It was almost scary how fast this game disappeared. One minute, there were speculation videos and fanmade songs all over UA-cam and the next there was silence.
The funniest part about Tiny Build desperately trying to get matpat to make a theory about the tv pilot is that like a week after Matpat called it a crappy low budget horror game
@@KD6-3005 No, the real story is something like the neighbor losing his wife in a car crash and his son killed his daughter. The protagonist found the neighbor locking the son up to keep him from being taken away and the neighbor locked him up to so no one would find out. All the rest is just a dream sequence about it.
@@swaggyspaceman9805 yeah the dream section is all about the protagonist (I forgot his name) overcoming his childhood trauma from being locked in and escaping the neighbours basement. The 3 abilities you get in act 3 represent his fears
@@swaggyspaceman9805 wow I never knew that I just really wanted matpats theory to be right honestly Huh, ....I *guess* that's an interesting story of it's own I just lost interest before I ever heard it until now
When i first heard of this game, i was hoping the twist would be that nothing was in the basement, that he was just a normal neighbor who had a love of engineering or perhaps was just paranoid because of the fact that the player kept breaking into their home.
I didn't know much about this game but the ending being that you were just an annoying brat who kept breaking into some misunderstood dude's home would have been quite nice. Sure it would probably hurt replayability (knowing that the neighbour isn't the bad guy) but it would have been nice.
Such a huge disappointment. The game kept getting worse and worse with every update. This is why a game being popular on UA-cam can be both a blessing and a curse
Fr. The original horror concept is what drew people in along with how impressive the AI was at the time. They changed the house into some sort of monstrosity that even the dude who frickin’ lives there can’t navigate without getting stuck in the geometry, did away with the horror/mystery elements in favour of a more adventure/platformer feel and completely decimated the AI with the new bulky ass house. So disappointing T_T
It's weird how a rushed fnaf game, Security Breach, has people immediately looking forward into the bug updates, theories, new minigames, puzzles, and dlc. While this game dies. Oh yeah, the latter game has shitty platforming segments.
@@davidbass4834 Did the developer of that game abandoned their own passion project to pursue something else more mainstream in the market, despite the generous feedback it received from the playerbase during the early access stage? Or did they just give up trying to make amends from their mistakes and decidedly stray about as far from the premise of a voxel Minecraft-inspired RPG as it's possible to get?
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m The influx of players playing certainly got to them. When you suddenly have a game that receive a lot of player out of nowhere, that influx can have a really bad effect on them. They most likely were not prepared for that. A lot of feedback, criticism and improvement need to be made. In the end, they just give up in the middle of development and run away. It's scummy, but I'm not surprise. Jumps like this can be really damaging. They came back, just to release the game in a half finish form and be it like that. Most likely to get the cubeworld thought out of their head.
One of the best parts of the original demo was how the nieghbor would pay attention to how you broke in, and make that route harder, but it somehow feels like they lost that
I remember MatPat getting visibly frustrated at the box stacking thing. I honestly lost interest when it got brighter and more colorful, yet less sinister. At this point it's weird to even call it a horror game anymore, even by kids standards.
Honestly. It went from an Indie Horror game to a Indie Puzzle game. I feel like they were trying to have a horror game with some puzzles, but it went the other way around. The reason why FNAF works is because it's split the lore apart into pieces of the game for you to find out. Imagine that Scott put everything, lore/lure (idk) and all, into one game. That's what Hello Neighbor is (or is like). Just toned down and the lore is explained in the game. I feel like they should've put a setting for kids and adults. So if you're a kid or a young teen, you would be counted as a kid. However, if you were an older teen or an adult, then you would go into the adult mode. (Since he said that older teens and adults were mainly complaining). The kid mode would be this version while the adult mode would be what it was intended to be.. *KidAdult*
My greatest memories of this game is totally watching Matt hate it, and just zoning out while I watched him freeze a globe and then thought "Why the HECK is he freezing a globe what did I miss."
What caused Hello Neighbor's downfall was definitely its heavy reliance on quantity over quality. With each alpha, the house kept getting bigger and bigger with new rooms and items, which just caused the graphics, frame rate, and overall experience to get worse and worse.
@@phoenixcoursey6711 I kinda agree. I beat the first part of getting in pretty straightforward but once we are stuck inside I got Hella confused. And I don't think ever figured out how I was supposed to get out. But I did get out, by using platforming and utilizing some of the water I just launched the kid out of bounds and it auto cut to the cutscene of me escaping
That and they relied too much on the mystery factor, they were expecting the community to flock to the game in hopes of digging into the mystery and lore aspects despite the game's lackluster gameplay.
