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...)

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.)