Hello Neighbor 2is a sequel to the hit title Hello Neighbor and follows journalist Quentin as he investigates the mystery of Raven Brooks, which just so happens to involve breaking and entering into a whole town’s worth of houses. While here, you’ll try your best to sneak around patrolling neighbors and uncover whichever secrets lie ahead.
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There’s around four to six hours worth of content, or even more, if you own the DLC, and each chapter is filled with puzzles to solve. Not everything about the experience is faultless, and if some aspects were different, it would improve the overall game.
7Smoother Controls
When playing on Xbox or PlayStation, you’ll be having a breeze of a time compared to keyboard and mouse players who have to awkwardly shift the protagonist around to get them in the sweet spot where they can then pick up a desired item. PC users will also need to be wary of the slight delay in interacting with things, especially when racing against the lethal purser clock of the neighbors.
These strange controls add to the situation’s intensity and make it more horrific in that sense, but easier-to-use controls are the preferable option.
6Improved Neighbor AI
Unlike the first game, the sequel has more than one person trying to prevent you from progressing. The first you meet is the police officer who guards the house you’re trying to enter. He does very little besides standing guard of the front door and walking inside the house every minute or so, but he gives a taste of what to expect.
All other pursuers from here play primarily the same, with them all being extremely easy to run away and hide from, where sometimes even standing close to them won’t trigger them to attack you. It’s an unfortunate bug that results in the AI feeling uneven and removing a lot of the promised challenge.
5Gameplay Diversity With The Neighbors
On the same topic of the neighbors, there’s little difference between how their gameplay works. Once you understand one of their patrolling and attack patterns, you’ll know all you need to avoid them successfully. Simply moving to a different level of a building,hiding in a locker, under a table, or taking cover behind a wall will almost always ensure your safety.
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This is excellent for tactical gameplay but not so much forbringing something new to a levelwith each neighbor. These pursuers could have dedicated sections where you’re free to walk around and solve puzzles and other moments where you need to evade them, so it isn’t all a continuous process.
4Additional Inventory Space
Eighty percent of the items you find are needed to complete a puzzle or get through a locked door, but your inventory never reflects this sentiment. You’ll always want scissors, a crowbar, and an abundance of keys to get through the many locked pathways, although you’ll never have enough space to carry it all.
Dropping these items puts you at risk of them glitching out of the building, so you’ll have to keep a mental note of everything’s location. With a game like this, you don’t need inventory management on top of everything else; a few extra spaces or an unlimited inventory would do you well.
3A Way To Respawn Items
Items are necessary to move forward, and when losing them, your only chance is to reload an earlier save to get it back. If a respawn button were added, it would help fix many of the bugs where items will disappear when dropped and would remove the act of having to reload a save.
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You wouldn’t want everything to respawn back to their respective places, but instead, just have the most recent item that you dropped respawn if it suddenly blips out of existence.
2A Clearer Story
There isn’t much of a story for Hello Neighbor 2, which isn’t a fault of the game, and it never deducts from the enjoyment, especially since solving puzzles and hiding from the neighbors is the focus. With that being said, a few parts of the story are easier to follow with outside knowledge of the game and discussions with other players, making it a little frustrating.
You know your goal is to track down the neighbor from the first game and that you have to work your way through Raven Brooks to do this, but what you don’t know is why each character is so hellbent on taking you down or why Aaron’s presence isn’t explained more in the sequel.
1More Interactivity
Every item you interact with is acquired for the sole purpose of solving a puzzleto then get through to the next room or area. There aren’t any collectibles like notes and audio logs to further build upon the story or small moments that encourage players to interact more with the environment.
If the game were to include optional interactable items like those in other indie games, whether adding to the story or not, it would give the player a greater sense of the world so they feel fully involved with the narrative.