Nah, I would definitely agree with OP. The original house was so great because it functioned with the "less is more" philosophy. The house was designed around the AI and the AI was finely tuned to that environment. As soon as they started shaking up the house design for more convoluted, abstract takes, however, that's when the AI started experiencing fits and spasms trying to comprehend the alien environment it was now trying to operate in. I watched people Lets Play this early on, and I distinctly remember a general disdain building towards the various alphas as the game deviated away from that tightly designed experience to something unnecessarily big that was throwing additional mass in for the sake of having more. More rooms. More height to the house. More more more without any rationalization for why that was or any attempt to adjust the AI. They couldn't even be bothered to have the AI do something basic like despawn once a certain floor or section is reached so that it can respawn elsewhere. Games with infinitely smaller budgets learned this. Had they done something as basic as that, they theoretically could have built an infinitely expanding tower and it would still work so long as not too many platforming segments broke up the AI's pathing. But they didn't. They went with quantity over quality.
This. I fucking hate games with big sprawling open worlds but there's nothing interesting to do in any of them. If a "big open world" only means it takes 5 minutes to get to your destination instead of 1, either shrink the world or put more interesting stuff in it.
@@ScrambledAndBenedict red dead online is the perfect example of it, I'm convinced that most of the time I've played it was spent riding from one town to another on a horse.
I think Hello Neighbor was meant to be much darker and mature initially, but the game became so popular with little kids that the devs seriously toned it down into something much more kid friendly.
I know a game like this, it was basically meant to be a dark scary, DBD esque game. You may call it a ripoff, but it was worked on by DBDs devs themself and it was a mobile version with separate lore and some mechanics different. The game also had hooks, hunters with scary weapons and a dark gloomy vibe all around. Until Chinese government restrictions and the age rating for this game had to be pushed down, resulting in the game keeping it's dark lore only for those who search for the chatacters (many of the first chatacters put in the game are based on historical murderers, like Amelie Dyer, for example, the newer ones do not seem to follow this pattern, probably in fear of censorship). The games lore was fantastic, the story mode that was included in the beta had to be scrapped and implemented 3 years later after tons of tweaks and changes to make it less dark. It killed the games vibe so muchm
@@SmashTheAdam Yes indeed. I used to play from early 2019 and I still play sometimes, following some of the content. And well, my nick is a dead giveaway, worstkiterchan lmao.
@@worstkiterchan9207 I use to play it too sometimes and honestly i feel like now with the back lore being slowly made that same mysterious vibe that the characters had back in the first months of the game is slowly coming back, feels more of a interesting relief
Oh, so Hello Neighbor is the game development equivalent of spending time in a character creator where you tweak every individual facial feature to be perfect and then the end result is so much worse than the face you started with.
@@DrakeHunter324 Shoot. I distincly remember a "Dungeon Siege II" type game that had you create your character in a tunnel, being released from jail, and I spent half an hour. Then, I happily watched the character walk beautifully through the dark tunnel, only to emerge into the sun like a damn Picasso napkin sketch.
The horror games for kids thing is something I never really thought about until now, thinking about it it really explains why bendy specifically never took advantage of its concepts even though they had the potential to be genuinely terrifying
@@alijahaskew4644 this type of stuff along with maybe body horror based on toon physics would have been actually super cool. There were so many ways to use that 30's cartoon style in scary ways and they ended up doing nothing interesting. Bendy himself isn't even really relevant either, makes me feel like it really was just for marketing
@@mr.mcklockwork3828 Exactly! Heck, why stop there? You know how Susie Campbell, Alice Angel's original voice actor, said she voiced talking chairs and dancing chickens right? Why not make those into enemies like the Butcher Gang? Like, maybe those chicken enemies, which I call Kickers, flock around the studio and kick Henry with razor sharp talon? And those chair enemies, which I call Sneakers, have rows of teeth and can camouflage themselves with regular furniture. Also it really is weird how little relevance Bendy himself has in the story despite A: Being the mascot of the series, B: He's the most feared in the studio, and C: HIS NAME IS LITERALLY IN THE TITLE.
The story matpat theorized was so cool, that the neighbor made a deal with the devil to be successful/rich/whatever and he was kidnapping women with their children in exchange, all for it to end up being just a dream
The joke is made that Scott Cawthon just steals Matt's theories to write the story of fnaf but honestly that's what should've actually been done for Hello Neighbor. Wouldn't have saved the game exactly but at least one aspect of the experience would be kind of worthwhile.
I agree. It should have been a more straightforward plot, rather than the convoluted existential mishmash we ended up with. And don't get me wrong, I HATE the whole woman in a fridge trope, but even that would have been a hundred times better than what we got.
