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Don’t even bother with these inferior AI neighbors – Hello Neighbor 2 Review

32K View2022-12-09

Hello Neighbor 2 isn’t a great game. I would think that the developers at Eerie Guest would take every chance to improve upon the lackluster original Hello Neighbor, which came out in 2017.

I’ve always found this series’s stealthy premise enticing, but I’ve avoided it because of the bad buzz. That is until I tried out Hello Neighbor: Diaries earlier this year for our stealth games collection. That entry was perfectly fine for a mobile take on stealth, doing exactly what it needed to and nothing more. The same, sadly, cannot be said for Hello Neighbor 2.

Apparently, Hello Neighbor 2 is set in-between the time skip in the first game. The titular neighbor, Mr. Peterson, is still alive and has fled his house. I play as a local journalist named Quentin who is investigating the missing children case (i.e., trying to figure out where Mr. Peterson is and what happened to the kids).

Unless you are big on Hello Neighbor lore, then nothing in Hello Neighbor 2 will actually engage you. The plot is wafer-thin, and you don’t get any sense of character motivations or what’s going on in the town. Most of the actual storytelling is done through flashbacks, or an attempt at something a bit more environmental that’s triggered as you traverse the town. This is great in theory, but just doesn’t work here.

Set loose in the open world of Raven Brooks, I poked into the lives of the inhabitants as the journalist. However, the open world is rather bland and brings nothing to the experience. Each level is now centered on a town resident in a different house. Once I completed a chapter, a brief loading screen would pop up, and then the next NPC spawned. If I went into a specific NPC’s house before their chapter started, I found an empty interior and zero activity. What should be an open-ended investigation into the disappearance of children is actually just a linear experience with very little interaction or investigation. And when I say no interaction I mean just that. The only inhabitants in the town are the NPCs that will eventually stalk you, and because of this, the world here just feels static and lifeless.

One of the main criticisms of the original Hello Neighbor was that it was unfocused. Everything in Hello Neighbor 2 has been dialed back to allow it to refocus on its core premise: Break into a house to uncover the secrets of the owner of that house. And when you do break and enter the homes, it controls almost identically to what I recall of Hello Neighbor: Diaries.

That’s not necessarily high praise, however. Despite technically being an improvement over its predecessors, I never really found myself enjoying Hello Neighbor 2. There’s less platforming this time around, but the platforming that’s here is as floaty and imprecise as ever. Inventory management is also a pain; I had to open Quentin’s bag every time I wanted to switch items.

The biggest improvement from past games can be found in Hello Neighbor 2’s puzzles, which didn’t require a ton of mental gymnastics for me to figure out. By exploring the houses and poking around, I was able to piece together my goal and how to achieve it without the game explicitly telling me what to do. It’s reasonably well-designed in that way, and while none of the levels were particularly memorable, I didn’t completely dislike them.

Rolling credits on Hello Neighbor 2 took me about six hours, but I like to explore and take my time with puzzles. That’s not all the content available, though. Multiple pieces of downloadable content are available on launch day, which means that they were excluded from the game to sell as extra content...which is baffling to me. This DLC includes two entire levels, which are reasonably sizable, and a helicopter drone to spy on people (and locations) with. It absolutely should have been included with the base game.

Hello Neighbor 2’s marketing promised advanced AI that would supposedly be able to adapt its behavior based on not just individual players but the community as a whole. I didn’t experience any of that here. In fact, the AI in this game is some of the worst I’ve encountered in a long time. At times, characters who were supposed to be chasing after me acted like I didn’t exist, even when I was a couple feet away from them. Other times they were able to spot me around a corner. What. The. Hell.

At one point, I was spotted and hid under a table, but the enemy could clearly still see me. For some reason, though, he just bugged out and returned to his search. It’s in this moment that I discovered the key strategy to overcoming all opponents in Hello Neighbor 2: if the NPC can’t reach you, it will reset itself. I began to abuse this glitch to a comical degree, dashing into rooms directly in front of enemies and then hiding. Nothing of consequence happened when I pulled these stunts. Even when I happened to get caught, absolutely nothing happened, really. I spawned outside and just tried again. The stealth mechanics of Hello Neighbor 2 completely break down because of nonsense like this.

I do rather like Hello Neighbor 2’s slightly darker and more grounded visuals though. There’s a rather big catch here though: the game feels completely unfinished overall. I found very little of interest to look at while exploring the streets of Raven Brooks. The interiors show off more detail, but a sense of emptiness prevails. And it was obvious that the game is simply incomplete when I could spot plenty of seams in the levels that I could see through. I even stumbled across objects not properly attached to the environment.

Hello Neighbor 2 improves on the formula of the original slightly but it can’t find its footing as it stumbles from one encounter to the next without any real cohesion. The game shows glimpses of potential, but it still has quite a long way to go before it can be considered a quality stealth game.

SCORE: 2 STARS OUT OF 5

PLAY IF YOU LIKE:

• The Metal Gear franchise. Give Hello Neighbor 2 a chance if the adventures of Solid Snake and company entice you in any way.

• Dishonored 1 & 2. Hello Neighbor 2 isn’t in the same league as Arkane’s stealthy classics, but it scratches that sneaky itch at times.

💬 What are some memorable moments you experienced in stealth games? Let me hear your thoughts in the comments below?

Mentioned games

Hello Neighbor 2

9.0

SandboxDarkPsychological HorrorActionThrillerStrategyFirst-PersonHorror

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Comments

Daniel Jack

ay bro nice review I'm still a little hype for the game tho because I haven't play hello neighbor and also in I am getting a TV for Christmas but btw have you tried out ddlc plus if you did I will check but plz do plz

2022-12-10

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User463612169 Author

I'm not sure what you mean by "ddlc?"

2022-12-13

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