Secret Neighbor Review (Switch eShop)

Of all the indie games released over the last decade, you’ll be forgiven for thinking the stealth horror game Hello Neighbor is one of the lesser-known creations, one that got caught up in the onslaught of, let’s face it, better games. However, despite poor critical reception, Hello Neighbor found its audience and, by extension, its success, spawning a number of additional titles and even an animated series.

Secret Neighbor is a multiplayer spinoff title in which several children must infiltrate Mr. Peterson’s sinister house to rescue one of their own from the basement. The capture? One of the children is secretly the disguised neighbor, who must do everything in his power to dissuade the children from his target and ultimately capture them all.

The main gameplay remains the same as its predecessor: taking place from a first-person perspective, you are encouraged to explore every corner of the dark and dank house, which means that the controls should be as fluid as possible. By default the movement can be quite clunky, with super slow sensitivity that you’ll want to increase significantly in settings (while also reversing the Y-axis, because that’s the right way to play any first-person game; fight with me!). There’s also a ton of motion blur, which you can thankfully turn off or off entirely, because Wow, it is incredibly annoying in its default settings.

Playing as a kid or the Neighbor himself is completely random when matching. You can choose which child to play with from a small selection of different characters, but we often saw people choosing the same type of character. We suspect this may be a tactical choice, to allow the Neighbor to blend in more with the crowd, but it’s hard to confirm with certainty. On a positive note though, matchmaking is pretty much instant, with minimal wait times, at least if you opt for the default game mode.

When you enter a game, the game will tell you whether you are playing as a kid or as the cowardly neighbor, with some basic instructions on what to do during the game. We’ll be the first to admit this, but when we started playing as kids, we didn’t have a track what we had to do. After a bit of trial and error and a bit of luck finding the right items, the point of the game slowly began to sink in. What didn’t help, though, is that if you’re pairing up with strangers, don’t worry. surprised if some of them just refuse to play well. We have lost count of the number of times we witnessed the entire group of players wandering around the entrance of the house, throwing boxes at each other while shouting “neighbor, neighbor!”. Kids, huh?

Navigating the house and locating the relevant keys to expand your search is fun for a short time, but it quickly loses its charm thanks to the aforementioned janky controls (even with heightened sensitivity) and smooth ambient layout. Much of the house is shrouded in darkness, so you have a torch to keep you company, but you can swap it out for different items as you go through the different rooms. The problem is that there is simply nothing interesting to look for other than the crucial keys. You can look in all the drawers and cabinets, but it feels incredibly tedious after a few short rounds.

Playing as the neighbor, on the other hand, is infinitely more fun and rewarding, albeit completely unbalanced. You start with the appearance of one of the children, pairing yourself with the character design of your choice from the main menu. Now if you want, you can just switch the neighbor immediately and chase your opponents around the house until you catch them all (which is also tedious and not very difficult), or you can play it cool, act out the role for a bit. and catch children while they are isolated and unprepared.

It’s a fancy concept and it can be fun, at least until you realize how easy it is to win matches playing as Neighbor. The game is simply too lopsided; If the kids find out about your costume, it doesn’t really matter. Sure, they’ll throw some items at you, but ultimately the Neighbor is too powerful to stop him, and the only hope the kids have of achieving victory is to avoid the Neighbor altogether and work together (something almost impossible if we’re pairing with strangers).

As for any kind of longevity or real enjoyment, this depends almost entirely on whether you can play with friends. The game loses its appeal too quickly thanks to its unreliable controls and the tendency for matches to descend into chaos thanks to, well, kids. If you can find like-minded people who are really committed to playing the game ‘right’ then you might have a little fun with this one, but you’re still stuck with silly controls and an uninspiring design. All in all, for the sake of your sanity, we’ll probably lose it.

conclusion

Secret Neighbor is, in theory, a significant and intriguing spin-off of Hello Neighbor, featuring multiplayer elements that really should it works quite well. In practice, however, the game suffers from poor controls, an uncomplicated environmental design, and quite frankly its own player base. Matches turn into excruciating spectacles of mayhem, and even as players commit to the rules of the game, it remains completely unbalanced, favoring the incredibly powerful neighbor every time. Even if you are a fan of asymmetric multiplayer games, you’d better skip this one.