The fact Alpha 1 has the best shading sums up the whole game

The developers of Hello Neighbor really focused too much into making it into a 'UKposts playthrough' game. You can have fun watching someone else struggle through the puzzles, but to try and play it yourself feels like a chore.

The early version was deemed too scary because the neighbor t-posed while he was chasing you

Kinda feels like the devs saw everyone doing weird parkour in the early alpha builds and thought, “Oh, this must be how people want to play!” instead of realizing it was just folks poking around and exploring however they could in an incomplete game.

That early footage with the player blocking the door in a room. That was scarier than the final game.

The publisher desperately tweeting at MatPat to care about their game again is one of the saddest things I've ever seen

I like how the neighbors AI seems to get worse at every single alpha release. It is literally evolving backwards.

Hell, a better ending would have been the player waking up from the dream, but they were actually stuck in the basement as the neighbour had kidnapped them as a kid. They were just dreaming of themselves rescuing themselves.

literally went from "horror mystery game" like Amnesia, to "zany platformer" in a few months. The drastic shift of tone killed this game

The game feels like a collection of the mobile game ads turned into a game.

I always thought Hello Neighbor really should have ended with like you get in the basement and find out that, no nothing nefarious is down there and then you get arrested for breaking and entering like a psychopath.

I like a cheesy “he was a murderer” or “he’s trying to bring back his wife and daughter in some Frankenstein fashion”. You don’t always have to be deep in order to make a good game. The AI was already fantastic. The Alpha could have been cleaned up a bit, adding small details to the environment, patch up the story, and it could have perfect.

Markiplier was incredibly smart when deciding to drop this game, he hadn’t even touched the full release, but by the final alpha, he knew this game was gonna be shite, and lo and behold

The early gameplay demo video is genuinely more terrifying to watch than the later alphas and even the full release. Says a lot about the downfall of the game

I feel like the devs of this game was just like: “Let’s make the wackiest nonsensical story possible, have some UKpostsr and Redditer come up with some theories and lore for the game and pretend that’s actually what we’ve meant to do the whole time.”

The neighbor actually learns from you,but since the game is so damn convoluted he just learns to be confused from your own confusion

This is the first time ever I've seen a case of a game reaching its peak during its first Alpha

I feel this game tried to be too many things at once. It’s a stealth game where you avoid the neighbor. It leans into horror elements. It’s a platformer. It’s a puzzle game. It’s got deep convoluted lore. While some of these could’ve worked together they should’ve just stuck with one or two. What initially drew people to the game was the AI of the neighbor learning from your previous failures (boarding up windows, checking closets, etc.). They should’ve focuses on that and stealth elements rather than try to make it a mix of everything

"It's just a dream" is always a bad way to end a story. It objectively invalidates everything. None of the events mattered because they weren't even real. In order for a story to matter, there needs to be tangible consequences or at least threats of consequence.

"Act 1 has you starting out as a kid who looks about 30, kicking a ball down a street" Never has a statement been more true and baffling at the same time...

Fun fact: if the crowbar was red hot like that, it wouldn't be magnetic. It enters an austenetic phase and loses its magnetism. Therefore the puzzle was nonsensical from the start Source: I'm a welder and know metallurgy.

Imagine coming up with a killer concept for a stealth/puzzle game and then ruining it by making it a weird parkour mess. Like, the neighbor adapting to entry and distractions makes for an interesting play through each and every time. That’s what people were hooked on in addition to the mystery of the basement. The weird house additions, convoluted story, and poorly crafted puzzles really stunt this game.

I remember the original story being about how the neighbor was actually your estranged father and how you were responsible for the death of your sister. That was where the whole thing with the coffin originally came in. Unfortunately once the hype machine started the game got too ambitious and thats where the downfall started.

I have a feeling the developer misunderstood the genre they originally had. Instead of going a wacky linear story route, they should have more made this like a semi endless / roguelike. Have the game be in the state where the Neighbour AI adapts, places traps etc and everytime you get caught the game becomes a bit harder until its game over. Then have something like multiple sets of multiple objectives, and at the start of a run the set gets chosen either by the player or at random. E.g. the base szenario is hes hiding something an you want to collect evidence / find out what, e.g. you find a bloddy hammer in the trashbin -> letters of a wife wanting a divorse -> blood on the floor in the attik and then a dead body in the freezer in the basement or so. Your goal is to take pictures from all the evidence once you found it and then escape. If you mess up to many times "Game over" and you start all over or a different szenario. Have it be everything from murder to kidnapping to organizing a surprise birthday party. they could even make multiple mid sized houses or even make the house modular and generate it, you have tons of replayability, can still put "deeper lore" hints with a low spawn chance that would be fodder for theorys etc. Have the player find random items that help him out for even more replayability. The bread and butter for this game, is the Enemy AI making it less predictable, and adapting to your playstyle, build the game around that and not around some lore

I can't believe this game gives backstory to the Spy from TF2. I mean how else do you explain the three hands, who else could use the Deadringer and reload their revolver at the same time?

