Reviews
[Review] ‘Hello Neighbor Hide & Seek’ Gets Surreal, But Loses the Series’ Horror Edge
A deeper look at the tragic past of a villain, but the returning horrors are not welcome ones. Find out why in our Hello Neighbor Hide & Seek review.
Hello Neighbor is somewhat of an anomaly: a game that was largely panned by critics at launch (sitting on a tepid OpenCritic average of 42) yet boasts a surprisingly large fanbase. There’s now a Hello Neighbor “universe” with two more games, a novel series, and merch that includes a Neighbor Funko Pop and even a range of McFarlane playsets and figures. While baffling to some there’s obviously a demand there, no doubt driven by the game’s popularity among YouTubers and streamers.
For those who’ve never heard of Hello Neighbor, it’s a bizarre, janky hodgepodge of genres: a first-person stealth puzzler with a healthy dose of platforming. Children have been going missing in the small suburban town of Raven Brooks and it doesn’t take long to work out who is behind these strange disappearances. As a child, you decide to enter the Neighbor’s home and investigate just what is going on while making sure you aren’t his next victim.
What follows is a series of puzzles that often require you to build platforms, flip switches, and collect key items from around the house including a variety of tools. It’s an interesting, creepy premise though the game wasn’t without its fair share of issues from confusing puzzles and rough first-person platforming to the Neighbor’s sporadic AI and a myriad of bugs.
For Dynamic Pixels, one thing that worked in the developer’s favor was a shift in art direction. Since it was revealed a couple of years ago, the game became increasingly more stylised, the end result looking like a Lemony Snicket/Cartoon Network crossover – peculiar and eccentric with a sinister undertone. Not only did this imbue Hello Neighbor with a more unique sense of character, but it also meant that the game could target a younger audience that would, in turn, grow into a thriving fanbase.
On the surface, Hello Neighbor doesn’t have much of a story. After escaping the house your character moves to the city only to return to Raven Brooks many years later, facing off against the Neighbor in a bizarre dream sequence, his home gradually turning into a rickety fortress held together by boards and nails.
You never really learn who he is or what exactly is going on in that basement. However, as you play Hello Neighbor you get the sense that it’s trying to tell a much deeper story, as evidenced by the occasional game over cutscene and fairly unassuming clues scattered about the house. Fans have continued to theorize, picking apart the game’s four, fairly brief acts to find some meaning. With Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek, Dynamic Pixels finally fills in some of the blanks.
It’s a prequel, and one that focuses on the Neighbor’s son and daughter. Each of the five stages has them dive into their own imaginations, the scenarios they encounter becoming more twisted following the sudden death of their mother and as their family life starts to deteriorate. As in the original game, characters rarely speak and when they do it’s conveyed through Sims-like gobbledygook, leaving players to infer what is being said. Still, the game manages to hit home with a couple of its more impactful cutscenes, painting the villainous Neighbor in a completely new light, albeit a fairly tragic one.
Actually playing Hide & Seek can be somewhat of an ordeal, however. For the most part, it’s pretty much the same as Hello Neighbor. There’s an overriding focus on puzzles and platforming while attempting to evade an ever-present stalker who, in this case, is the Neighbor’s son.
The five stages are all structured similarly – imaginary playboxes in which you’ll need to collect hidden toys and place them in a basket to advance. The way these toys are carefully stashed away means that you’ll need to search every nook and cranny, exploring hard-to-reach places and keeping an eye out for key items that may be of use.
Some of the solutions can be genuinely fun and rewarding though others are simply too vague. It wouldn’t be such an issue if Hide & Seek didn’t demand that you retrieve every single collectible in order to clear a stage – there are plenty to find and only having one or two left with no idea where they are can be infuriating to say the least.
With the Neighbor himself being largely out of focus, that slight horror element from the original game doesn’t really carry over. Creeping around his house, unsure where he was going to appear led to some tense moments that you just don’t get with Hide & Seek. Evading the Neighbor’s son is easy and while the stages become more surreal there’s an altogether lighter vibe this time around.
For those who simply must know what happens in the lead up to that first game, Hello Neighbor: Hide & Seek is essential for filling in those blanks. However, those who are simply looking for a fun game to play are likely to be left deeply unsatisfied. Unpolished and often times confusing, it’s a weird mishmash of genres that, despite its issues, is at least helping to popularise an incredibly niche genre of children’s horror in video games.
Hide & Seek is sure to go down well with fans, and with another (multiplayer-focused) game already in the works, it will be interesting to see how Dynamic Pixels continues to build the franchise in future, hopefully tightening its core design and rounding off some of those rougher edges.
Hello Neighbor Hide & Seek review code on PS4 provided by the publisher.
