The Hello Neighbor series has come a long way. What started out as a fun little tech demo has evolved into its own mini-media empire. There are various spin-offs, and even an animated series in the works, so a sequel was pretty inevitable.

The first mainline game had a great premise but suffered from a few flaws in its eventual execution. While this might have been the end for a lot of franchises, the strength of the style and concept carried it through, long enough that tinyBuild and Eerie Guest have gotten a second chance at creating a definitive Hello Neighbor title.

Hello Neighbor 2 is here, and it’s taking you out into a whole neighborhood.

Story

If you’re familiar with the Hello Neighbor series, you’ll have a decent idea of the situation when you come into the game. You are investigating the mysterious Mr. Peterson, a secretive, sinister individual whose children mysteriously disappeared. Peterson has a very interesting talent for home improvement and uses this to create elaborate security measures to prevent anyone from getting into his house.

Despite being a fairly sinister individual, Peterson seems fairly opposed to murdering people snooping into his business, so on being caught, invaders are likely to be thrown out.

In this case, you take the role of an investigative journalist, trying to look into the case. In Hello Neighbor 2, things are a little more complicated than one scheming neighbor though. You’re given a whole section of the town of Raven Brooks to explore, and you soon realize it’s populated with all kinds of shifty characters keen to obstruct your investigations in one way or another.

The story is pretty intriguing, though soon you’ll start running into unanswered questions. Why is the Neighbor so opposed to actually harming you in a meaningful way? Why do the police never do anything? Who is setting up half of these puzzles and why? It starts to nag a little the longer you play.

Gameplay

The core of the gameplay loop is straightforward enough. You snoop around the houses of various Raven Brooks residents, solve puzzles, and avoid getting caught by the property owner.

The physics are improved upon from the first Hello Neighbor, so it’s no longer possible to break everything by stacking boxes, but the first-person platforming still isn’t exactly enjoyable. This isn’t really helped by the fact that it’s very hard to tell what objects the game wants you to jump on and what it doesn’t. At times I had to check a guide after an apparently essential path looked like a visual prop and seemed near-impossible to get onto.

The meat of the game is the puzzles. Each house is loaded with different object puzzles that need to be solved to progress. You’ll find yourself hunting around for keys, getting safe codes, and finding items that will interact properly with an item in the building to advance.

You’re not given much in terms of guidance, which may be to try and emphasize the idea that you’re a journalist sneaking about on your own motivation. This can make houses a little overwhelming, as you generally have a very limited idea of what you’re aiming for. Mostly I found myself just trying whatever looked puzzle-like in the house and hoping for a good outcome.

Some of the puzzles also fall into the common trap of being infuriatingly arbitrary. There was a point where I had to get some scissors from the inside of a tree house. I could see the scissors. The area they were in was big and open enough that it looked completely possible to just take them. That wasn’t allowed, though. Instead, I had to find a secret compartment, correctly position a toy robot, and activate a model train to move the scissors the few inches they needed to be moved for the game to let me grab them.

While you’re trying to solve these puzzles, you’ll have to contend with the residents. These are the AI-driven citizens of Raven Brooks who don’t take kindly to anyone trespassing in their houses. One of the selling points of the game is that they possess an advanced AI that lets them learn your patterns of behavior.

In my experience, the intelligence of the residents was hit-and-miss. I noticed that if they caught me somewhere, they’d often hang around that area, which was fairly smart. On the other hand, sometimes they would alert, run right up to me, look right through me, and charge off down a corridor. I was also able to explore most of the Back To School DLC uninterrupted after shutting the caretaker outside the main gate.

The main trouble with the residents that I found is that they didn’t make the game more exciting as much as simply wasted your time. The residents aren’t really a danger to you as such, they’ll just toss you out onto the street if they catch you, so the cat-and-mouse game you play feels very low stakes. They mostly just became a way to make puzzles a bit more annoying to solve.

Audio And Visual

There’s one aspect of the game I feel zero ambiguity about. Hello Neighbor 2 looks gorgeous! The art design is distinct, and interesting, and was clearly put together with a great deal of care. All of the props look lovely and it’s obviously been designed with a great deal of visual flare. The textures do a nice job of mixing toony art style with more realistic PBR shaders without it coming across as weird or jarring. It’s clear that the art department has put a lot of work and thought into the design aspect.

The audio is similarly good. The music works well with the theme, and the sound effects manage to be satisfying as well as giving good sound cues for the puzzle aspects. The short voice effects for each resident are a nice touch, and extremely helpful from a gameplay point of view, as it’s one of the most reliable ways to keep track of one of them when they’re walking around a house.

What It Could Have Done Better

Hello Neighbor 2 has some definite issues. For a start, it’s very short. Depending on your skill with the puzzles and your luck with the residents, you’ll probably not get over ten hours from the base game. The DLC content included in the Deluxe Edition adds a decent amount of content, though oddly also includes the Hello-Copter, which allows you to bypass significant chunks of it.

There are major issues with bugs, and though these may be patched out they’re particularly prevalent in the DLC, to a game-breaking degree. I jumped right through the ceiling at one point in the school DLC, and became trapped up there until I found a way to drop back into the play area.

Puzzles feel cryptic to the point that the game is trying to pad out its own length, and the story feels similarly cryptic simply for the sake of it. Avoiding any potential spoilers, the ending is a very unsatisfying cliffhanger that doesn’t really leave you feeling like you’ve learned anything.

Verdict

I wanted to like Hello Neighbor 2. It has a definite charm to it, and there was a lot of promise in the first game that was never fully realized. The sequel felt like a great opportunity to do that. Sadly, the game only partially succeeds in doing what it needed to do. The physics are better, and the move to multiple smaller houses was a smart choice. However, the game feels like it needed far longer in development. The game is pretty and contains some good ideas, but feels directionless, deliberately obtuse, and far too short.

Hello Neighbor 2 is available for Xbox One, Xbox X|S, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, and PC via Steam.