Fairy Tale Spotlight: Hello Neighbor (Game Review)

[Major spoilers. Do not read this blog if you want to avoid having much of the game spoiled.]

According to my Steam account, I have played the 2017 game Hello Neighbor for 13 hours. It took me 13 hours to beat it, yet I think I bought it almost a year ago. The reason this happened is because I kept running away from this game. It may go down as one of the strangest and most disturbing experiences I have ever suffered through in a video game.

Hello Neighbor was developed by a group called Dynamic Pixels. I have a feeling that I would probably get along with them, as they seem to think in a sort of out-of-the-box sort of way. I lay claim to such a way of thinking also. The very basic idea of this game is that you are a boy who witnesses the neighbor across the street seemingly kidnapping a screaming boy and stuffing him behind a doorway. And that's it. That's the whole premises from the beginning, and really you don't need anymore than that.

You see... curiosity can be a terrible thing. No matter how hard you try and avoid it, it can continue to peck at you until you do something about it. In truth, the easier solution would be to just not play the game. After all, the idea of breaking into a scary man's house might have been a bit too much to ask of people in real life. But this is a game, I figured. I can safely try and figure out what actually was happening. And for 13 hours of playing this game, I regretted every moment of it... while finding myself simultaneously enthralled by it.

The first thing you find out about this strange man across the street is that he is more than willing to put you in the same place he put that boy. He's not nice, and he is certainly not safe. He's also one of those extremely paranoid types. His entire house is organized like a complicated puzzle... and I mean REALLY complicated. No, I'm serious here. His house looks normal from the outside, but that is extremely misleading. The inside of his house is like a Rubric's Cube with extra sides and corners.

So the very action of getting into this door where this kid was placed requires that you unravel the complex puzzle that is his house, while simultaneously avoiding capture. No, wait. It gets worse. There are red herrings everywhere. There are complex puzzles that only lead to absolutely nothing. There were times I put every bit of effort I had into unlocking a room, only to find that I was going the wrong way. The longer you play this game, the more you run across that problem.

So... there is a sort of comfort this game gives you when things get scary. All you have to do is run back across the street to your own house. The neighbor will not follow you there. There were some points I got just so frustrated with him that I would stop trying to solve the puzzle and would just do mean things to him. I didn't feel bad at it at the time. I already assumed that he was a bad person. And I always could go back to my house and be safe.

But then I got captured. He got me. He put me in a room in his basement with pictures of a sunny day in a set of fake windows. And there I would be forever if I did not escape. Upon getting out of the basement, I looked up to my horror and saw that he had rebuilt the fences of his house to be insanely high. The gate was locked. His house had also been rebuilt to have a ton of insane additions. I now had to solve a new puzzle... but without a home I could go to for safety. It was horrible and depressing. I stopped playing the game for a couple of months.

When I came back, I realized that the puzzles were just too complicated for me. I began to look up guides. A lot of these puzzles are solved through entirely unintuitive means. I think this was by design. They went out of their way to punish players for being smart. Smart people find red herrings.

It took me a long time but I was able to get free of the house, but not after being grabbed by him over and over. The whole thing of it was traumatic to both me and the main character. Apparently he really was kidnapped and kept in a basement for a long time. And that brings us to the final 2 acts of the game.

The final two acts are actually a dream. It's the main character trying to cope with having been kidnapped by his own neighbor. But here's the funny thing about that: This whole game feels like a dream. Whenever you see text, it looks readable at a glance... but it's actually gibberish. The style of everything looks like it came from a Doctor Seuss illustration. Everything is so weird and surreal.

So if those last 2 acts are only a dream, the first two acts are visions of a memory... a sort of waking nightmare. And in that final dream... that's when everything just gets out of control. I now have my house again as a safety zone, but the neighbor's place is just an absolute mess of architecture. It doesn't even make sense. It was hell. Even with a guide, it was hell.

There were no easy solutions to any of the puzzles, and half of my successes led nowhere really. It was a depressing and unrewarding experience that often left me frustrated and even bored. Countless times, I just shut the game off and went on to something else... but I always came back. Why? Because I wanted the truth... and the closer I got to the truth... I began to realize that this man who kidnapped me... might not be as bad as I first thought.

Now don't get me wrong. The game does not explain itself at all. It always falls back on subtlety. You will not learn any clear answers in this game... but I definitely got the idea that this man experienced a terrible tragedy which left him broken and paranoid about existence on this planet Earth. And unfortunately... I dug a hole where I didn't belong. I went where no child should ever tread. I traveled into the heart of madness and got stuck.

The answers I seek are in the prequel. I haven't bought it. I don't know if I ever will. I guess, like I said in the beginning, the best way to play this game... is to just put the controller down and move on to something else. It's not because Hello Neighbor is a particularly bad game, although some might say its design leaves something to be desired. But I never felt like the game was being especially dishonest with me. I was just in a place that I didn't belong, and I probably would have known that... if I hadn't been a stupid and nosey little kid.

Thank you for reading my blog! Did you enjoy it? Either way, you can comment below, or you can email me at tkwadeauthor@gmail.com. You can also visit my website at www.tkwade.com. Check out my books! Thanks!