The designers are incredibly competent at understanding the rules of their own system, and so are the QA testers. The puzzle design feels like a case of over-familiarity.
It is unpredictable, and that lack of predictability is frustrating. Sometimes he’s got a laser target on your forehead when you step on a baby blade of grass. Sometimes you can walk right past him and he doesn’t see or hear you. I have no idea how he operates or how he is controlled. The Man, who will chase you, throw glue at you, smack you with some sort of red substance that blurs your vision, and ultimately strangle you so that you need to restart the level (with your progress and items saved, of course) is hard to deal with. If that isn’t confusing enough, there is an all-seeing, all-knowing entity stalking the levels. Putting players in the world and saying “well, get to it, buster” forces people to seek out help. It might mean that hardcore players will commit, solve and then share their solutions on YouTube or streaming platforms. I can imagine that in the design process, or at least in the conversations about how the game might make its way out into the world, that this could have been talked about as a positive. There are no hints, no tips, and very few visual signifiers about how to move forward or respond to the stalking, grunting, kidnapping Man. The game is almost 100% hands-off from that point forward.
You need to get inside of his house, unlock the door, and see what’s up. A child is screaming and you, a young boy who is running down the middle of the damn street playing with a ball, sneak up to a window to see what’s going on. Hello Neighbor opens with a horrible scene. It is a fickle, arbitrary experience that demands you be a mind reader, an expert in level layout, and a master of a fumbling control scheme. The reality, I am sad to report, is that Hello Neighbor fails at those things. Hello Neighbor is meant to be a more reactive Alien Isolation or a more dynamic Amnesia. The combination of these two game design ideas should, in theory, create a very exciting scenario. The second is that it wants you to solve puzzles in tightly constructed environments. The first is that it wants you to play head-to-head up against a malevolent AI kidnapper/murder man in a high-stakes game of cat and mouse.
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