So the "deep lore" of this game is summed up very quickly? Your curiosity as a kid get's you kidnapped and you break out broken, beaten and scarred. Then 20 years later, you have a weird dream. That sounds like there was supposed to be an on the nose metaphor about childhood trauma, but hit the mark about as well as that jar of pickles entered the trolley.

I think the main issue they had was the concept for the AI is extremely ambitious and difficult to program. So I don’t think they necessarily chose the parkour route, it’s more that they reached their level of programming competency. It’s why most games like this have some sort of supernatural element so that the character chasing you can disappear and reorient without it looking janky.

This seems to be an issue with a LOT of russian game designers - for some reason they are incredibly contrarian when it comes to feedback and tend to double down on any system that players find frustrating. I guess the logic must be "if players are complaining that means they find this too difficult, meaning I should make it more of a focus because difficulty is good".

Jesus Christ that demo scares the shit out of me. Something about just seeing him floating towards you in the corner of your eye is really getting to me.

They ended it in the worst way possible for a story. "And then he woke up"

i kinda knew this game was doomed after seeing plushies of the neighbor in Walmart in the kids section even before it was fully released

Here's a better idea for the game: you get into the basement, and find out it's a sort of shrine to his dead son, centered around his grave. When the Neighbor finds you, you attempt to escape but nearly fall to your death, prompting him to save your life. After which, he sits down and reveals his son died in an accident while the house was being built, and he was never able to move on from it. The bizarre architecture was a means of coping, where each of the out of place puzzles was based on something his son enjoyed, or a moment they shared. You apologize, and he does the same, while smiling and thanking you, as the whole game made it feel like he got to play with his son one last time, and he feels like he can move on now. You return home, and out of your window, you see his house burning to the ground, as he smiles and waves goodbye before leaving the neighborhood for good, symbolically moving on from his past. It took me thirty seconds to come up with that.

I remember the main appeal was the fact that the neighbour adapted to your attempts to break in, I don't think anyone thought moving away from that was a good idea.

Ight, pulling the "It was all a dream move" is the real warcrime here; not only because it robs the narrative of a satisfying ending, but because it allows the developers to make shit even more cryptic by including symbology and half baked psychological facts, which I assume was the point.

Literally incredible that it went from that awesome, fun little tech demo to this giant, bloated, steaming pile of everything-but-what-was-in-the-tech-demo. Imagine if Hitman turned into a surrealist dreamworld platformer with puzzles that effectively require you to look up solutions.

The fact one of the UKpostsrs they relied on so heavily to become popular could only beat the last few alphas by getting a step by step guide from the comments sums it up perfectly

This developer is really focused on Let's Players and Theorists. If you look at their social media, they are desperately trying to get MatPat to make videos about their games. It's unfortunate. If they put the same amount of energy into making a quality game I feel like they could really succeed.

i typically don't ever cringe at things, the word itself bothers me, but seeing the publisher tweet out to matpat begging to make a theory video really did it for me. i don't think that will ever leave my head, it's engrained within my soul.

Literally taking a writing course right now and one of the big things was that you should (almost) never end with your character waking up or realizing it was all fake

20:00 "We're now much older and struggling from a crack habit, leaving us-" Okay slow down. I think we missed some plot development here, writers.

When they changed the chase music, I knew it was over lol. The first chase song was perfect. It was scary asf!!

The part that hurts the most out of all this has to be the part of it where the devs kick you in the balls by saying all the lore was just a dream and none of that theory crafting led to anything.

I love how in the concept gameplay the neighbor just *G L I D E S* towards you menacingly

I remember hearing about this game near the beginning. "It gets smarter, man! The game ADAPTS to your strategies! Isn't that neat?" It was..

Best guess is that the original idea was a horror-like, but the publisher decided to have it more geared towards a younger audience so that they could market it out in spin off's

The realistic look of the game in the first 2 versions made it way more real-feely and scary, when it got cartoony it almost felt like a joke

I can't believe they went with that last act with a straight face, thinking it would be something besides a painful attempt at sentimentality

It’s sad how the pre alpha was literally the best version it was the most realistic it was just a creepy man doing suspicious things in his basement and it would send chills down my spine when he would chase me

the devs have never heard the phrase "less is more" they just kept adding on tons of useless stuff until the game collapsed in on itself

Well like MatPat said in most recent theory, this game changed a lot lore wise cause some fan theories were able to guess the plot of the game but then they changed it just so people couldn’t guess how it was going to end

When I was playing this, I remember the absolute worst part of the game after alpha 3 was that it was just nonsense. There was no rhyme or reason to the puzzles. It made no sense, none of it was even possible without outside knowledge or just throwing yourself at impossibilities nonstop until something worked or you stumbled upon the solution by accident. This game is exactly what a puzzle game should NOT be.

