If you don’t have a child aged somewhere between five and
ten years, then you probably haven’t heard of Hello Neighbor. I know that’s the only reason I know anything about
it; this game is literally all over the channels of the various ‘kid-friendly’
YouTubers that my stepson somehow inexorably finds himself attracted to. So,
for those who don’t know, Hello Neighbor is,
or rather was, a relatively low-profile in-development indie game that somehow
found itself getting featured and played on such famous channels as DanTDM and
FGTeeV (don’t Google that last one, your life is worth more than that), at
which point it seems to have rather exploded in popularity, to the point that
when the final release came out in December 2017, there was, indeed, much hype.
Against my better judgement, I even found myself somewhat interested, for two
reasons: a) kids are really good at talking about things in a stream of
conscious style that lodges into your brain in a way not dissimilar to the
familiar feeling of having a song stuck in your head, and b) conceptually, this
game is actually pretty interesting.
Hello Neighbor presents
itself as a stealth survival horror game, with the objective of sneaking into
your neighbour’s house to find out what sort of shady business he’s been up to –
specifically, what he’s got in his basement. Getting into said basement
involves solving a sequence of puzzles in the various rooms of the neighbour’s
insane Escheresque acid trip of a house while avoiding the neighbour himself,
who will be hunting you every step of the way. The neighbour is equipped with a
smart AI that, in theory, learns from and attunes itself to your play style so
as to better ruin your efforts with his implacable man nature. Conceptually,
then, this game is a hybrid of the original Resident
Evil and Nemesis - the one where Jill got chased around
Raccoon City by a terrifying invincible monster - as novelised by R.L. Stine:
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Stay Out of the
Basement was the second book in the original run of Goosebumps books,
and was adapted into a two-part story for the first season of the Goosebumps TV show, which is on Netflix in its entirety and much worse than you remember. |
So, after a few months of constant updates about where you
could find the wrench in Alpha 3 vs. Alpha 4 and other things that I didn’t
care about but couldn’t avoid learning about, I finally caved and bought the
game, hoping to stop my stepson’s complaining about how the free demo we’d
gotten from Steam was a total trainwreck that crashed every five minutes and
wasn’t sufficiently scratching his all-consuming itch to play this damn game. Maybe,
experienced without the ear-raping context of the kind of YouTuber that appeals
to a five year old, the game might be worth our time? If nothing else, we can
play it together and have our own anecdotes, and maybe he’ll tell those instead
of singing about dodos non-stop…
Unfortunately, it turns out that the best this game has to
offer is a perfect parable for why you shouldn’t let yourself get
tricked into thinking that just because something is popular, it’s good,
because Hello Neighbor is a hot mess
clusterfuck and one of the worst damn games that I’ve ever played. There are
plenty of reasons for this – the ubiquity of reasons to declare this game
terrible is, in itself, a reason to do so – but the most notable of them is
that, as it turns out, the game’s whole concept is untenable. Yes, it turns out
that an AI antagonist in constant pursuit is completely anathema to a game that
has slow, complicated, unintuitive puzzles. The puzzles in Hello Neighbor don’t have any flow between them; it’s incredibly
difficult to try and puzzle out how one event will flow into another, to brainstorm
and test if a sequence of actions will lead to your goal. These ‘brainteasers’
have more in common with old point-and-click adventure games like Broken Sword, where standard progression
involved taking an inventory item and bashing it against every
interactive part of the local environment until said random flailing accidentally
results in microscopic progress. Now, in those games, that wasn’t so bad,
because you could take this process at your own pace, and really think it out
as you did. In Hello Neighbor, you
have to try and do this while constantly
evading the neighbour, and it just doesn’t work; imagine that, after being stuck
for 20 minutes, you come up with a new idea about how to use an inventory item
in a certain room, only to spend another 20 minutes trying to get to the room
because somehow the neighbour is in the wrong place every time and you have
extremely limited means of evading and/or sneaking past him. And then when you
get there, it turns out that your idea was a bust, so you get to start the
process over again.
