The Mustachioed Menace Hits the Market in Hello Neighbor’s Final Build!
After a year of open development, Stack-Up’s delighted to finally see tinyBuild’s Hello Neighbor out on the market! This colorful cat-and-mouse thriller has been on our radar since November of last year. Since then, we’ve seen it featured in almost every major gaming convention across the country, and even took a second look at the available Alpha at PAX East. Hello Neighbor has created an impressive following in the short year or so since its first build. From the free Neighbor masks at conventions to the collaboration with TheMeatly Games to create a Hello Bendy mod, to little figurines available at your local GameStop, Hello Neighbor has built a reputation that just might make it an unexpected cult classic!
Returning readers will no doubt recognize the game’s premise: you play a boy in a quiet suburb, living across the street from a burly, sweater-vest sporting man. By chance, you happen to eavesdrop on your neighbor leaving his basement door, where some disturbing screams are coming from. Driven by insatiable curiosity, the player must sneak around the neighbor’s house and find a way to the basement. Just don’t let the mustachioed menace catch you!
The finished build fleshes out the surroundings to an extent, but the surreal cartoon aesthetic has reached its full peak. Absurd slants to furniture pointed edges in supposedly smooth objects, and of course the neighbor’s house and its blatant disregard for physics. Even in Act 1, the neighbor’s house has an unmistakable hint of wackiness about it. The car resting on the picket fence, the massive hole in the roof, the bookshelf serving as a ladder up to the shingles, and that’s just the tip of the bizarre iceberg. Inside, you’ll find rollaway stairwells and a labyrinthine underground floor that must run through half the block!
As you progress through the second and third acts, you’ll find unexpected aspects of the Alphas and Betas make their way into Hello Neighbor. The hidden mini-games make an appearance, only this time you’ll need the prizes from them all in order to complete the game. The first Alpha’s dream sequences have also returned, and offer a few hints about the story’s background. For instance, the creators have hinted throughout development that the neighbor once had children of his own; these trippy sequences shed a little more light on just who this strange man might be, and who he is to the protagonist.
Puzzles in Hello Neighbor have never been spelled out for the player, and even loyal fans who’ve played earlier builds will find themselves stuck sooner or later. Act 1 serves as a tutorial, and the game only gets tougher and stranger from there. Prepare for some tight-roping across plumbing pipes, delicate placing of tiny objects, and clicking every object in the room to see if you can interact with it!
While it’s true that getting caught becomes harder as the neighbor’s house grows, the amount of backtracking (and the inevitable mad dashes to safety) you’ll need to do easily compensate for the distance between cat and mouse. Fortunately, tinyBuild’s left the player some wiggle room. Keep one access point closed and use a longer route, and the neighbor will have an even tougher time getting to you; just make sure you always know where the exits are!
While the final build has hammered out most of the previous model’s bugs, Hello Neighbor could still use some patches. The game may crash unexpectedly; vital items might get stuck in the floors, walls, or behind gates; glue and tomatoes thrown by the neighbor’s magical throwing arm might hit the player in random places; the neighbor himself might fly off the ground and ghost his way through the house to catch you. Of course, not all bugs are detrimental—the neighbor could just as easily glitch behind a gate, allowing you to explore the entire house without fear! Hello Neighbor’s bugs still need work, but it’s at least entertaining to watch the burly villain sleep in the yard, or fly away like a superhero!
The presence of Hello Neighbor’s second villain gets confirmed in the finished product, though the “Shadow Man’s” presence seems disappointingly minimal. Apart from lurking in the background of a cutscene in Act 3, a few shots in dream sequences, a lightning-fast hide-and-seek segment, and the final confrontation, this mysterious figure never comes on screen. While the fan theory of the Shadow Man preying on the neighbor seems plausible, the game leans more towards this featureless monster having its eyes set on the protagonist. Whether the neighbors working with the Shadow Man or trying to protect the protagonist from it, is a question only the player can answer.
Hello Neighbor is available now on Steam and Xbox One.
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