Hello Neighbor is a game about breaking into your neighbor’s house because you suspect him of keeping kidnapped children in his basement. Right off the bat, it’s an excellent premise for a horror game with plenty of opportunities for developers to put their distinctive spin on it. Instead, Dynamic Pixels produced one of the worst genre mashups I’ve played in a while. It clumsily blends a first-person horror game with a point-and-click adventure game to create a uniquely terrible experience.

Presentation

Graphically, it’s middle-of-the-road, which is fine for most indie games, but the art style is so ugly that it makes the visuals more off-putting than they should be. To make matters worse, there’s a strange filter effect that gives the world a hazy, blurred look, especially when in motion.

The audio is definitely better than the visuals, but it’s not without fault. The music does a great job setting the tone, although the music stings quickly become repetitive. Soundtrack aside, the lack of voice acting would be acceptable, except it’s been replaced by grunts. There are no text boxes either, so most cutscenes consist of some voice actor attempting to emote while only being allowed to mumble.

Gameplay

Before I launched Hello Neighbor, I expected to like the gameplay based on the trailers I had seen, which was true for the first five minutes. You try sneaking in through the window, get caught, then next time he has booby-trapped it, so you can’t get in that way. Some of your progress carries over each time you lose, so it feels a little more dynamic than just replaying the same level over and over. Sadly, once you realize what the gameplay actually entails, it becomes one of the most horrendous slogs I’ve ever witnessed.

You are tasked with finding the key to a padlock, which seems fine initially, but then you need to get a hammer. Then a screwdriver. Then a crowbar. You get saddled with this endless list of objects to find, and you start to lose track of the horror. By the end of the game, I would go 15 minutes without even hearing the neighbor, let alone running or hiding from him. On the rare occasions I did run into him, it simply wasn’t scary due to how easy it is to escape from him.

To make matters worse, you aren’t just rifling through cabinets trying to find these items; you need to solve increasingly complex puzzles. Some are open-ended with multiple solutions, but they often boil down to a combination of physics puzzles and point-and-click style puzzles. Neither are very good, but the physics puzzles are especially weak because of how janky the game is. Something as simple as stacking cardboard boxes can take ten minutes because of how finicky the physics are. The point-and-click puzzles aren’t as frustrating mechanically, but their solutions are so esoteric that you’ll need a walkthrough if you want to finish the game in a reasonable time frame, especially once the puzzles evolve past “put the red key in the red padlock.”

Hello Neighbor also suffers from severe quality of life issues; there are so many it almost deserves its own section of the review. First, movement is awkward and clunky. In a game that requires a decent amount of platforming, this is unacceptable and really puts a damper on how fun it is to explore the neighbor’s home. Then you have your inventory space, which is needlessly limited to four items, requiring a lot of backtracking to solve certain puzzles. You also have the fact that dropped items stay where you leave them, so you can lose an essential item if you leave it in a spot you can’t remember, preventing you from progressing unless you restart. It’s as if the game doesn’t want you to enjoy your time with it like it thinks it’s Pathologic.

Story

I wasn’t hugely disappointed by the story because it isn’t the game’s focus, but it’s undoubtedly lackluster. It’s told almost entirely through wordless cutscenes, so it’s tough to decipher what exactly is going on outside of broad plot points that are extremely obvious. By the end of the game, you can understand some of the backstory, but it’s sparse enough that it could have been explained in a single cutscene with dialogue.

Verdict

I initially had high hopes for Hello Neighbor, and I was astounded by how mediocre, and even downright bad, it was at times. Leaving aside the usability issues, the gameplay was tedious and frustrating, with few, if any, redeeming qualities. So many of the mechanics clash together that it feels like it’s been cobbled together from the spare parts of better games. Ultimately, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. I truly don’t know who this would appeal to, but given the review score, I guess they must be out there somewhere.

2/10

• Dynamic Pixels, tinyBuild
• Steam, Humble, GOG
• $30