When I first saw this game, I figured the ending was going to be that there was nothing sinister with the neighbor, and it turned out you've been harassing this poor guy over nothing, when all he wants is for people to stop breaking into his house. I still think that would have made a more fun twist.

The story is basically Act 1, and after you get caught the kid is probably abused or something in the basement until he gets out years later at the end of Act 2, being traumatized for the rest of his life and having nightmares and whatnot. That's it. So much for deep lore and story.

I'm glad you mentioned the art style change because I feel like no one mentions how much that hurt the game. IDK what it is but the new art style they went for just ruined the unique style the game had in their previous alphas and really makes the game feel too cartoony

"It's so awkwardly positioned that it doesn't feel like that's what you're supposed to do." This sums up everything in Hello Neighbor.

"what went wrong - Yandere Simulator" will be a huge one

To me the biggest problem with Hello Neighbor is that it stopped being ABOUT the Neighbor. Most people will cite that the problems come when they seemed to revise the movement and took a downward spiral into a platformer, but coincided with that is the inclusion of the player model itself, and both of these signify a major negative change in the direction of the game. Mechanically it stopped being about the Neighbor and his learning AI to being about the house itself. Before the house was merely a tool for both you and the neighbor to interact with in this push and pull stealth battle, now the game lives and dies on the level design, and boy is the level design terribly loose. But then narratively, we also shift focus away from the neighbor and into the player character. Suddenly its a story about us and the neighbor is just the agent of chaos who sets the obstacles. While they definitely attempted to preserve the mystery of the neighbor, his motives and intentions are now secondary to this new story of a kidnap victim with PTSD. Its not really effective at telling this type of narrative, especially as the artstyle got more and more wacky as opposed to grim Burton-esque. The reality is, if you want to tell a mystery, then tell the mystery. The players role is just to be a new concerned neighbor, and as a video game we can fill that role, the player character doesn't need much of any backstory, just put something interesting behind that door and foreshadow it in the climb to achieve opening it. While the game wants us to dig into the motives of the neighbor, the big secret is blown in the first act, he has or was planning to hold a child hostage. It doesn't matter if hes doing it because his daughter and/or wife died, the secret is out before you even escape and hes taken care of after that. But then it gets worse with the flash backs, for one its confusing to understand what perspective any of them take, neighbor or the player, as they contain context for both characters. They use the dream thing to glance over the trippy stuff and the ridiculous final house, but that doesn't explain how the player's hallucinations elucidates us on the Neighbor's backstory. And while exact details are confusing and sparse, the big key points are right in your face with them. In fact I'd argue that between the flashbacks and cutscenes the game actually isn't cryptic enough and ruins any sense of mystery. Considering that they started to pour so much resources into the house, either for pandering to kids UKposts or a lack of ambition to actually refine what could have been really innovative stealth gameplay, they made no attempt to use the house to actually tell a compelling story, and the flashback sections are just a crutch to that affect, same as the box stacking is a crutch to any legitimate game design. The house isn't a place that is lived in and aside from that one room in the basement theres no context to who the neighbor really is hidden in the walls, its just wacky nonsense for the sake of wacky nonsense, and in that way, they failed to capture the reason why people love to dig into the lore of games like FNAF, the obvious success story they attempted to copy. Also yeah, I am now really suspect of the publisher of the game. I remember Tiny Build used to market themselves as a publisher that helps fund upstart devs with preserved creative control, but its obvious to me that you only get funding if they feel your product is marketable. Now that they have this IP that's big with children on UKposts, its become their sole focus, and the directions they are pivoting keeps turning towards this idea of shitting out content that either runs on potato pcs or on mobile keep kids buying, yet another way they are painfully attempting to copy the FNAF business model that was, until Security Breach at least, launching small but polished experiences that always brought a new mechanic to the table.

The perfect case study of "Quit while you're ahead." I still remember getting hooked on this game watching Let's Play vids of the Alpha and Beta versions... only to buy the finished version and realize five minutes in that the new nonsensical puzzles and mechanics made it downright unplayable.

