Back to Blog
House hello neighbor 26/20/2023 ![]() Some of the subject material is undeniably grim – child abduction for one – but it is delivered in an incongruously bright and attractive visual fashion. Family friendly? Yes, absolutely but horror…? I’m not convinced the development team themselves really know what balance they are trying to achieve here. This bright, colourful world strikes me as at odds with a horror game. ![]() This does bring me to another question mark over what the game is trying to achieve. HN2 bills itself as a horror stealth game and at the same time “family friendly horror”. The world evokes an aesthetic not unlike a Pixar (or similar) animated movie. The game world of Hello Neighbor 2 is an eye catching one with bright, bold colours and strong visual design. Like I say, a minor issue but still a slight concern. There was one key upstairs in the first house that was inside a cupboard drawer which I found really tricky to pick up. They feel like they were designed with mouse and keyboard in mind – fine for the Windows release admittedly but this was on PlayStation! They felt quite clunky in places and not really as accurate as you probably would hope for. This brings me to my first minor gripe about the game – the controls. You can’t carry a lot of items so you will be using this a lot! The player also becomes familiar with the fairly straightforward control system. We start off in the tutorial area which introduces the key mechanics of the game including item manipulation and inventory management. The only first person puzzle game I have played recently is The Turing Test which is a very different beast to HN2. Again, like the franchise itself, this is a game genre I’m not particularly familiar with. HN2 is a first person puzzle game, with elements of stealth and horror. After a close escape we find ourselves inside a barn which we have crashed into and serves as a tutorial area. He notices our character and rushes towards us brandishing a shovel. The game kicks off with a cut scene where we see the titular neighbour attack, apparently intending to abduct, a child. When I told her she said she’d seen videos of it – Pure Dead Craig tells me his children had exactly the same reaction! In addition to the games the franchise has apparently become huge on YouTube – while I was playing the game for this review my 12 year old daughter came into the room and enquired as to what I was playing. I have never played the first game so have no frame of reference when reviewing this new release. Hello Neighbor 2 (HN2) is a sequel to the original Hello Neighbor released in 2018 – it was a first person stealth puzzle game, a gameplay approach which this follow up reprises. ![]() Platforms: Windows, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PS4, PS5, Switch
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |