Wonky stealth horror game Hello Neighbor is getting a prequel, publisher Tinybuild has announced.

Titled “Hello Neighbor: Hide and Seek”, the game tells the story behind your neighborly nemesis and his family. In particular, it will focus on the neighbor’s two children.

“Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek follows the tragic story of the Neighbor’s family in this dramatic prequel to Hello Neighbor,” Tinybuild said in their announcement on their website. “Experience playing a game of hide-and-seek with your brother as you both deal with a loss of a family member. The game explains events that lead up to the original Stealth Horror hit Hello Neighbor.”

The announcement also provided of a surprisingly emotional trailer, which implies a gradually deteriorating relationship between the Neighbor and his children, and between the children themselves. Cheerful!

How the prequel will actually play remains unclear. The trailer shows a much broader range of environments, suggesting that it will involve more than simply sneaking around increasingly elaborate versions of the Neighbor’s house. Given the stronger story focus this time around, it's reasonable to anticipate a slightly different take on the first game's blend of stealth and horror. 

Despite its intriguing premise, PC Gamer’s Chris Thursten found the original to be a buggy mess, but that hasn’t stopped the game selling half a million copies as of February this year. Hello Neighbor also has a surprisingly active modding scene, currently the 24th most popular game on ModDB (which is impressive given it’s less than a year old).

No release date for Hide and Seek was announced, but you can currently download a free Alpha version of the prequel via the Hello Neighbor website.

Hello Neighbor is a game about stalking your neighbors. More specifically, a game about stalking one particularly creepy neighbor, a neighbor who appears to be hiding something in his home. But who's the real creep, here? I hide stuff from my neighbors too, such as belongings I don't want them to steal. But who gives a toss about real world moral dilemmas, because Hello Neighbor is a video game – a promising one – and it'll release this week.

It'll release on December 8, to be precise. Chris played a bit of the pre-alpha last year, and he enjoyed himself despite trying a good 30 times to successfully invade  someone's privacy. Read that while you wait, or else watch the trailer below.

Hello Neighbor, the stealth-creepo game about spying on the weirdo next door (who may or may not be a murderous lunatic), was slated to come out on August 29. That's not going to happen, however, as publisher TinyBuild announced today that it's been pushed back to December 8, a delay that it said is "100 percent our fault." 

The news isn't all bad. Beta 3, with roughly 40 percent of the content that will be in the full game, is now out in Early Access, and includes a boss, a basement, and "reworked Fear rooms." The AI can now climb ladders, so you'll no longer be able to escape by moving up or down floors, and "stability is good," which is always a plus. The second alpha build, with the first-ever Hello Neighbor tutorial, is now free for everyone as well at helloneighborgame.com. 

But "everything went to hell" when the engine was updated to ready the game for release—it "broke the pathfinding, the AI, and the stability," as TinyBuild's Alex Nichiporchik explains in the producer's update video below—and the time required to fix all of that bit too deeply into what had been allocated for the QA process. Thus, in the finest tradition of "a delayed game can eventually be good but a bad game is bad forever," TinyBuild elected to push it back. 

The video also digs into new design issues, including the removal of the "Fear Factory" and major changes to the "Fear Supermarket," which sounds like an interesting place to go shopping. Players now spawn inside their own house, the "haunted door" is now gone, and the giant Neighbor from pre-alpha also makes a return—apparently you'll need an umbrella to deal with him. The full rundown is up at tinybuild.com.

Preorder bonuses are a common part of the videogame business, but they usually come by way of a game's publisher, and not the platform where it's being sold. But GOG would like you to think about buying games from its digital storefront rather than, you know, elsewhere, and so it's offering free games to people who purchase Absolver, Hello Neighbor, The Pillars of the Earth, and/or Sudden Strike 4 through its storefront.   

Preorder Absolver on GOG and you'll also get Furi; pony up for Hello Neighbor and GOG will throw in Jazzpunk; Ken Follet's The Pillars of the Earth comes with The Dark Eye: Chains of Satinav; and the Sudden Strike 4 preorder bonus is Sudden Strike 1, 2, and 3. The freebies were "hand-picked by developers and GOG to really go great together," a rep said, and come on top of existing preorder bonuses, including purchase-price discounts and in-game items such as the Labyrinth Prospect Mask and Uring Priest gear set in Absolver.   

The offers aren't entirely unique to GOG—Sudden Strike 4 preorders on Steam include the previous trilogy, too—but it is an interesting way for the platform to attract the attention of of gamers who make a habit of shopping elsewhere. And these aren't just throwaway oldies, either. We rated both Furi and Jazzpunk very highly in our reviews, and while Chains of Satinav is getting up there in years (it came out in 2012), it's one of Daedalics better works, and as a point-and-click adventure it doesn't suffer the ravages of age as obviously as other genres tend to. 

