Continuing on with Epic Games’ 12 Days of Free games initiative, Dynamic Pixels’ Hello Neighbor is currently free on the Epic Games Store. The stealth horror title launched in 2017 and sees the player trying to escape from their terrifying neighbor. Simply log in with your Epic Games account and claim the game for free by 9 AM PST today.

Hello Neighbor may sound like your average stealth title but there’s a bit more to it. The game’s neighbor, Mr. Peterson, benefits from advanced AI and will often learn from past encounters. So if you’re caught sneaking in through the back, then you can expect traps to greet you.

Though it didn’t get the best critical reception at launch, Hello Neighbor has since had a number of updates and patches to fix its more pressing issues. The game offers a fairly surreal story and might be worth checking out for those with a few hours to kill. The next free game appears to be Playtonic’s Yooka-Laylee so check back on the storefront later today.

"The premise itself sounds simple enough but the game’s bugs and overall lack of polish hit you immediately."

The high-stakes adventure revolves around sneaking into your neighbour’s house and seeing what he’s up to. Obviously it’s not that simple but that’s the basic premise that most will be entering the game for. This quest is divided into three acts where the house layouts become more complex. The game’s aesthetic looks appealing enough – the mix of cartoonish colours with an unsettling atmosphere convey the sense of grim mystery well enough. However, there’s a lack of polish in the animations. Maybe it’s just that they’re so bare-bones as to rob the game of any personality that its visuals may have offered. Either/or, in this case.

The premise itself sounds simple enough but the game’s bugs and overall lack of polish hit you immediately. Clipping issues, the neighbour’s AI, objects suddenly vanishing, the list goes on. Hello Neighbor‘s biggest fault is that its introductory gameplay hook, the neighbour himself, isn’t even consistent. Sometimes you’ll be completely undetected despite being mere inches away. Other times he’ll spot you at random. It’s wildly unfair at times but it’s also extremely random. Who knows what’s going to happen next?

Then again, it would be wildly unfair if there was some consequence to being caught. You simply start the area again with all the items you previously picked up. This doesn’t rob the game of its stealth approach but it does erase any sense of urgency that each playthrough has. With how randomly the neighbour behaves, setting up traps in places that you may visit, there’s simply no real consequence to losing.

"Yes, it’s that kind of puzzler, meant for old-school adventure fans who weren’t sufficiently tortured by the classics."

When you strip away any consequence of being caught, there’s not much incentive to stealth, much less being moderately sneaky. When you fail to define the right conditions under which an enemy can detect the player, it’s all just one big toss-up. The Xenomorph in Alien Isolation made for great gameplay because of its intelligence and unstoppable nature, which mixed well with that game’s tense exploration and mood. Also, it’s AI incentivized you to stay one step ahead and react intuitively. By comparison, Hello Neighbor‘s titular antagonist is just a random reset button that’s meant to slow down your progress and little else.

“Losing progress” is still meant to be a big deal in Hello Neighbor because of its puzzles. However, for a game that seems so free-form, there’s only one straightforward solution in every case. That wouldn’t be such a big deal if the puzzles weren’t the kinds of obscure, cryptic horrors that want you to think outside the box, then light the box on fire and dance around the ashes wearing a wolf’s head. There’s a point where you have to hit a few levers on some pipes but the game hasn’t led you to that conclusion. You might have to pick up a toy truck and then jump on a train on the side of a building to reach a certain convoluted spot.

In fact, you’re not really led towards any kind of solution. It’s one thing to drop a player into a world and have them figure everything out. It’s quite another to create a world that’s so obtuse that the only real way to progress is by looking up solutions online. Yes, it’s that kind of puzzler, meant for old-school adventure fans who weren’t sufficiently tortured by the classics.

"Hello Neighbor started out as something nifty – an adaptive AI presented in the guise of childhood nostalgia."

