The Hello Neighbor franchise has enjoyed an almost cultlike following in the PC gaming world due to its unique first-person stealth/puzzle solving gameplay wrapped around a horrifyingly mystery just itching to be investigated. And if that does not sound enticing enough, the games sport an advanced AI engine running in the background that learns and adapts the gameplay based on the player’s actions and patterns.
However, the original Hello Neighbor’s touchy point-and-click mechanics developed with a mouse and keyboard in mind did not translate well to the controller-based input, and the game really sputtered on the consoles per other’s reviews. I was really hoping that tinyBuild Games and their newly established development group Eerie Guest would address this issue with their recent porting of their follow-up release, Hello Neighbor 2, but sadly this is not the case. Hello Neighbor 2 is a game that obviously has a lot of love and dedication behind it but comes off as a bit of a shambles on the PS4.
Hello Neighbor 2 puts the gamer in the shoes of an unnamed journalist from the local television station WCR4TV who on his way home from a story witnesses a horrifying scene involving a townsman dragging an abducted child into his house. The journalist had just enough time to snap a handful of photos of the crime in progress before he is spotted by the abductor, and in his frenzy to escape the scene he ends up crashing his TV van to the neighboring barn. Battered and bruised, the journalist must find his way out of the barn – in the form of a gameplay tutorial – by solving a couple of basic gear-and-lever puzzles. But once freed, he’s walloped across the head by the abductor who leaves him for dead and steals the evidence-containing camera.
Of course, our hero survives the attack, returns to the TV station and start putting two-and-two together regarding a recent string of recent events of children coming up simming. Yes, I purposely typed “simming” to refer to the odd wordplay that is used all throughout the game where all the MISSING posters say SIMMING, all the STOP signs say PTOS, and even the town’s WELCOME TO sign says CALWOM OOT. OH yeah, the town is named WAYRON CROOBS if that makes any more sense.
This sets the gamer off on the first investigation of the crime scene, which is now taped-off by the police, but oddly has a lot of padlocked areas that require finding a series of keys to access. These keys are obtained by searching the home and surrounding areas to solve a series of rather abstract puzzles. There are often clues scattered about that help the gamer figure things out – a child’s drawing on the refrigerator that may denote a specific placement of trinkets, or a painting that just doesn’t seem to be part of the background décor, but times these clues are absurd like knowing that the title of the television show that happens to be playing in the living room might just contain the letters that make up the code to the safe.
The investigation requires various tools – from the trusty old rocks, crowbars, and scissors to high tech drones and other odd things in between. It’s not always logical (or maybe TOO logical) as to what/why only certain tools will work in certain situations (I mean, I should be able to rip away police tape using a crowbar instead of scissors, shouldn’t I?) and why you have to always solve some ridiculous puzzle to obtain a tool you can plainly see sitting in front of you (do I really need that toy train to push those scissors six inches toward me?). But what’s more frustrating is when you lose a tool because the confusing contextual control scheme has the “throw” button coupled with the “use” button and you accidentally toss the only pair of scissors somewhere into oblivion behind a couch when you’re trying to cut the damn police tape over a shelving unit on which you can clearly see the necessary clue within arms-reach. Yes, sadly – it IS that bad.
This contextual control scheme rears its ugly head at the worst times possible, too. So often in the heat of escaping from the patrolling police or other enemies, you’ll go to open a door only to pull up the darn drone video controller which freezes the journalist and completely takes over the field of view with a screen-in-screen. This momentary halt is all the time needed to get the player caught and restart the scene from the last arbitrary autosave point, forcing the gamer to re-solve any puzzles that happened afterward. It unnecessarily drags the gameplay out from about 1.5hr total (as witnessed by video walkthroughs) to hours upon hours of unnecessary retracing.
Speaking of that – I have to admit that I had to use a lot of walkthroughs and online help just to figure out many of the puzzles in this game. Again, this is because many of the puzzles are rather obtuse – I mean why would I have to go across the street to find my way into a treehouse (with no ladder, mind you) to fiddle with a robot to make a train push a pair of scissors six inches toward me so I can go back across the street to cut some police tape that I have four other tools – and two working hands – that I could use to pull the tape off? But even more so, it is again because of the contextual nature of many of the tasks that only indicate that they can be interacted with if you have the proper tool or trinket in your limited inventory.
OK, so in the first couple paragraphs I said the issue with this franchise was porting the point-and-click controls to the consoles and then I went off with 500-some words of other stuff that bothered me about Hello Neighbor 2 – so maybe I simply do not like this game at all. But that’s not to say there are not some highlights; the presentation is spectacular, with a great cartoony aesthetic that turns around and slaps you in the face with some seriously sinister cutscenes. The music – while somewhat “stocky” at times – is actually pretty enjoyable, and seamlessly rises and falls to help indicate when you are on the right or wrong path, or when danger is looming nearby. If it were not for the funky controls and the nonsensical puzzle requirements, I’d be all-in on Hello Neighbor 2, but as it is, I have to give it a hard pass.
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