All four games are available for preorder now, and the bonus freebies will be granted as soon as the preorder is completed. The offer will be valid for each game's preorder period, and in the case of Absolver and Hello Neighbor, will remain available for two weeks after they come out.

Hello Neighbor is a stealth-horror game about the perils of living next door to a really creepy guy—although the fact that you are the one who keeps breaking into his house to poke through all his stuff makes me wonder who the creepo here really is. The issue of legal and moral culpability notwithstanding, it does sound like fun, and going head-to-head with an AI in a break-and-enter battle of wits is certainly an interesting idea. It's currently scheduled to come out on August 29, but you can get a taste of what it's all about right now, and for free, with the demo that was released on Steam and GOG last week. 

The demo is "pre-alpha," which I assume drops it somewhere between the alpha version that's available now to anyone who pre-purchases, and the pre-alpha build that we looked at last year. It may actually be the same build we played with, although with nine months passed between then and now, I would assume (or at least hope) that it's newer and updated to some extent. Which is good, because while Chris described that October version as "good fun" and said he was looking forward to playing a more polished build, it was obviously incomplete and suffered from some technical wonkiness.

I haven't tried the Hello Neighbor demo myself so I can't opine as to whether or not it's any good. I can say with absolute certainty that it is free, however, and that's a pretty good starting point.  A closer examination of how the game works is available in the video below.

The new Humble Tinybuild Bundle offers up to a dozen different games from—you guessed it—publisher Tinybuild, ranging from an educationally-inclined "math puzzler" to a train ride across post-apocalypse Russia and a game about murdering your neighbors because they just won't keep it down. Speaking of bad neighbors, the top tier will score you a preorder of the creepy Hello Neighbor, including access to the alpha, and everyone can claim a free copy of the Party Hard 2 alpha just for signing up. 

At the "pay what you want" level, you'll take home Divide By Sheep, Road to Ballhalla, No Time to Explain Remastered, and SpeedRunners. Things get a whole lot more interesting at the "beat the average" tier, a little over $6 right now, which will add the aforementioned neighbor-murder-sim Party Hard, the excellent Russian railroad adventure The Final Station, the big-rig surfing game Clustertruck, early access to Guts and Glory, and Punch Club Deluxe, the game that helped catalyze the beef between Tinybuild and G2A. 

Continuing on, $15 will add the recently-released Final Station DLC The Only Traitor to the mix, and the Early Access release of Streets of Rogue. And for $40 or more, you'll get Hello Neighbor, "a stealth-horror game about sneaking into your creepy neighbor's house," which looks like it could be really cool. Tinybuild recently rolled out the alpha 4 build of the game, along with a new trailer you can check out below. 

The Humble Tinybuild Bundle is live now and will remain that way until May 23.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

Hello, neighbor! It's not just a friendly greeting, it's also the title of a creepy, spying-on-your-neighbor stealth game that was revealed to the world in September. Today, publisher tinyBuild announced that the second alpha build is now live, and also put out a pair of new videos: One a story trailer that provides a look at the game's introduction, and the other a brief snippet of gameplay demonstrating how to keep the unfriendly neighbor off your tail, at least for a little while.

Everything shown so far has been "throw-away, used for testing and evaluating the direction for the full game," tinyBuild said. And while the house in the new alpha release isn't final, it "is a glimpse into what the final game looks, feels, sounds, and plays like."

The new build includes a "small tutorial house," a finalized art style, improved Neighbor AI and speed, and new and/or improved mechanics, like peeking through keyholes and throwing things. Because of all the new content and changes to AI and physics, "we expect the Alpha 2 to break in horrible and funny ways," tinyBuild warned in a blog post. "So as always, play at your own risk."

A good stealth game isn't easy to pull off, even with a big budget, but I'm hopeful for Hello Neighbor: A "dodge the psycho" sim in the relatively tiny environment of a single house, without all the usual horror game trappings as far as I can tell, you're literally up against the guy who lives next door sounds like it could be a lot of fun. The pre-alpha demo that we played in October is available at helloneighborgame.com, and and the early access release is available through the Humble Store.

Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info.

There's something intriguing about a locked door. What's behind it? What secrets is it hiding? How far would you go to find out? In Hello Neighbor, a stealth horror game being developed by tinyBuild, you'll get to find out. The odd little man who lives across the street from you is clearly hiding something behind a triple-locked door in his house, and it's up to you to completely disregard his right to privacy.