There are also instances where Hello Neighbor is really interested in platforming. This manifests strongly from Act 2 onwards (get ready for some hardcore box stacking) and while the surrealistic turn was pretty neat, especially as the game’s aesthetics shine all the more, it isn’t magically fun. The controls hurt the experience a lot with their general clunkiness. Get used to it though because they can’t be customized in any way.

To top it off, all that allure of being the naive kid investigating his neighbour’s house because he might be up to no good? There’s no pay-off as such. You grow up. You discover some stuff. It gets weird. Move on with life. Why the sudden shift in approach? Why all of this hallucinatory material that makes me feel like I’m still stuck in the latter half of Outlast 2? Maybe I just don’t get it but the experience as a whole is too frustrating, buggy and unsatisfying to make it half a brain cell.

Hello Neighbor started out as something nifty – an adaptive AI presented in the guise of childhood nostalgia. It could have been a simple albeit slightly imperfect experience with great aesthetics. Instead, we have this middling title that tries to be so many things, fails miserably and isn’t even bug-free despite it all. I doubt the core concept can be extracted and the entire game changed to fit it but anything would be better than this mess.

This game was reviewed on the Xbox One.

How did such a concept come about and how did the developer go about creating it? GamingBolt spoke to producer Alex Nichiporchik about the same.

"The visuals are the heaviest one, we experimented a lot with the look of the game."

What inspired the concept for Hello Neighbor? Did you watch Rear Window one day and decide it would make for a compelling game?

It’s a combination of factors. The game’s designer really loved Portal and how it broke the 4th wall in video games. That transcended into how we developed the game. There’s also heavy influence of being in an American suburb, where you really feel like your creepy neighbor might be hiding something.

What does a typical playthrough of Hello Neighbor look like? Are there multiple successful outcomes that can occur?

That’s a surprise.

How many abilities, tool, etc. can players unlock in the game? How did you effectively balance the game’s items to ensure there wasn’t one correct solution?

There are a few abilities you unlock, but ultimately it’s a game about playing against a self-learning AI.

What changes did the concept go through from the original design?

The visuals are the heaviest one, we experimented a lot with the look of the game. From there it’s the design of the house, the neighbor’s behavior, and how do we present the story. Heavy iteration on those parts.

"He likes them traps."

How did you develop the self-learning AI of the neighbor? How did you effectively balance it between being artificial but still human and willing to make mistakes?

The way we designed it facilitates mistakes, which makes it interesting and unpredictable. It’s all about learning the player’s patterns, and reacting to changes in the house. If the AI sees moved furniture – he will start to hunt for the player.

Can you tell us about some of the things the neighbor will do to counteract players on later playthroughs?

He likes them traps.

What is your most memorable playthrough of the game thus far?

When a play tester saw the final game, and screamed out of surprise.

In the game, the player moves into a house across the street from a mysterious, nameless neighbour who is hiding a terrible secret in his basement. The player’s job is to search the home of the neighbour without being caught and discover his secret. Where Hello Neighbor stands out is the advanced AI of the neighbor, who learns from the players past behaviours and modifies to prevent those actions from being as useful. The neighbor will learn hiding spots, favourite tactics and set traps on paths the player previously used. The player must thus change up their approach to avoid the attentive neighbour, use items to their advantage to break away from a pursuit and learn to outsmart the AI over time.

The game has gained a relatively positive reception over the course of development through Youtube influencers like Markiplier, JackSepticeye and Captainsauce before the game even released. Following a delay to correct for bugs, Hello Neighbor is set to launch on Xbox One and PC on December 8th, 2017.

• 1. Development
• 2. Story
• 3. Gameplay
• 4. Characters

Development

While the earliest details on Hello Neighbor and the developers at Dynamic Pixels aren’t widely avalible, the game originally launched on their website with an alpha build, and a trailer, showing off a little bit about what the game would be. The focuses on stealth horror, procedural AI, and tense gameplay were a part of the project from the beginning, as well as its Pixar inspired art style.

