When I first arrived at PAX East 2022, there was quite a bit to look at! However, there was one area that stood out amongst all the others and beckoned everyone towards it with its flashy colors and lights. This area was the carnival of tinyBUILD, an area that showed off all of the various projects that the publisher and developer planned to release over the next year or two.

While I played games such as Justice Sucks and Rawmen, there was one game on display above the rest that seemed to be on a lot of people’s minds: Hello Neighbor 2. While I didn’t play the demo they had there, I was given access to the demo that was released in September. The question that popped into my head after playing it was, how will the full release capitalize on this promising demo? That question has now been answered, for better or for worse.

When I first launched Hello Neighbor 2, it seemed to start off in the usual dark and zany way that we have come to expect from this franchise. A child is seemingly kidnapped by The Neighbor, aka Theodore Masters Peterson, and you are the unfortunate reporter who has seen the whole thing. The reason that you are unfortunate is because The Neighbor has also seen you, and this begins your journey in the neighborhood of Raven Brooks. From here you will go from neighbor to neighbor in an attempt to solve the mystery of the missing kids and what exactly is going on in this town.

With this story and the various promotional materials that were shown of the game, it seemed to me that the game was going to be an open-world game in the sense that all of the neighbors and their houses were available at the same time. It made sense to me, as the next evolution of Hello Neighbor since it would be both fun and tricky to maneuver between all of the various houses and obstacles in order to make progress in the overall campaign. There were also two other key things that I looked for in the game: Self-learning AI and a Sandbox-style experience. Neither of these things, as far as I can tell, has been implemented into the game at all. Let me delve into the gameplay experience that I had in order to explain this.

The gameplay at the very beginning of Hello Neighbor 2 was very simple and allows players to get an idea of the controls and mechanics of how things work. It is almost an exact copy of the beginning of the demo that was released in September. After this, I became a bit worried as this seemed to be where I would begin seeing all of the neighbor’s houses be available to explore and the various neighbors at the ready to present unique challenges.

While each neighbor certainly presented different challenges, it only did this in a linear way as the game didn’t allow any deviation from one house to another. Furthermore, the so-called Self-learning AI was not exactly the smartest thing, assuming that it is part of the game in the first place. One of my first experiences to show that this was the case was when the Officer who is patrolling The Neighbor’s house got stuck in an endless loop eating his donut. There only time I was able to break him out of this loop was when I stepped on a rubber chicken, but this only caused him to break free for about twenty seconds before returning to his donut.

Another thing that threw me off about Hello Neighbor 2 was the fact that they had three day-one DLCs that you could buy. The Hello-copter, Back to School, and Late Fees DLCs provide a new tool and two new stages to the game. While this wouldn’t raise too many eyebrows if these had come out weeks or even months later, the fact that players are being charged an additional $36 in total for these three after already paying $40 on the base game seems wrong. Playing devil’s advocate, the overall price of these DLCs can be reduced by buying the Deluxe Edition of the game at $60, but it feels like all three of these DLCs should’ve been part of the base game from the start, considering the direction that the final product has taken.

Overall, I was not too thrilled by Hello Neighbor 2 as it didn’t live up to the promises that were made to the community. Taking those promises out of the equation, it seems like a missed opportunity in terms of follow-up for a series that has been rather well-regarded by most of the gaming community and industry as a whole. There is always the chance that the developers could change the game drastically in order to meet some of these promises since the original Hello Neighbor was changed quite a bit during its active development cycle, but only time will tell if such things are done. My only hope now is that Rawmen is more like Justice Sucks than Hello Neighbor 2, but that will be a discussion for another day.

A PC review copy of Hello Neighbor 2 was provided by tinyBUILD for this review.

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Hello Neighbor 2

$39.99

6.5

Score

6.5/10

Pros

• Interesting Gadgets
• Quirky Art Style

Cons

• Annoying or Strange Bugs
• Not What was Promised
• Overpriced Day One DLCs