What Went Wrong? - Hello Neighbor

The developers of Hello Neighbor really focused too much into making it into a 'Youtube playthrough' game. You can have fun watching someone else struggle through the puzzles, but to try and play it yourself feels like a chore.

The publisher desperately tweeting at MatPat to care about their game again is one of the saddest things I've ever seen

Kinda feels like the devs saw everyone doing weird parkour in the early alpha builds and thought, “Oh, this must be how people want to play!” instead of realizing it was just folks poking around and exploring however they could in an incomplete game.

I like how the neighbors AI seems to get worse at every single alpha release. It is literally evolving backwards.

The fact Alpha 1 has the best shading sums up the whole game

literally went from "horror mystery game" like Amnesia, to "zany platformer" in a few months. The drastic shift of tone killed this game

Hell, a better ending would have been the player waking up from the dream, but they were actually stuck in the basement as the neighbour had kidnapped them as a kid. They were just dreaming of themselves rescuing themselves.

The early version was deemed too scary because the neighbor t-posed while he was chasing you

That early footage with the player blocking the door in a room. That was scarier than the final game.

Markiplier was incredibly smart when deciding to drop this game, he hadn’t even touched the full release, but by the final alpha, he knew this game was gonna be shite, and lo and behold

I always thought Hello Neighbor really should have ended with like you get in the basement and find out that, no nothing nefarious is down there and then you get arrested for breaking and entering like a psychopath.

I like a cheesy “he was a murderer” or “he’s trying to bring back his wife and daughter in some Frankenstein fashion”. You don’t always have to be deep in order to make a good game. The AI was already fantastic. The Alpha could have been cleaned up a bit, adding small details to the environment, patch up the story, and it could have perfect.

The early gameplay demo video is genuinely more terrifying to watch than the later alphas and even the full release. Says a lot about the downfall of the game

This is the first time ever I've seen a case of a game reaching its peak during its first Alpha

I feel like the devs of this game was just like: “Let’s make the wackiest nonsensical story possible, have some YouTuber and Redditer come up with some theories and lore for the game and pretend that’s actually what we’ve meant to do the whole time.”

The neighbor actually learns from you,but since the game is so damn convoluted he just learns to be confused from your own confusion

So the "deep lore" of this game is summed up very quickly? Your curiosity as a kid get's you kidnapped and you break out broken, beaten and scarred. Then 20 years later, you have a weird dream. That sounds like there was supposed to be an on the nose metaphor about childhood trauma, but hit the mark about as well as that jar of pickles entered the trolley.

I feel this game tried to be too many things at once. It’s a stealth game where you avoid the neighbor. It leans into horror elements. It’s a platformer. It’s a puzzle game. It’s got deep convoluted lore. While some of these could’ve worked together they should’ve just stuck with one or two. What initially drew people to the game was the AI of the neighbor learning from your previous failures (boarding up windows, checking closets, etc.). They should’ve focuses on that and stealth elements rather than try to make it a mix of everything

"It's just a dream" is always a bad way to end a story. It objectively invalidates everything. None of the events mattered because they weren't even real. In order for a story to matter, there needs to be tangible consequences or at least threats of consequence.

I remember the original story being about how the neighbor was actually your estranged father and how you were responsible for the death of your sister. That was where the whole thing with the coffin originally came in. Unfortunately once the hype machine started the game got too ambitious and thats where the downfall started.