I took a garbage bag and threw it through a top floor window. In the end I found the solution to unlocking the basement door to be relatively simplistic, and even managed to pull it off with minimal effort. This only makes it all the more easier to exploit him, by drawing him into places away from where you need to be. I was expecting far more challenging gameplay, instead the neighbor just tends to keep an eye on areas that you’re most active at. In fact once I got the hang of outsmarting this advanced AI, it became amusing to have him running around his home several laps at a time whilst he hurled projectiles at me. Surely having a neighbor that’s faster than you would be more terrifying? Surely having your items stripped from you once you’ve been captured would make more sense? Surely your secret-keeping neighbor would refortify his home once you’ve been caught rummaging? Clearly not. That’s right, if you’ve moved objects and pulled levers to raise platforms, this will all remain in place even after hes successfully caught you. Yet again another design flaw is that your neighbor will not rearrange his home once he’s captured you. Another design flaw is that even if you get captured, you get to keep the items you’ve picked up so far. This is a bit daft because the idea is to crap yourself if he sees you, but instead you can merely run circles around him or gain enough distance until he gives up the chase. First and foremost, you can run faster than your neighbor. With that in mind it was time to start experimenting, and in doing so I found quite a few design flaws. It taught me that my neighbor will investigate doors that I never shut behind me, and it taught me that running a bath is a great distraction technique if I want to grab the attention of my neighbor. It taught me that there’s no penalty for being captured, you’re just thrown back to the spawning area outside your home. That short run taught me a number of things. Making my way to the bathroom I curiously turned on the tap on the bath, only to turn around and see my neighbor running for me.

I opened drawers, cupboards, refrigerators, and found absolutely nothing that would point me in the right direction. On my first run the neighbor was conveniently in bed, so I made my way into his home and began looking around. During Act I, the aim of the game is to make it into your neighbors home and locate a red key to unlock the red padlock on the basement door. Hello Neighbor is a game that boasts an advanced AI, which is a fancy way of saying that your creepy neighbor will constantly learn from your behaviour and make your breaking and entering life a whole lot harder. With that in mind, I pressed on all the same. So what the game is trying to relay to me from the get-go is that the neighbor captured the young boy for being nosy, and placed him on the other side of the street after locking up someone up in the basement? The setup certainly doesn’t give off a good first impression, made worse by some texture issues during the first cutscene and some odd design bugs that sees you merging with the floor periodically. Did I miss something? It instantly became confusing. That however is clearly not the case, because immediately following on from this cutscene you’re once again thrown into the role of the young boy and respawn outside your home, right across the street from your neighbor. I say that because from the moment you get grabbed, a small cutscene showcases the neighbor once again locking the basement door, presumably with the boy in there due to the sound of a screaming child. What follows on is as confusing as it is open-ended. Before long the neighbor notices you peeping, jumps through the window and grabs you. Doing what any rude prepubescent child would do, the young boy decides to get up close and peer through the window.

It’s hard to see exactly what’s going on but at first glace it would seem as though your neighbor is tying someone up and tossing them into the basement. Situated up the street, you kick your football down the road until you stumble upon a strange noise coming from your neighbors home. The game opens up relatively quickly to begin with, you seemingly take on the role of a young boy that appears to have recently moved into the neighbourhood.

Did you ever watch what’s considered to be Shia LaBeouf’s only good movie, Disturbia? That’s the immediate impression that I got when playing Hello Neighbor, being that the premise of the game is trying to work out exactly what secret your creepy neighbor is hiding in his basement.

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