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Where the problems begin is that within the confines of the game itself there’s pretty well no direction, hints, or clues to what it is you’ll need to do. A traditional adventure or puzzle game would pepper notes or hints about to try to give you a sense of direction. Instead you’ll find that you’ll need to trial and error your way through things, experimenting with ideas and typically failing, or you’ll simply resort to using an online guide. There being only these two choices in front of you is vexing and it has the effect of making the gameplay tedious and aggravating if you go without help but ultimately unrewarding if you decide to get some. I really found this irksome because these extremes lacking any real middle ground are a purposely imposed problem, and that feels foolish. Aside from the puzzles the other primary frustration is the decidedly wonky physics of the objects and the environment. Even when you’ve got a good idea of what you need to do executing the plan can be needlessly difficult. With some physics games this can be weirdly charming but here, when piling it on top of the aggravations of the puzzles themselves, it just doubles down on the pain a bit too much. While I don’t want to kick the game further while it’s down I’ll also note that the Switch version of this game is visibly a step back in terms of visual quality, it look like the resolution was dropped and the result isn’t nearly as polished, detracting from the charm its quirky appearance had. Looking for the silver lining with Hello Neighbor is a bit of a challenge. Underneath it all there’s an ambitious idea with goals I can appreciate but as a whole the execution is simply a mess. To make matters worse the conversion over to the Switch was a bit of an ugly one, doing gameplay that was already in serious trouble no favors. While perhaps the suspense of small moments in the game, trying to hide or evade capture, could give a thrill here and there more often than not frustration will be most people’s primary emotion while playing it. At best I would call this a divisive title. I can imagine there are people who do and will enjoy it, but it’s likely anyone else will greatly dislike it.
Justin Nation, Score:Bad [4.0]