As many a parent has wryly told their spouse above the caterwauling of their kid on a long haul flight: getting there is half the fun. So it goes with Hello Neighbor, a game about breaking into a stranger's house to find out what they're keeping so well guarded in the basement. The journey into that basement, through secret passageways and over roller coaster tracks in a three act structure, was bound to outshine the destination, because not knowing is more fun than knowing. And, more pragmatically, because navigating a surrealist environment and working your way through its puzzles is more fun than opening a door.
More surprisingly, the journey through Early Access and into this final release reflects the same platitude. Hello Neighbor's numerous alpha and beta releases over the last year have taken on an almost episodic adventure-like quality, each new build deepening the mystery of the eponymous neighbour and a couple going so far as to completely redesign his abode. For the faithful who've braved its bugs and sifted through its detritus for clues all this time, this final release is a fitting reward. It's stitched together from the component parts of those prior builds, but in a very real way, it's a completely new experience.
I've seen it pitched as a horror game, but Hello Neighbor isn't about jump-scares. There is a prevailing sense of unease, but it's the kind of unease you get from inhabiting a world that flatly refuses to harbour anything made of straight lines and right angles; in which there are doors on the floor that lead to nowhere, and the same thirty seconds of an old noir movie playing on loop in your neighbour's front room. It's a nightmarish, irrational kind of horror borne of breaking into someone's house without knowing why, and of trying to solve a world of opaque puzzles without a word of instruction from the game. Without a word of anything from anyone. It's enough to make you wonder whether you didn't, in fact, succumb to your diet of strong cheese and hallucinogens at the loading screen, and are now simply sitting slumped and open-mouthed, dreaming of a nonsensical home invasion game while in reality another gritty survival sim awaits your input.
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