The controls aren’t as tight as you’d hope and require in a game full of platforming and fiddly inventory puzzle mechanics.

Hello Neighbor started life as an Early Access title, it still feels like one today, three years later. So, I guess we should address the elephant in the room first of all, one of the biggest things a lot of people had an issue with – the controls. I have a feeling the last part of the game didn’t actually ‘happen’… Finally, the end segment is just flat out strange and fantastical. Act 3 is where things get really crazy and the game decides to mess with you as it introduces some rather annoyingly hard side-missions as you try and get back into the house, only this time you’re a young adult. Act two, without spoiling things, is the opposite as you’re now trying to get out and back to your own house. So, as you can approach things in various ways, it’s not the end of the world if you accidentally hold a key, stick your hand through a door, and then throw the key inside the locked room (which a friend of mine actually did)! One thing you need to be aware of, there are many ways to complete each puzzle/act, which is a great help as it’s very easy to accidentally ‘lose’ a key item and never see it again. Your challenge, in Hello Neighbor, is to break into your neighbour’s house and find out what dirty little secrets he has hiding within that basement of his! This is accomplished by utilising a lot of inventory puzzles as well as sneaking around without him realising where you are and even smashing things to cause a distraction. He sees you, you run, stupidly your curiosity gets the better of you! As you head on over to collect it, you hear a noise which sounds like a scream coming from the living room! As you peer into the window, you see the old man seemingly attacking something (or someone) as it makes a lot of noise, only to be then locked inside his basement. Your neighbourhood seems to have a few issues with people going missing recently, yet your parents seem to think it’s fine to leave you home alone and let you wander around the streets playing with your ball… Anyway, you’re out playing with your ball when it lands in your opposite neighbours garden. Our protagonist is a young kid who is about to embark on a rather crazy ‘adventure’. However, for those one or two of you who don’t know what the ‘plot’ is, I’ll keep it brief. Everyone knows the story of Hello Neighbor unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, as you couldn’t look at YouTube without seeing someone talking about or playing the game.

Hello neighbor ps4 game