Hello Neighbor

Hello Neighbor should have become a video game I liked. A survival horror based adventure with cartoon visuals and an innovative premise? Sign me up! Unfortunately despite its powerful and unique concept, Hello Neighbor utterly fails upon its execution with poor level design and profoundly confusing puzzles that leave the player throwing their controller against the wall in agony!

The game operates through stealth mechanics. Your goal is to use the provided three acts to find a way to infiltrate the neighbor's basement and uncover what he is hiding. However, as the floor plan evolves into more elaborate fixtures, pacing issues begin right away. Hello, Neighbor's frustratingly inverse difficulty curve makes stealth sections a game of whack a mole trying to avoid the neighbor. Good survival horror games such as Resident Evil amp up the tension with solid gameplay mechanics and frightening monsters to fight. Here, all pressure is surgically removed due to the cartoon style, which wouldn't matter if the stealth mechanics were any good. Here's a hint, they are not. You are more likely to get caught due to glitches and poor programming mechanics, then lack of individual skill.

The biggest problem with this game is that it does an atrociously poor job of teaching the player which interactions are possible in the worlds you explore. You are consistently lost, and the game gives you no clues how to progress forward, so everything is a clumsy trial and error process! The neighbor is smart enough to design traps based on your movements, but good luck figuring out where they are placed! When the game gives you so few tools to work with! Its a frustrating, tedious grind with illogically designed puzzles that have no ingenuity, with crappy stealth mechanics and a lackluster progression system that cripples any potential Hello Neighbor could have had. As it stands, its a frustrating mess of a game I highly recommend you avoid at all costs!

Final Verdict:
Graphics: 6/10
Gameplay: 3/10
Sound: 4/10
Replay Value: 1/10
Overall: 3/10 (Terrible!)