Hello Neighbor Preview

Hello Neighbor is a bit of a gaming oddity: it’s a stealth game about spying on your neighbour, a middle-aged man who has something hidden in his basement. Made by mobile developers Dynamic Pixel and published by tinyBuild, this first foray into PC stealth is already shaping up to be an amazing game.

The goal is simple: get into the basement of the man who lives across the street without him catching you. To do this, you must pick up tools to distract him and break through the most well guarded room in the history of videogames. You can pick up four items from pretty much anything out in the world, from chairs to televisions. Items like the televisions and radios can be used as a distraction to lure your neighbour out of a room, but be careful since he will come looking for you.

This is probably my biggest issue with Hello Neighbor: if anything makes a noise, he’ll start patrolling randomly through the house and I couldn’t find any way to hide from him. There are wardrobes around his house, but any time I hid in one he just grabbed me through the door, so either I did something wrong or that isn’t in the game yet. If he sees you, he will hunt you down until he catches you, which is quite annoying if you use one of the distraction tools accidentally. I used the radio outside my house on the other side of the street to test it out and I was jumped by the neighbour. As it turns out, your house is not a safe space, and the neighbour just stood outside the door creepily staring.

That said, the use of music in Hello Neighbor is incredible: I honestly have never felt more tense in a single player game, and a lot of that is down to the audio that plays while you’re being chased. I’m learning to fear that music because it means I’ll have to start again, and change up how I got caught. All the audio is spectacular, with heavy footsteps and loud doors letting you know roughly where your adversary is.

Getting caught doesn’t just reset you back to the beginning, it makes your neighbour smarter. Whatever he caught you doing last time will have bear traps, and if you’ve broken through a window or torn down some wooden boards, they’ll be back for your next attempt. I must admit that the only thing that makes me think that the neighbour is the bad guy is his never-ending supply of bear traps, because past that we seem to be the ones breaking and entering.

At the moment, there’s only one floor of the house to explore, with the upstairs and several rooms being blocked off by items heavier than you can move. I would hope that this will be expanded before the game's full release because I’ve found that you can either win easily or get unlucky with the spawns of essential items and get caught a lot. I’m hoping for a bigger playground to sneak around, feeling terrified as I rifle through my neighbour’s underwear drawer hoping to find a key as he prowls around his living room.

After all, what are neighbours for?