I played a bit of Hello Neighbor's pre-alpha, and attempted to break into my neighbor's house a good twenty or thirty times. My neighbor wasn't super happy about it, and the horror portion of the game comes from his attempts to chase and catch you (when he does, you wake up back at home and can try again). It's a strange little setup, because you're certainly the bad guy, and he has every right to kick you out of his house for snooping without being treated like a monster. But he still feels like a monster and you, though trespassing, are somehow the victim.

While your neighbor doesn't have the logical reaction to your repeated incursions, like calling the police, having you arrested, and filing a restraining order, he definitely does react. Come in through his front door a few too many times, and you might find a bear trap placed in front of it. Break in through a certain window once or twice, and you might find it boarded up the next time. Repeatedly take the same path over his fence or across his driveway and he'll set up a motion sensor that trips an alarm, and keep using the same interior doors and you'll find them blocked by chairs. You won't be running the same routes over and over again, you'll have to find new ones, or at least be far more cautious about using the old ones.

He also moves things around. At one point after I'd slunk into his house I'd thrown a radio through a window on the far side of the house to draw him over, then slipped in through the front door I spotted a key in one of the rooms. He grabbed me before I managed to snag it, and the next time I went into his house, the key wasn't there. My next ten or so tries revolved around finding the key again, which I eventually located hanging on the wall in another part of the house. I lost the key again he was chasing me, I panicked, and threw the key at a window hoping to break it and escape and found he'd placed it another spot the next time I broke in.

This makes it pretty difficult to plan ahead. Sure, you can distract him and enter the house, but what you're looking for might not be in the place you last saw it, meaning you never really know how each break-in will go.

And, of course, he's not always in the same spot either. While you'll often find him sitting in front of his TV, sometimes he'll be in other rooms when you arrive. One evening he was outside working on his car, sometimes he's around the side of the house, and another time, quite adorably, I found him in his kitchen doing calisthenics.

Sometimes his preparations get in his own way. At one point, he started locking his front doors, meaning I had to stick to other ways of getting in. However, this meant on the days he walked around in his yard, he couldn't get in through his front doors either, preferring instead to pick up a box from his lawn, use it to shatter his living room window, and climb into the house that way. I guess that's a solution he is getting where he needs to go but he's saving me the trouble of breaking the window myself.

It's also hard to say how scary the neighbor will remain throughout the game. At first, he's terrifying, lunging at you to the accompaniment of a jangling horror sting. And, there's an extremely alarming sequence that takes place, for a change, in your own house. After a dozen or so times being caught, however, it's not really scary anymore, though it can still definitely be tense, especially the times when I'd found some item to help me with his triple-locked door of mystery and his pursuit was making it difficult to use it.

The pre-alpha is good fun, though. I want to play more once Hello Neighbor is further along in development. I disabled two of the three door locks, but still haven't found a way to handle the third. And damn it, I want to know what's in there! Maybe I am the true monster in all this, just a lousy snoop who can't leave well enough alone.

But he's no angel either. Dude owns a dozen bear traps and he's always wearing shiny black gloves. He's definitely up to something.

If you need to borrow a cup of sugar, just deal with it because your neighbor laid a bear trap on the welcome mat and already dug a grave. The pie can wait.

Hello Neighbor, a new horror stealth game from Dynamic Pixels, can make such a domestic pie-free nightmare a reality when it releases sometime next year. Just announced by publisher tinyBuild, Hello Neighbor is a pretty unique take on stealth horror, pitting you against a single AI character in their house. Your goal is to find out what they're hiding in the basement, but they won't make it easy.

The mustachioed AI neighbor apparently "learns from your every move," which is an intriguing, but pretty vague claim. As the Steam page description puts it, "Really enjoying climbing through that backyard window? Expect a bear trap there. Sneaking through the front door? There'll be cameras there soon. Trying to escape? The Neighbor will find a shortcut and catch you."

Will we be dealing with an aggressive hunter AI, a la Alien: Isolation or something else entirely? If the gifs and trailer are any indication, it looks like we'll be able to use most physics objects to our advantage. Toss a tomato at the window, sneak in through the back, block off dangerous doors with chairs, and steal a few bear traps while you're at it. The same tricks just might not work twice.

While most of the real sleuthing will take place in the Neighbor's house, Dynamic Pixels is aiming for over 10 hours of play, including story-driven levels that take place somewhere beyond the neighborhood.

Conceptually, I love the idea. A stealth game focused in a small sandbox environment with a single AI could make for some really tense, emergent horror. I just hope the systems are as great as they sound.

Signups for a playable alpha are already open, and Dynamic Pixels plans on releasing new builds regularly. Plenty of time to practice stealing sugar.