Hello Neighbor isn’t a game that everyone remembers fondly, but returning fans are sure to compare the sequel with the original. Surprisingly enough, years of experience and development didn’t translate into a direct improvement. Rather, this sequel is as inspired by the original as it finds ways to differentiate itself.
Both Hello Neighbor and Hello Neighbor 2 are about infiltrating one or more houses with the objective of discovering why people are disappearing in this neighborhood. While players are snooping around a building, the residing neighbor goes on with their life, apparently only mildly interested in catching this intruder. Both games are aimed at an all-age group, something of a rarity in the stealth-horror genre.
6
More Tools
In many ways, Hello Neighbor 2 feels empty when compared to the original. One major exception appears clear when comparing the arsenal of tools available to players in the two games. While Hello Neighbor 1 has more total items than its sequel, most of them are iterations on the idea of “throwable weapon” and “distractions”.
Hello Neighbor 2 has a more streamlined approach to tools, planting distractions like alarm clocks firmly on the ground and outside the player’s inventory. It also reduces the number of “usable” tools to just the shovel, the scissors, the crowbar, and the fire extinguisher. Even then, just by introducing the security cameras, Hello Neighbor 2 makes the tools feel like a much more important part of the game than they perhaps really are.
5 Less Story
The story of the Hello Neighbor series is weird and confusing, sprawling over 10 games (counting alphas as individual releases) and many books. The games almost got their own TV series, of which the pilot can be seen in Hello Neighbor 2 as an Easter Egg. It might be surprising, then, to learn that the original game is a self-contained story with a satisfying ending.
Unlike its predecessor, Hello Neighbor 2 doesn’t have a clear finale, ending on a cliffhanger of dubious importance, failing to pose questions as much as to answer them. The plot looks like a filler episode, with no clear stakes or objective other than to investigate the antagonist of the first game for the same kidnappings that were already cleared up in the original game.
4 More Houses, More Neighbors
The whole game of Hello Neighbor had just one neighbor, as the name implies, with one house that would massively change between levels. Infiltrating that one house was the main objective of the entirety of the game, except the last hour or so of gameplay.
Hello Neighbor 2 has an entire village worth of houses, although only a handful are inhabited and can be explored. Still, sneaking through multiple buildings, each with a unique theme and design, makes the repetitive gameplay much easier to digest. Even then, the neighbors seem to all have the same AI and similar routines, the only real difference being their appearance.
3 Better Puzzles
It’s hard to call the puzzles in Hello Neighbor 2 good, but they are a far cry from the inscrutable contraptions that plagued the original game. While Hello Neighbor 1 had complex, incomplete machines that the player had to activate, the sequel threats puzzles like simple activities that are only made hard when hiding from the neighbor.
In the best puzzle games, getting stuck for a few minutes now and then is part of the intended experience. In a way, the original Hello Neighbor was more of a puzzle game than its sequel, but with surprisingly worst puzzles. Complex mysteries might be fun to unravel, but only as long as the puzzle is the only real task in the player’s hands.
2 Different Presentation
The original Hello Neighbor started as a small project. As a result, most of the art looked charming as a still picture while bordering on grotesque when put into motion. The lighting also never looked very good, as the whole world was baked in a weird yellowy light of unclear origin.
Art and animation seem to have received lots of attention in Hello Neighbor 2. The result is a game that is still cartoony but more grounded than the original, making for more readable levels that still look pleasant. Visuals and animations are where the series saw the biggest improvements, but music and sound effects are also more varied and unique.
1 The Open World
The open-world structure is perhaps the biggest change going from Hello Neighbor 1 to its sequel. Even if both games are about infiltrating a neighbor’s house, Hello Neighbor 2 places all its buildings in the same town, letting the player walk from one objective to the next.
The open world might seem like a major difference, but it quickly reveals itself to be of little importance, since players will only ever be tasked to explore one house at any time. Still, even if it is underused, the open world makes the events of the game feel like an investigation instead of a string of random occurrences.
Hello Neighbor 2 is now available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.