Hello Neighbor

Hello Neighbor is a confused game that doesn’t do much to entice those that are new to the experience. There’s a lack of structure in both the story and the gameplay. This alone makes much of the pace rely heavily on trial and error, and although there’s a wide variety of different puzzles to work out, the delivery of each of them can be mind boggling if you miss out on a single detail.

Puzzles and stealth are the main attractions of this peculiar videogame by the Prussian Dynamic Pixels. A title full of good intentions but riddled with bad results.

This game is not what I had envisioned, instead giving me wonky tech and an adversary who’s about as frightening as Barney the Dinosaur when all is said and done.

The basic gameplay idea is solid, but due to the bad implementation the game barely escapes being a total write-off.

After a few hours of playtime, it is clear that Dynamic Pixels needed to keep this game in the oven a little longer, as the physics bugs, inventory glitches, and poor control explanations make this experience a horrifying one for the wrong reasons. This is a mess of broken mechanics that has a lot of potential, but unfortunately potential is all that it has going for it.

There was a lot of hype behind Hello Neighbor, and I've even started seeing merch at stores to purchase, but at this point in time it hasn’t lived up to it yet, not even close. The ideas are there, as is the premise and backdrop, but the execution is severely lacking in the worst possible way. Sure, some fixes might make it a better experience, but there’s no way this should be a full release in its current state. With all this in mind, I say Goodbye Neighbor.

In its current form, I simply cannot recommend Hello Neighbor to anyone until all of the problems are fixed. Again, I am shocked and disappointed that publisher tinyBuild would charge $30 for a product that clearly needs a lot more work. It really sucks because this game has a few things that work well, like its unique mechanics, a great art style, and good, measured horror. There’s a glimmer of something neat but right now, it's best to treat this as Hello Neighbor Game Preview Edition.

A mish-mash of concepts and half-cooked ideas that are never fully developed, wrapped up in a cutesy aesthetic that is at odds with its (at times) dark and disturbing themes. This is one to avoid.

A stealth game with frustrating AI, horrible controls, and game-breaking bugs.

Hello Neighbor is a fantastic premise that falls apart in practice in nearly every way. The game was billed to have cunning AI but offers only an overbearing Neighbor with occasional moments of goofiness. It was meant to feature a bizarre and secret-filled house, but ends up wanting to streamline players with little wiggle room. If you're really dying to know what the Neighbor is hiding and can easily forgive the many trouble spots, you might have limited fun here. Alternatively, another hefty patch could undo a lot of these problems. Such a makeover would need to be drastic, however. When simple tasks like reliably picking up and using or placing items are clunky, it's a good sign that the skeletons in the closet aren't worth discovering.

Frequently more frustrating than frightening, Hello Neighbor is a disaster from top to bottom. There’s a nugget of a good idea here, but between the irrational puzzle design and inconsistent AI, the finished product isn't up to snuff.