Hello Neighbor Hide & Seek is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
It’s a day of the month ending in Y, and that means it’s time for another killer shark film. Why? Because they’re inexpensive to make, play into an easy fear, and keep finding audiences willing to give them a spin. The Bay is the latest entry in the shark attack subgenre, and while it’s noticeably better than last month’s Chum, it still struggles to barely stay afloat.
Emma (Francesca Eastwood) and Lani (Dani Oliveros) are best friends who’ve traveled to Thailand for a destination wedding, and a chance encounter at the buffet table leads to an unexpected adventure. Mandal (Alexander Wraith) is a friendly, knowledgeable transplant who connects with nature and makes a living by offering boat tours through the area’s scenic waterways. The trips culminate with the opportunity for tourists to witness a shark feeding with local tiger sharks. The tourists aren’t meant to be the food, obviously, but sometimes accidents happen.
The Bay checks off most of the subgenre’s expected beats – an attractive location, an iffy ensemble of characters, a series of poor choices – but it does a few things differently along the way. For one thing, while we see plenty of sharks in the build-up, the first attack doesn’t happen until past the film’s midpoint. Writer/director Phil Volken fills the time leading up to that attack with engaging enough character beats, some genuine suspense, and an abundance of dialogue about how sharks aren’t typically a threat to people – or threats like people. “Sharks hunt,” says Mandal, “humans kill.”
It’s a bit of foreshadowing, perhaps, but it’s also the film’s presiding theme. Sharks don’t want to hurt or kill humans, but “mistakes happen.” Mandal offers up numerous eco-friendly spiels about the role sharks play in the environment, how overhunting could lead to disaster, and how humans are the ones invading their territory. “Don’t act like prey,” and you won’t be bitten, eaten, digested, and shat out by a shark. Pretty simple, if you think about it.
Trouble starts when they toss a chunk of meat into the water attached to a chain and a large female tiger shark gets caught up in it. Mandal’s sidekick, a local man named Ruhan (Ta’imua), panics and starts stabbing at the thrashing creature. He has a history of being bitten by a shark and is clearly frightened, and as the situation worsens, he becomes a far more active threat to the others’ safety than the actual sharks. That character type is pretty common in these films, but it’s a curious choice to make the film’s sole indigenous member of the ensemble the morally weak link.
To be clear, Ta’imua is playing a local but isn’t actually Thai. He is, however, Hawaiian, and The Bay was filmed off Oahu, meaning he’s the only indigenous representation on both counts. The other three characters, all Americans, are brave and willing to risk their own safety for the group, leaving only Ruhan to put a face to the cruel, selfish humans mentioned earlier in the film. It’s certainly a choice!
His performance is somewhat stifled by the desire to make him seem menacing, but it’s passable. The others are equally okay as performers, but it’s only Oliveros’ Dani who stands apart as a spirited individual worthy of viewer fist pumps. Cinematographer Helge Gerull delivers some attractive landscape shots destined to make you consider a Hawaiian vacation, and composer Gad Emile Zeitune finds some effective aural backdrops for the film’s teasingly emotional moments.
Then there’s the sharks. A major drag on the subgenre these days is the use of cheap CG effects (including the abysmal use of A.I. in Chum), but The Bay sidesteps that problem for the most part. There are real sharks here, lots of them, but they appear to be solely present via stock footage edited into the film. Some CG is used here and there, too, with shots being comped together to tighten the proximity between humans and sharks. Most effective, arguably, are the practical effects used to create fins cutting through the water near the characters.
There’s a sense of grounded reality to the shark kills, and while they’re less showy, they’re weightier as a result. Wounded bodies drift away, and the moment where shark nibbles turn into ferocious feasting feels more inevitable and affecting than sudden or scary. The sole exception to the general quality of those kills is the film’s final shark encounter, which doubles down on the poor choices by pairing a silly CG beat with some poorly matched stock footage.
Pretty much every shark attack movie lives or dies on its presentation of the sharks themselves. There are exceptions, of course, with Steven Spielberg’s Jaws being chief among them – everything about that film, from the writing and acting to the directing and editing, helps make it a masterpiece despite the mechanical shark looking goofy as hell outside of the water – but The Bay isn’t Jaws. It’s not even Jaws: The Revenge. Its live sharks are mildly effective, though, and give it a subdued realism that will likely appeal to viewers averse to CG intrusions. Will that be enough to win them over, though?
“When you enter the ocean, you enter the food chain… and not necessarily at the top,” says an opening onscreen quote from Jacques Cousteau, and something similar could be said for shark attack movies in general. When you make one of these movies, you enter a well-trodden and densely populated subgenre… and you’re all but guaranteed to not be at or even near the top. The Bay is closer to the ocean floor than the water’s surface, and while that still puts it above the bulk of the genre, it’s probably not enough of a reason to step foot in these waters.
The Bay opens in theaters and on demand on July 17, 2026.
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