4:45 this is litteraly exactly what it feels like being chased in a dream

The thing is, one other game did what Hello Neighbor tried to do initially with its A.I. and did a far better job of it, and that was Alien Isolation, the Xenomorph would learn the player's common hiding spots, try pinpoint the location of noises it heard and even try cut the player off, this made it the unsettling and imposing threat that Dynamic Pixels tried to make the Neighbor into.

Wait, so the whole time the story was basically: As a kid you see your neighbour acting weird, so decide to break into his house for some reason, only to find a bedroom in the basement, revealing him to be a kidnapper, then he captures you and locks you up, you escape and run away. Years later you go back home, the neighbour is long gone, you fall asleep on a couch and have a convoluted dream sequence about getting over your fears from that traumatic childhood event. that's it? I never played or watched much of the game but I remember seeing the hype and the "mystery" behind it, so for that mystery to be fairly common (albeit dark) and everything else just be LITERALLY made up nonsense because it's a dream must have been really disappointing for people looking forward to it. Also "it was a dream all along" was a trope that was tired 20 years ago, I remember watching shows in the early 2000's making fun of it, so for a writer to willingly choose to do that in this day and age is baffling, because I don't think I've ever once seen someone like that as an ending

It started out as a unique "horror" game with a good premise, but then it devolved into random junk for the sake of being random junk.

The concept of this game was so good I am so sad it didn't go well for them, they focused on the wrong things. I loved this game before it got too confusing and didn't really understand why suddenly no one mentioned or played it.

Employee: "What do we do about Lore?" Director: "Umm pfffffft EH throw in some vague clues, the theory hounds will fill in the gaps"

I remember being so hyped to find out what was in the basement, but when the game came out and it was this weird linear story, I lost interest. Finding out all these years later that the full game doesn't provide any actual answers is just so disappointing.

You can tell this was one of the devs personal project, and the company they worked for hijacked it because they saw it could make money.

Yeah, I remember playing Alpha 4 and literally getting so frustrated with that magnet puzzle. Also the room that opens with the red key. Just unbeatable

Sooooo, the game called neighbors from hell was kinda popular in Russia back in 2000s So it feels like devs looked at a nostalgic game, said hey, what if we put a horror/thriller spin on it, created promising early builds, and at the end failed miserably to make something coherent with this idea

This game really could have spearheaded a "break & enter" sort of subgenre to Stealth games but they were way too busy trying to make a puddle appear deep rather than iron out the actual game itself

This has a “you don’t understand this masterpiece” aura from the developers.

I love even more matpat basically out right refusing them every time they talked about him. They was so desperate 😅

0:28 The Concept. 5:16 PreAlpha. 8:30 Alpha II. 9:37 Alpha III. 11:53 Alpha IV. 16:44 Full Release. 20:42 Minigames. 22:49 Story.

I think it would've been interesting if they twisted the story. At first you think your neighbour is hiding a terrible secret (keeping people in his basement, murderer, etc.) And you try to find proof/release the victims. But when the game ends you're actually the antagonist, YOU are the nightmare neighbour breaking into the house because you're either crazy or a massive nosy Karen. Multiple endings would be great too like you either get arrested, the neighbour kills you in self defence, you can frame your neighbour oooooorrrr... You actually were right about him and you become his next victim.

They really took the "kid friendly horror game" thing to heart and it hurt the game. Unlike FNAF, which manages to be scary and still not super inappropriate, they just changed this from being creepy to kooky, for no good reason.

The animated series made the first game’s story make sense. Also pre-alpha and alpha 1 are the best versions since they are actually scary with scary chase music. Also it really ticks me off that the ai in hello neighbor 2 was supposed to be controlled by a “neural network” and the ai is somehow worse than the first game.

This would have been a good product if it was made by one dude in his basement just emptying his mind into his art with no theory begging. the fact it was made by an actual production company blows my mind

A combo of the two good ol pitfalls that plague most indy games: - trying to put parkour in your game when the controls are just not good enough to pull it off - rely on a lot of object manipulation with clunky physics It even hit the other grand classic : Puzzle with only ONE solution despite the environment offering a lot of obvious alternative.

the true problem with this is that the premise seemed okay innocent enough and fun, just a kid spying on his neighboor, that's all it should have been. Act 1 should have ended with something shockingly sad or creepy, like the Neighbor was just being overly protective because in that room he had his super ill wife or child, ending with a fun game and a short good experience. But they wanted to milk it as much as they could so instead of making a good cake they keep adding shit on top until it tasted, well, like shit.

