Whatever happened to Hello Neighbour?

 

I had one of those gross thoughts you try to forget ever having this morning. I though about Hello Neighbour. No, not actually playing the thing, what do you take me for? Just the game itself. That was enough to illicit the 'ick' and have me gagging. Because to be clear; simply envisioning the head scratch that is 'Hello Neighbour' is punishment enough- some titles should exist entirely within their fanbase, because the common human mind was not meant to struggle comprehending them. Like an eldritch cult hoarding forbidden knowledge and twists and warps the curious outsider peering in through the dusty window cracks- it is the curious and incautious who are the authors of their own cognitive decline. The bizarre nature of the Hello Neighbour cult should ward me off, but my fatalistic attractions have led me to my undoing.

Hello Neighbour is what happens when you land on one solid gameplay mechanic and totally blank on the ways you can use that single idea to flesh out a wider game. What genre to integrate it into, it's narrative implications, any of the meat of an actual video game- and as such decide to pile atop the crap until the overall package seems kinda full. And that might seem a bit heavy handed of a definition but I have to be honest here- Hello Neighbour is just a puzzle game stretched around a basic and largely forgettable gimmick. And to be clear, many horror games and even horror franchises start out in that exact same fashion and then expand. (Even though I might doubt Hello Neighbour's membership into the 'horror' genre, the shoe kinda fits.) Five Nights as Freddy's ran on the strength of it's gimmick alone for four games straight- but I just don't think what Hello Neighbour had was ever strong enough to last even a single full-length game.

The game relied on a hide-and-seek mechanic wherein the computer supposedly learns from your mistakes and buffs itself out from the player's intrusions each time they are caught. This could be by boarding up a window you smashed to get in through, laying down bear traps in areas you frequent, stealing items and hiding them in different locations, setting up cameras in important areas that alert the Neighbour to your presence. Dynamic gameplay like that. But these system never really left their beta test form, in which they just felt like half-assed 'complications' placed by an unseeing AI overseer rather than an intelligently reactive AI. I never brought the claim that the game actually marked your path into the house, and feel like the devs just pregenerated traps in obvious chokeholds. Which might be completely offbase, but if they can't make the system as least feel natural, then that is a missed mark of success.

Hello Neighbour 2 pulled off an even worse prank, by selling itself on the strength of a dynamic pathing upgrade to the original system which would theoretically have made chasers feel like the breathing characters they weren't in the first game. Only that system was... well, they just didn't do it. They never announced the feature was discontinued, they just stopped talking about and the game shipped without it. Making the end game AI every bit as unimpressive as the original, although spread across much smaller environments which made enemy chasers a decent bit more effective than the Neighbour from the original game. In the original it was all too trivial for the Neighbour to get lost trying to navigate his own house, scaling things down and separating the puzzle areas into separate houses deftly mitigated that issue.

But the game never really settled into a niche for itself. It was always trying to capture a zeitgeist, follow the footsteps of the other big horror-adjacent franchises. Fnaf did a lot of games, so they did a lot of games. Asymmetrical multiplayer is a staple of horror, so you bet they chucked on of those on the pile! As for the build-a-vehicle Stadia exclusive game they put out? Yeah I... I don't know what that was about... Youtube creator's were incredibly influential to the spread of the first game's popularity, given that it lacked compelling enough gameplay to enforce that naturally- so of course the developers went e-begging of Matpat. (Rest in Peace.) And of course, the book series. When I tell you that I could not imagine a franchise less deserving of a spin-off book franchise, I absolutely mean it with gusto when it comes to Hello Neighbour. I cannot imagine how they squeezed seven books out of such a nothing narrative. (At least Fnaf's books are anthology horror tales!)

Though it's very hard to kick up reliable sales figures to compare the rising success of the franchise, there's a 2018 Gamesrank article that credits their initial games sales to 500,000- which is lightly sickening when you acknowledge the absolute state of that game. How many distinguished passion projects got overlooked for the social media darling trainwreck game? As for 2, I can see a VG insights article (a source I've never heard of before so I have no idea where they get their stats or how trust worthy they are) who seem to think the sequel snagged around 72,000 on Steam. Now Steam is surprisingly this franchises least performing platform, so let's triple that number and round up to account for the other big consoles. 222,000 is a lowball estimate, it could be as high as 300,000- but that's still a downwards trajectory, implying (should these suspicious figures be reliable) that the big Hello Neighbour 'franchise' is running out of gas like there's no tomorrow.

Now it is important to point out that incredibly, the game is actually still being updated by the developers every now and then, which I'm sure is exciting for the 20-30 players who engage with it on the average. Seriously, there must be something deeply wrong with these numbers because the Steam all-time player peak is 570, less then half of the first game's 1399. (How can so many people buy these games but not be playing in the same moment? I struggle to comprehend how that's possible.) If it weren't for the 30,000,000 downloads that the team brag about, I would honestly wonder if the fame of these titles is entirely fabricated. But you don't get a seven book deal without the number to justify it. (Those console numbers have to be holding up the bulk of the fandom, I guess.)

Hello Neighbour is a franchise that is struggling itself to be. Like many other flash in the pan horror games, it had its moment in the sun and is chasing that high aggressively. What Fnaf has achieved with it's evergreen success and movie franchise is anomalous and should probably be captured and catalogued by the 05 Council. Hello Neighbour never quite sparked that note in pop culture, and given the general incoherence of it's ideas I kind of think that's for the best. The last thing we need is a game like that to inspire a trend of discordant singular gameplay ideas stretched into full blown games with dental floss and bad dreams. Still, if you think this franchise breathed it's last with the obviously disappointing performance of 2- well, you are a more optimistic fellow than I. (But not for a while yet. They're working on a 'story expansion' for 2 right now, which is nice. About time this franchise got itself a story...)