Hello Neighbor: Review and Basics you need to know.

Hello Neighbor is a survival horror stealth game developed by Russian studio Dynamic Pixels and published by tinyBuild.

On 6th December, 2022 a standalone sequel, Hello Neighbor 2 was released, which was not accepted with great reviews as Hello Neighbor itself. That brings us to revise and review the first ever Hello Neighbor released in 2017.

In the game, players play to be a new neighbor who is trying to break into their neighbor's home. It has three acts to find a way into the neighbor’s basement. Their objective is to successfully infiltrate into the basement inorder to discover a sinister secret without being discovered by him. Based on the player's prior activities, the artificial intelligence (AI) of the game adjusts the neighbor's behaviour, for example by placing traps along routes the player took in a prior try.

The house's floor design expands and becomes more complex throughout each act, which causes some pacing issues and an odd inverted difficulty curve where maintaining stealth is significantly more difficult at first. For instance, the small cottage in Act 1 was difficult to enter since there was so little room between the player and the neighbour.

The neighbor's dynamism and his inconsistent behaviour cannot really be distinguished. You cannot try to plan around or interrupt his schedule in any way. Hello Neighbor doesn't make it obvious what the neighbour can see, what may upset him, or what will cause him to conduct a search.

There is a predetermined solution for each level, leaving little room for meaningful decision-making. Hello Neighbor devolves into a series of trial-and-error solution attempts once you have determined the correct sequence of blocks to stack, doors to unblock, tools to find, power switches to flip, and pipes to tinker with. Even though the neighbor is there to stop those attempts, getting caught isn't a big deal: You keep any pickups you find, and the level state is exactly the same as when you left it.

In point of fact, it is frequently preferable to be caught than to be drawn into an escape attempt. Trying to engage with Hello Neighbor as a stealth game, which is a clear indication that this isn't really a stealth game at all, is more effective than getting reset back to the beginning of the level.