Hello Neighbor 2: How are we here?

 Goodbye Objectivity

I can remember you, child. From the very first meeting, that white-hot anticipation, excitement from a people drunk on the sheer potential of the indie horror market. Phantom pedigree strewn around anklets and tousled into little bows around your pigtails; you wore it like a shroud, beautiful and mysterious; promising the unimaginable and unattainable. Promising too much. Maybe you believed yourself- no, you certainly did. It was written on your cheeks in dripping black marker; you wanted so badly to stand beside your peers and call them 'equals'. We wanted you to, we believed in you to, which is why we inveterated you into their ranks so readily, so willingly. Too early. We were excitable, and you were ambitious, and in the end we both ended up being made the fool. I can remember you, child. Which is why I loathe to watch as you stand there with your bounty-less glare, as you ask may we dance into the night for one outing more.

Hello. Neighbour. Two... Why? Like the exhale of Thor after the ninth step on from slaying Jörmungandr, I simply must ask; Why? Is it a money situation? Have the powers that be sunk enough into the casket of this franchise to keep it's corpse good and reanimated for the foreseeable future, ensuring that these games will persist even when classics like Dues Ex go unattended? (I know that the investors behind TinyBuild and those behind Eidos have likely never even passed each other on the street, I just feel like chucking blame at the entire industry right now.) Has Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, decreed that their 'exclusivity' line-up needs, beyond all else, another indie 'darling' to help pad out it's library in the market share war against Sony? Have TB themselves dictated that this series, despite everything, is simply too big to fail and that they'll devote their very souls behind propping it up in hopes that it'll one day learn to walk, make a proper splash out in the world, then come back in it's ripened age to support the folks who nurtured it? I'll put my money into it being that last one.

Because at no point am I going to sit here and buy the lie, that Hello Neighbour 2 is coming by popular demand; that is a fallacy. And I refuse to accept anyone who says otherwise. (I have to believe that's not the case, I trust in the good taste of the wider public too much to accept this. I already have to live with the fact that diehard sports game fans exist, don't do me on the Hello Neighbour 2 side of things too!) And I understand the appeal of the original, I do! I was there for those very first builds of the game where it was all about the crazy mystery behind the Neighbour's crazy house and whatever was lying in his basement; those were the glory days of this game by far. Not what came of it and whatever this sequel is pretending to shape up as. What this game had was lightning in a bottle, undeserved perhaps, but genuine and, unfortunately, unreplaceable. 

To understand why Hello Neighbour became anything to begin with, you have to understand the climate around it. Hello Neighbour came into this world on the heels of Indie horror, and indie in general, which were steadily becoming consistent Cult Classics. You had Fnaf and Undertale, and at some point later you would have Doki Doki. These are games that inspired the imagination through clever story, drip feeding, or just non-sensible lore revisions every other game, whatever it takes to keep your fans constantly on their toes. Hello Neighbour understood this, to begin with, and that's why people were so excitable about it in those early days. Back then it was just some beta releases and concept art, but the Betas would drastically change the layout of the house, therefore what was needed to open 'the basement' and the secret of what was actually in the basement was nursed perfectly.

Those days of lore diving were full of concept analysis and theories bustling galore. One of the most fertile being the overt comparisons between The Neighbour and Dr Faustus, a fiction character who famously sold their soul to the devil. This was no idle speculation either, there was hard evidence behind it! You had 666 written on one of the neighbour's shoes, ominous shadows that seems to stalk him in concept art, and even a Halloween picture where he literally dressed up in the horns and tail outfit. So people started wondering if a portal to hell might be in the basement, maybe something even wilder than that. You can start to see the problem, can't you? They courted the imagination and let the reigns off to the player, and from that point on there was no real way they could have matched expectations no matter how many new Alphas and new lore bits they drummed up. They let the beast out of their control, and disappointment was inevitable sooner or later.

But failing to live up to the standards of your fans is one thing, their expectations can often be unrealistic anyway. Being bought on by Microsoft to bring your game to their console, and then delivering a broken buggy mess of a game is something else entirely. The bugs aren't the only issue, unfortunately, things are a lot closer to the 'Cyberpunk issue' in that the game behind the bugs is hopelessly flawed to. (Except Cyberpunk is, naturally, a much better game even with it's flaws. Can't really blame TinyBuild for that comparison though, can we?) The game never matured it's premise of solving puzzles whilst running around the crappy AI of the Neighbour, two gameplay concepts that are at distinct Odds from one another as you solve badly conceived puzzles whilst trying to run away. (Who thought that was a good idea?) The supernatural promise of the teases gave way to a character dive into the most boring 'mysterious' Neighbour you could imagine, with all the cliches you can expect from a tale like that. And the mysterious final chapter which the team purposely never showed off during Betas because they wanted it to be a surprise, was an uninspired platforming section masquerading as a boss battle. To make it a long story short; this was game that never quite came together despite having seemingly everything going for it, and it showed.

So lesson learned, right? They tried and failed, now it's time to move on. I'm sure they made a lot of money from the Microsoft deal, plus the momentum of the grassroots advertising surely contributed some to sales and now they have the money to put their talents into something new, probably better, and prove themselves the next go around. Except that hasn't been what's happening. Instead, Hello Neighbour has been coming back around again and again, as though it's some sourceless well of creativity, when its bounty is always disappointing. There's the competitive online title which is uninspired and buggy, the cooperative online game which never seemed to get any traction to begin with, the spin-off which was actually the most feature complete iteration of this series yet, but still pretty darn lacklustre when it was all said and done. And the Book series. There is a book series. On Hello Neighbour. Someone desperately wants this series to be the hit I don't think it was ever destined to be.

Now I've spent this entire blog that was ostensibly about Hello Neighbour 2, speaking about the dragging cape of refuse and trash it trails behind it, but there's a reason for that. The Hello Neighbour 2 trailer shows gameplay that is smoother than the final product, portrays tension that the team have shown time and time again they don't know how to conjure, and promises a mystery that has never been interesting in the belated history of this franchise. Short of a miracle, the history of Hello Neighbour tells you everything you could want to know about its sequel. And perhaps a while ago I wouldn't have gone this hard, considering it to be Indie bashing, but I think once you're released your seventh book on your 'flagship' series you've pushed past the point of struggling indie, just a bit. So all in all; the new game sounds great, can't wait to sign up! (Yes, I know I spelt Neighbour differently to how they do this entire blog, sue me.)