Pre alpha-alpha 3 was a huge part of my childhood like I was insanely obsessed with them so playing the actual release was quite depressing

Regarding the parcour: Dynamic Pixels is a russian based studio and at the time of making this game irl parcour was all the rage in Russia and surrounding countries. I guess they wanted to appeal to kids more like that? As to the minigames and the shadow figure, xthose were supposed to be snippets of lore and of neighbour's/ours (don't remember which one it is) past. Don't remember what the pantry and the shopping ones were supposed to symbolise, but the school one was supposed to symbolise the neighbour/ourselves getting bullied in school (hence the mannequins being aggressive) and finally standing up for himself at the end, gaining the push ability.

The problem wasn't so much the narrative evolving or art style changing slightly. It was definitely the inconsistency of the puzzles, the game design directions with the platforming and the buggy gameplay surrounding those design choices. This is also a testament that you should do a closed-beta/alpha because people may like the early stages more and think that this is what the entire game should be. Then when you start taking things the direction you had originally planned, the public may resent these changes.

I think the game mechanics in the 2014 version was way more interesting It made Neighbor seem more like he had much more control over your surroundings and would even freak you out by doing something unexpected And how the player could just block the door by pushing something in front of the door

7:32, that tire killed me 💀

Hi, writer/author here. The "it was just a dream" cliche is considered to be one of the worst endings in the writing community. Mainly because, as you stated in your video, it's a kick in the balls to the reader, and sends the message that nothing really mattered. It's considered one of the tell-tale signs of an amateur writer who lacks experience in crafting quality fiction.

Honestly, the simpler this game was, the better it was. I never cared for the lore, it just kept getting more and more in the way. The lore is garbage and they bloated the hell out of an interesting game.

It seems to me the biggest problem was there was a huge map full of items, but only one way to solve every puzzle. For example, if I needed to cool down a crowbar, I might think to stick it in the freezer. The fact there's only one way to do things is what always takes me out of games with "crafting" systems, and it seems like even the people who normally like those kind of games got fed up with how it was taken to the extreme here.

I watched my friend play one of the early alphas He decided to run through the back door like 50 times in a row and 100% of the game's resources diverted to the backdoor Then he split up his approach fairly evenly to other entry points and the game couldn't keep up with a big brain maneuver like that. Eventually he just got the neighbor stuck in the starting house and he slowly went through the game. It was a major disappointment that the house is so goofy, a more straightforward approach would have been more exciting compared to weird minecart tracks outside the 9th floor and all kinds of goofy magic nonsense. The original trailer was spooky as hell, and still creeps me out. Major disappointment, ended up selling more plushies than it was worth but in another universe this game was a big hit I'm sure. There's only two things that are exciting in the game: Getting to the basement and evading the neighbour. Just playing that one early alpha, I absolutely didn't want to do any of the puzzles, I just wanted to stealth around and avoid this guy, and enjoy an engine that tries to counter your unique gameplay quirks. SHame ya got neither.

I also 100% agree with the texture and graphic changes. It felt more scary in the pre alpha and alpha 1. It gave a more realistic vibe like you are actually sneaking into a crazy persons house

Nothing makes me more infuriated and want to immediately drop a game than convoluted, nonsensical, non-intuitive puzzles.

I don’t think you were being “petty” when you mentioned the design change. It is strange to change the visual design of a game drastically that sudden between betas. From a somewhat neutral environment designed consistent with the overall game theme, to Loony Toon style without plot reasons would catch anyone off gaurd lol!

They spent too much time chasing Game Theory, instead of letting Game Theory chase them.

So it went from “find out what your scary neighbors secret is” to “youre a crackhead who’s jonesing”?

I love this concept of "big hyped game that disappeared almost instantly without anyone even noticing". How many games have I forgotten about that I was once hyped up about? How can i remember if i don't know what i need to remember? will you remember for me?

This game is the definition of identity crisis. It doesn’t know what it wanted to be: A scary hide-go-seek game to a platform with non-sensible, out of worldly assets. I saw the ending coming, but I don’t understand how it could be the dream about the neighbour’s “lore/backstory” considering he never knew the neighbour personally. What made it worse is the second game made it Canon. Edit: No way: 1K? Thanks guys

I can guarantee you that at least half of this was TinyBuild’s fault. There’s a reason why other indie devs who partnered with them jumped ship after Hello Neighbor’s release.

Hello Neighbor was pretty unique in it's kind, you're not getting chased by a killer or monster, but by a normal neighbor securing his privacy hiding something in the basement, that was pretty simple but intriguing.

I remember this game quite well, I still remember watching Dashie struggle through this game

"You need to cool down this crowbar." Normally, time would sort that problem out.

I never realized his ai could track when I dropped an empty Ramen Cup

The third hand makes so much sense! That's how you got the ability to push the neighbor, you needed three hands to do so.