Tiny Build’s Hello Neighbor Alpha Access Available Now!
Tiny Build’s not-so-tiny booth at PAX East had some impressive titles in development. Among them, the Hello Neighbor Alpha caught lots of attention. Stack-Up covered the survival horror’s Pre-Alpha release back in November, and the demo in the main expo hall looks much better than what we saw back then. With higher-quality graphics and fewer game-crashing glitches, Hello Neighbor seems well on its way to releasing this summer!
You play as a newcomer to this quiet suburban street. After moving the first box into your new house, you find a bulky mustachioed man in your doorway. The man attacks you without a word and knocks you unconscious. You wake up to find yourself on your couch, outside in the yard. The man has seized your home! Once you peer inside, you spot a strange metal door leading to the basement, where the neighbor has installed a security system to protect what’s inside. You’ll have to sneak around the house, get the keys from this intruder, and reveal whatever’s behind that door!
While the textures and shading are a huge improvement, turning the gameplay’s focus onto your own house was incredibly disappointing. The sheer absurdity in the neighbor’s house made the pre-Alpha model fun to play. The crazy mansion across the street had a trolley running through (and outside of!) the third floor, a classroom full of mannequins, even a flooded second-floor hallway with a shark swimming through it! The cartoonish physics made the survivor-horror gameplay really entertaining and unique.
In the booth’s demo, there are no wacky rooms with even wackier puzzles to solve. Instead, all you get are a few empty spaces and some oddly-placed cabinets to hide in. While the gameplay feels much more straightforward without all the crazy features, it was also much more boring.
Fortunately, it seems that Tiny Build only wanted to present the cat-and-mouse premise in this demo. The neighbor’s house isn’t gone for good and will be featured in the full release.
Hello Neighbor will be available on Steam this summer, but you can sign up for the Alpha now on the game’s website.