress to unraveling his secret, he begins to build up his house more and more with new additions. A large fence around it might make sense and some of the rooms he adds seem like they could be elaborate attics or rooms that have been repurposed for strange traps and puzzles, but near the end he starts getting things like a little cart that rides tracks around his towering residence, a room that’s only attached by two ropes its hanging from, and the interior becomes less and less traversable by traditional means. The need to expand the game’s single important location is certainly recognized by the creators of Hello Neighbor, but while the expansions seem interesting on paper, they begin to play more and more into the flaws in Hello Neighbor’s puzzles and physics. Puzzlewise the game expects you to find out many mechanics on your own, the player able to carry up to four objects from the environment at any time to use but their effects sometimes needing to be gleaned from odd experimentation. Even when they have effects, they aren’t always reliable either. Most objects in the game can be moved around and thrown, but the darts that can be used as platforms and other items that must be thrown to use show just how unreliable the throwing is. The darts will embed in walls when they feel like it, so it can be extremely finicky to use them for their intended purpose. At other times, throwing a large object in certain areas will cause it to just disappear, and in an enclosed space I personally saw six large standing screens as big as my character outright vanish when I attempted to throw them, meaning that helpful items can be lost to random physics woes.

Even when you are figuring out a puzzle that doesn’t involve placing objects to climb or trying to learn an item’s function when it only impacts a small area of the big house, the clues are rarely present to figure things out in a reasonable time frame. There are many moments where Hello Neighbor wants you to notice a single piece of the environment that hardly stands out in a house packed with junk and decorations. Weird ideas like taking a LEGO man from the bathroom and putting him in a dollhouse’s bathroom so a large version of him spawns in the real bathroom holding an enlarged version of the tool you need have no real organic hints in a house with so much ground to cover and plenty of essentially pointless items. The pointless items can have their own issues, like chairs getting stuck in the walls and floors to make an endless racket or a gate you need to open just deciding to go down all of a sudden as a physics quirk messes up the room. Perhaps even worse than the strange logic of the puzzles is that some of the solutions almost feel like you weren’t meant to do them. This partly comes down to the awful platforming that is given far too much focus for how weak its design is. Already as a first-person game it would be a little awkward to do precise jumps, but Hello Neighbor expects much more from its platforming design than it can handle. At one point it asks you to climb a tilted bookcase, but as you jump up the shelves you might bump one a little and get shot back by wonky physics interaction, or maybe you’ll fly up into the air a little instead. Then there are times you need to find the way around an area such as a gate blocking progress at the top of the stairs, and the solution turns out to be using the light on the wall as a perch to leap from, something you never did before or will do anywhere else since before it was just set dressing. Landing on such a small target can be hard in itself, but there are other moments where the game wants you to stack items to get over something and your feet might just pass through some of them with little clear reason why, or maybe the objects will push each other off one time and stack nicely another. The physics can even impact your interactions with the neighbor, since he’ll sometimes hurl stuff at you to slow you down, and if he nails you just right with a tomato, you can end up launched up into the sky and sent flying across the neighborhood.

Poorly conveyed objectives and wonky physics ruin the elaborate evolving design of the house, but there are still more woes to be found with a few areas that amount to minigames. To get certain key items or to unlock abilities like a double jump, there are areas in the game that change up the rules of play in an almost dreamlike twist of reality. A few of these Fear areas were previously mentioned, but they all take you to a different place where the neighbor isn’t chasing you anymore. Instead, there are areas like the supermarket with its vague goal and other shoppers gunning to reset your progress, a school area where you need to get past randomly moving mannequins who alternate between the abundant students and the faster teachers with a ring of a bell, and a room where you’re shrunken down and need to reach the top. Each one has its flaws, the school game involving a lot of luck as you need to hide and can’t always see if the path you need to take is safe from mannequins while doing so, and the shrunken section almost could have worked if it didn’t come down to you either riding paper airplanes that can be permanently missed or fiddling with the darts that barely work near the end. These diversions would be awful in any other game, but here they just add a new layer of failure to a game that can’t really seem to follow through well on any of its ideas either through technical failure or failing to account for an approach outside their ideal one.

THE VERDICT: Hello Neighbor is a game that could work in theory, but every important part of it has been designed poorly. The neighbor who pursues you relentlessly has buggy AI that makes him either a non-factor or too capable to deal with, navigation and puzzle-solving require seemingly incidental and often glitchy objects from crowded environments, the physics are constantly sabotaging play, your goals are poorly communicated, and the story barely gives you enough to work with. It’s a collection of ideas and concepts where the work wasn’t put in to flesh them out. Hello Neighbor fails to properly set up the necessary mechanics and goals needed for the player to enjoy what could have been a tense experience with navigational puzzles. With almost nothing seeming to hit its mark though, everything new you find in the game is just some way the game is going to screw up once more.

And so, I give Hello Neighbor for Xbox One…

An ATROCIOUS rating. Besides a few effective moments of surreal horror, so much of Hello Neighbor is just a collection of poor execution. A devoted player could push through it if they wanted to, but the game world requires an unusual amount of unintuitive interaction that is made even harder to engage with when the physics start working against the player. Some puzzles that could seem clever like using the light as a platform don’t work because they’re one of many cases where plenty of the objects around you are essentially pointless and it’s just a matter of working through them to get to the important ones, after which you may still need to learn how it’s actually used or how to get around the physics system messing up. The Fear segments break away from the normal play for more direct horror scenarios, but unsurprisingly, they’re just as half-baked, the concepts that could work not being polished or tuned to the point they can serve as interesting challenges. Hello Neighbor will involve struggling with inconsistencies in design to receive very little reward in regards to the story, but so many parts of it could be rectified with simple but incredibly important changes to vital components.

Cleaning up the physics, tightening up the enemy AI, putting even small hints for some of the puzzles… any one of these could at least salvage some of the experience, but everything that is attempted here is flawed in some fundamental way that makes Hello Neighbor’s true horror the amount of effort you’d need to put in to work around this buggy mess of a game.