Actually, the bear traps are pretty potent, but only because
they play into the hands of another thing that is terrible about this game; the
controls. It shouldn’t be difficult
to jump over the bear traps, but in practise, it’s almost impossible, because when
you try the PC invariably catches himself on and bounces off a nearby bit of
scenery, which sends him straight back to the floor and into the trap. The
slippery, unresponsive controls turn every single bit of platforming in this
game into a trial and error chore, no matter how difficult what you’re being
asked to do actually is. In one memorable instance, I needed to jump onto the
top of a moving tram as it passed underneath me. A conceptually simple task became
a highly frustrating wrestling match given that once launched into the air the
playable character takes on all the key aspects of a dead bird, and that
everything in this game seems to be made out of rubber, given that anything other
than a perfect landing - within an invisible hitbox that rarely correlates to
what the player can actually see - will result in your being bounced off into oblivion.
Oh well, better luck next time. Enjoy getting past the neighbour, working your
way back up here and waiting for the tram to come back around; I do so love to
have my fake difficulty paired up with my fake longevity.
I’m not even finished. Not only is there no stealth in this
stealth survival horror game, there’s no survival horror either. Getting caught
by the neighbour has no repercussions other than sending you back to your house
across the street and changing the time of day. Your inventory remains intact,
as well as your puzzle progress. Once you’ve progressed far enough to open a
few doors, it becomes trivial to sprint right back to where you were and carry
on with what you were doing. I lost track of the amount of times that I would,
upon getting caught, immediately sprint forward, enter the neighbour’s house
through the front door, run towards the back and climb a particular ladder to
reach a safe space that he rarely went to; the AI’s learned response to this scenario not to, say, start going to that place; instead, he spent his time putting up more security cameras along this path, which served to make absolutely
no difference against the ones that were already there. Behold how he learns
from my actions and forces me to adapt!
No, getting caught by the neighbour isn’t anything other
than vaguely annoying, a feeling that gets swallowed up among all the other
things about this game that are already annoying. There’s no conservation of
resources to worry about, either, given that the game features no health system
and that we’ve established that your inventory is always safe, so I can only
assume that this game’s developers are working off some new definition of ‘survival
horror’ where ‘survival’ means ‘just get caught, it doesn’t matter’, and ‘horror’
means this:
The only thing that is horrifying about this game’s aesthetic is that the suburban pastels and cartoony feel are a major part of what attracts kids to it. When I was young, I learned that not everything that is colourful is for kids when I went on a mission to cross a department store because something shiny had caught my eye, and it turned out to be a pack of rubber gloves. This game would have been a far more brutal way to learn that lesson.
This game isn’t for kids. It isn’t for anybody. It isn’t
even finished, judging by the way items would disappear from my inventory, or
how when I would attempt to run past an item on the floor the physics engine
would kick in and knock me across the room, or how one of my thoughtful
attempts to get past a closing door trigger puzzle ended up locking me out of
said puzzle, which then proceeded to somehow solve itself rather than reset itself when I restarted the instance to try
and undo this. Whenever I thought of a strange solution to a puzzle that worked
out, or whenever I did a crazy jump across the rooftops to get to a place I
hadn’t been yet, I could never be sure if I was doing what the game wanted me
to do or if I was just cheesing past by breaking it. There were at least three
times in the game’s third act where I know solved a puzzle because of physics
and game errors and accidental exploits rather than by just, y’know, solving
it. Now, I know a lot of games are buggy on launch, but I’m playing this three
months after the fact, and remember also that this game went through countless
alphas. So my question is, how the fuck is it still so broken? How did it get
released in this state? Because it’s colourful and popular enough on YouTube
that kids don’t care, and so why should the developers? That would at least
explain why the upcoming Switch port will inexplicably cost more money for the
same amount of bugs and hair-tearing incoherence.
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Pictured: the head developer
of Hello Neighbor, who has successfully
fleeced enough unsuspecting families that he can now move to a new neighbourhood and not have any dirty proletariat brats try to sneak into his basement. |
Stay away from this fucking game. Hello Neighbor is a monument to wasted time and potential, built in a shitty engine, with shitty controls, lacking any sense of narrative, intuitive progress, depth, or literally any of the other things that make good games good. It reaches heights of mediocrity that most bad games can only aspire to, sitting atop a throne of shittiness without any of the comedic or memetic features that make us look fondly on games like Big Rigs or Superman 64. Hello Neighbor stands alone, a monument to failure, and if your kids are bugging you to buy it then you need to sit them down and show them some good games, because no-one deserves to grow up thinking that this pile of excrement is anywhere in the vicinity of what a video game can be.
