![]() ![]() “We want tension and anxiety, not jumps.” He wasn’t kidding the game makes it painfully clear when the neighbor is onto you, with both excessive sound and visual cues. ![]() Since the game allows you to keep some items after you die, at points it almost feels like you’re speedrunning, rather than being stealthy. “We give you all the information to avoid jump scares,” Nichiporchik told us. There’s no horrifying death, no screams, no awful in-your-face moment. When the Neighbor catches you, you just respawn across the street, all set for another run. Supposedly, the AI will learn from your behavior and set traps, but I never saw anything quite that sophisticated. Open a door you shouldn’t, there he is, run away, find a closet, hope he leaves. So, if you’ve ever played a horror game where you’re being stalked by a monster you can only run from, you know the score. You have no method of defending yourself, which feels odd when you’re at eye level with this character and you’ve got a wrench ready to go in your right hand. Along the way, you’ll solve minor environmental puzzles, all while avoiding the titular Neighbor. Here’s the pitch: you’re breaking into your neighbor’s house in the hopes of getting into his mysterious basement. We toned it down so kids would be able to play it,” Nichiporchik said. “The original alpha builds were more violent and curse-y. He’s a silly cartoon man, and that’s absolutely the intended tone. Good stuff! But in Hello Neighbor, your adversary looks like one of the snobs from an ’80s skiing movie grew up and inflated his skull with a basketball pump. When they inevitably catch you, these horrid fiends relocate your guts from the warzone that is your tum-tum. ![]() In a game like Resident Evil 7, the unkillable monstrosities stalking you look like they’ve been taking late-night ugly classes down at the community college. Oh, what’s that he said? No jump scares in a horror game?! Yes, Hello Neighbor is a game that wants you to float on the surface tension of its atmosphere, rather than drown in it. It’s not hard to see why - the game has all the mechanical trappings of a YouTube-friendly survival horror game, but it’s been designed to avoid potentially frightening jump scares and has been endowed with a cartoony aesthetic that feels more Toontown than Resident Evil 7. The kids I saw playing Hello Neighbor seemed like they were having a blast. If my reconnaissance told me anything, the team was absolutely successful in targeting young players. “Our target demographic is the ‘Minecraft Generation’,” Nichiporchik said to me at PAX South. According to TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik, that is absolutely intentional. Or both! (See also: Minecraft.) Turns out I was right - the “stealth horror” title is fairly popular on YouTube, as you’d expect from a video game that feels like it owes more than a little to the Slender craze. To me, that meant that either Hello Neighbor was a kid-friendly game or a popular YouTuber had gotten their hands on it. And I’m only 21 years old, so you know that when I say “kids,” I mean “actual children.” When I arrived at TinyBuild’s PAX South booth for my Hello Neighbor appointment, hoping to either get a hold of somebody or hop on a station myself, I noticed something that both piqued my interest and got me a little worried: a lot of kids were playing the game.
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