The team quickly took their early build and trailer to Kickstarter on October 12th, 2015, after the game was successful in the Steam Greenlight Program that June. Dynamic Pixels was asking for a $100,000 goal to continue development, and flesh out the project. While the team did not get funded completely through Kickstarter, managing only $12,000, they took the experience to heart and continued to work on the game with the feedback received through the campaign.

Though they did not secure their own funding through Kickstarter, Hello Neighbor was picked up by publisher Tinybuild, popular for other titles like SpeedRunners and Punch Club, to continue development. Much like Tinybuild’s previous titles, Hello Neighbor used an open development methodology to help guide the game to completion, as such there is a fleshed out timeline on how the game would grow.

The first pre-Alpha version was very barebones, showing off more a proof of concept than a full game. The player begins in his own home, and is directed towards a glowing basement door in his neighbor’s home. Before the player enters he is caught, send back to his house and the neighbor boards the door to the basement. The home in this and several subsequent Alpha builds is quite different from what we’ve seen in more recent builds, but in this pre-alpha only the first floor is accessible. The player is challenged to find a tool to remove the boards on the basement door, a key to unlock it, and a code to the keypad.

Future revisions would change the nature of the puzzle, like losing the keypad for a keycard, adding new puzzles such as bypassing a robot shark on the second floor, the addition of a tutorial, adding a day/night cycle and the addition of abilities the player can find, such as a double jump and a one time ability to break free of the Neighbor. The Neighbor himself also gains new abilities and becomes better at his job of keeping the player from the basement, including the ability to climb ladders.

The final version for Xbox One and PC was originally scheduled to launch on August 29th, 2017. However that month, the game had to be pushed back to deal with bugs arising from an engine update that broke the AI, which is kind of a big deal in a game with the central point of outsmarting an AI.

Story

Hello Neighbor has more of a loose premise for the gameplay than a narrative structure to follow. You move into a small, quiet village across the street from a mysterious, shifty looking neighbour who you quickly find is hiding something in his basement he is quite serious about keeping safe. Something so important that he has decided it to keep it under wraps, key-carded and boarded the door shut. It’s on you to outsmart the Neighbor, get into his basement, and discover whatever something – or someone he might be keeping in there.

Gameplay

The main focus of the gameplay of Hello Neighbor is sneaking around the Neighbor’s rather large home, finding the items you need to break into his basement and exposing his secret, all without being spotted by him, who will chase down and catch you, ending your run and sending you home.

But as the player is caught in different situations by the neighbor, the AI gathers what it can learn about each mistake the player makes, the actions, decisions, movements, favourite tactics, entry points and such, and adapt to counter the player’s tactics. He’ll board up smashed windows, place bear traps or cameras to catch you or alert him, block doors with chairs to keep you from rooms and more. The player can interact with almost anything you can think of in the home, and use it to their advantage, though loud noises generated by smashing a window or even turning on a TV can alert him to your position.

The neighbor himself is not invunerable. A crafty player can use items throughout the house to their advantage not only to gain access to the basement, but also to trip up the Neighbor as well, for example blinding him with Fireworks for a few moments or turning his Bear traps back on him. The player will also find different tools as they go, not all immediately useful but will progress the game when used properly or save the player from a mistake, such as the Hammer to get the boards off the door, and the Umbrella which can allow you to float from an otherwise game ending two-storey drop. The player can only hold four items at a single time, and duplicates can not be stacked, asking strategy from the player.

The game ends when you finally outsmart the Neighbor and get into his basement to discover his secret.

Characters

There aren’t a lot of key players in Hello Neighbor. The game is basically you, a fresh faced blank avatar who just moved into the sleepy little village the game is set in, against the AI. There’s not a lot known about the Neighbor. He’s shifty, doesn’t want you getting into his basement, and will go to any length to do it.

Note: This wiki will be updated once we have more information about the game.