Critics were not kind to Dynamic Pixels game Hello Neighbor when it launched in 2017, with some evening going so far as to label it one of the year's worst releases. Some praise was lavished upon the colorful art direction and easy to grasp gameplay, but every other aspect of the game was uniformly hated. However, the game has since become a wildly popular franchise, largely due to social media.
In Hello Neighbor, players take the role of Nicky Roth, an ordinary, small-town boy who hears a blood-curdling scream from his neighbor's house when he's outside playing one day. This prompts him to go inside and find out what's going on. Its simple premise feeds directly into the stealth gameplay, which has players infiltrate the titular neighbor's house to discover what dark secrets lurk within. All of this is set against a colorful, suburban backdrop that has a vague hint of something sinister lurking beneath -- think Rear Window, if it was directed by Tim Burton.
The original game sits at a 38 percent on Metacritic, with its user score barely scraping a 4.5 -- which would typically mean curtains for any other game. Against all odds, Hello Neighbor survived its harsh critical bashing and has gone on to become something of an underdog within the industry.
Despite the poor reviews, sales for the game were surprisingly solid, perhaps in no small part due to its child-friendly approach to survival horror that no doubt fooled parents and relatives into thinking the game was full of whimsy and cartoony fun, rather than nerve-shredding tension and various assaults with Chinese takeout boxes. At the time of this writing, the game has seen in excess of 30 million downloads, a truly staggering number for a game that was so harshly panned on launch.
Much like other, more child-friendly horror games, such as Five Nights at Freddy's and Bendy and the Ink Machine, the YouTube community was quick to latch onto Hello Neighbor, churning out a ludicrous amount of let's plays and scream compilations -- which raised its profile to bold new heights. This led to Dynamic Pixels releasing a series of patches to make the gameplay smoother and more functional.
Dynamic Pixels wasted no time in crafting a prequel title with Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek, which explored the origins of the titular neighbor. Hide & Seek was better received than its predecessor, managing to scrape an overall score of 55 percent on Metacritic, with an average user score of 5.0. Much like the original, Hide & Seek struck gold on YouTube, with legions of users flocking to the title.
Before long, fans were blessed with Secret Neighbor, a multiplayer spin-off title set between the original game's first two acts. This game saw a varied group of local kids band together to help rescue their friend from the clutches of the evil neighbor and fared much better with users, scoring a modest 6.0 on Metacritic -- although a general score from critics is surprisingly absent. Much like Hide & Seek, Secret Neighbor was a commercial success and cemented the series as being something of a mainstay in the indie market, but it was at this time that the series decided to move away from the world of video games.
Publisher tinyBuild released a six-minute animated pilot based on Hide & Seek in April, which racked up over 11 million views in its first week on YouTube. No more has been said on the progress of the series, but fans currently remain hopeful that it'll be picked up soon.
At this year's Xbox Games Showcase, Hello Neighbor 2 was announced for 2021, which will continue the surprisingly successful franchise. An Alpha build of the game landed on Steam shortly after, adding further fuel to the fire and giving YouTube personalities a new thing to scream about. Despite an incredibly shaky start, Hello Neighbor is a franchise that's here to stay.