Learning is also a big part of his strategy: if he finds you in a cupboard once, expect him to start checking them all. He realises when doors that weren’t open before have suddenly become ajar, he notices when lights are turned off or on, and he’ll investigate noises from different rooms. The Neighbor has just as many ways to hunt you down and capitalise on any mistakes you make. Loads of reassuring options, right? Well, no. To hide you can switch off the power to the house, hide behind corners and (surprise surprise) in cupboards, turn lights on and off to give yourself better cover and, if you get caught, use some items to stun the Neighbor when he’s chasing you. So how far do the stealth mechanics go? You can pick up almost anything to use to your advantage, whether that be to break windows, break open doors, peek through keyholes, or distract the Neighbor by chucking things around. The tension is high enough as it is when you’re innocent, but when you’re not quite certain if you’re interloping you become not only scared of being discovered, but scared of what happens if you don’t get found - after all, if someone was hiding in your house, you’d want to find them as quickly as possible, right? In Hello, Neighbor! you’re the odd one, maybe even the villain, who has broken into a house on a summer afternoon, because you think there’s something iffy going on. There are no mutants or monsters here, just that unsettling feeling that you don’t quite know enough about your next door chum which, admit it, we’ve all felt at one point or another. Initially it’s hard to imagine how the colourful, Pixar-ish environment could be unnerving, but the sheer cheeriness of the level design does a damn good job at undermining any fond childhood memories when the Neighbor notices you and a Jaws-like theme starts playing, the edges of the screen flooding into darkness. But this is the new genre of suburban horror, and there are many more shades of grey.
Usually in horror games you’ll play the part of the lone survivor or brave explorer, almost always innocent versus the terrifying, sometimes mutated enemies who prowl around the asylum, hospital, school, abandoned house, mineshaft, whatever. In Hello, Neighbor!, you might be the crackpot. That person minding their own business could just as easily be you, and you can bet that if I thought there was some stranger in my house I’d also be trying to find them, to get them the hell out. Hello, Neighbor! is set in a normal house (apart from the bolted-down basement door) with a guy who is simply going about his day until you barge in.
But it’s easy to make wandering around someone’s house scary by turning its owners into cannibals, zombies or mutants, because with all that to deal with you’re perfectly entitled to sneak around. You’re given just a tad more motive for hiding in, say, the home of the gruesome Baker family in Resident Evil 7, because you’re trying not to be the next course on their dinner table.