What makes me sad is that their original concept of being trapped in a small, claustrophobic feeling house with an enemy whose ai learns how to block your most used paths ended up being the reason why that stupid granny game became so popular a couple of years ago
If only the aforementioned Granny game stayed relatively small and uncomplicated, had a lot more competent development team with more experience, less repetitive puzzles, polished gameplay, smoother animations, a smarter and unpredictable AI that is genuinely threatening to the player, higher-quality graphics to enhance the whole visual presentation, and an actual budget or passion behind it, then it would be a potentially serviceable game with a lot going for.
@@DanielsAlt503 I think it’s extremely popular because of the kids nowadays, since they always gravitate towards something that’s trending because of the UA-camrs (especially Flamingo). To be honest, I never really had any interest in the popularity of Piggy from the beginning, aside from the fact that they’ve also decided to make a crossover collaboration with Dark Deception (from what I heard).
I watched all of MatPat’s livestream playthroughs. Even he was wildly frustrated by the game both in its story and mechanics and came down pretty hard on it. I can really understand him just dropping it after all that.
Tbh m rly looking forward to hello neighbor 2 like there's some much stuffs in it it's just amazing m sure it won't disappoint and turn out to be an legendary master piece which everyone didn't expect much from
@@cluster4583 if ever there's a 2, I hope it's a comepletely different thing from the first game. Obviously all the mechanics should still be there, but I would want to see a new house, new characters, better plot/story, things that need to be changed, and has no relation to the first game besides the similar mechanics. edit: ok I didnt know there was a 2 until I was near the end zamn
@@kemma_ I just said it's an open world with alot of characters watch all hello neighbor 2 stuffs in tiny builds channel u will get sneak peaks, some leaks and stuffs
I never understood why they had an excellent idea that probably could've set a trend of a learning AI enemy that is scary because it is unpredictable and feels alive and they instead just chased the general trends.
They must have been in the pretty tough situation that any game developed from the original concept could be played through in about an hour. A single tiny house and a single enemy can only be stretched so much. I suppose they could have padded it out with a long introduction in another location and maybe multiple different houses, but... Making it a puzzle-filled mansion is the obvious and inevitable choice.
I'm totally with you on that 'post fnaf indie horror game' thing. I remember even as a kid I hated that evil furby game because my tiny brain realized I was being marketed to
Don't use "it's made for kids" to excuse bad design or writing or similar. They have a sense of taste, too, what they haven't developed yet is a sense of standards yet. Just because they'll tolerate anything doesn't mean that media aimed at them should get away with not trying at all.
But...it clearly is made for kids Who mostly watches cartoons? Kids Who mostly play board/card games? Kids Who plays mostly bright colored games? Kids A kid would find this game more amazing than an adult or a teenager because a kid isn't as focused as a grown up to a story, a kid would rather play the game, end it and then watch a video of it's favorite youtuber analyzing the story of the game in detail. I'm 20 now but I was a kid too and I too did all the stuff that I just wrote Play the game/watch a gameplay Find a video from one of my fav youtubers that makes theories or just narrates the story of it
@@thatguyzerg The kids who FLOCK to FNAF are all pretty much there for the lore and horror, not for the fun game or creepycute characters. Also I know a bunch of adults who do the exact same thing you said kids do. You basically just listed things that aren't inherently "childish" and said they ARE childish. The only games I can think of that aren't "brightly-colored" are the slop of "BROWN IS REALISTIC" games we had as an epidemic for a while (followed by the SICKLY GREEN IS REALISTIC wave, then the DESATURATED IS REALISTIC one), and horror games that think you have to be unable to see 10 feet in front of you to be scary.
@@thatguyzerg I mean, minecraft is also a colorful cartoon game suitable for kids, and at this point I think there's more adults that play the game than kids
@@neoqwerty the kids that were there for FNAF initially most probably didn't even care about the story because it was not that much noticible at the time, the game became known for the youtubers putting it on youtube, ppl (so I mean of every age) mostly started caring about a lore in those games after FNAF 2 came out, because for everyone for sure the first FNAF was in a nutshell this: "I'm standing still, I can't move I can only close and open the doors, check the cameras and survive if I'm lucky enough" and that is it, the mechanics weren't as known as today, ppl thought it was a mix of luck and instinct on closing the doors to protect yourself and that's it. That bunch of adults you mention probably were kids or teenagers when these game came out, I didn't listed things to say they are childish, I listed them because those element is what attract more children most of the time, which is true. Just because I listed stuff that attract children...it doesn't mean they are childish or that they must be childish (stupid example: Family Guy is a cartoon with bright colors since it has to keep the cartoonish aspect of it right?...but it's totally not suited for children and it's totally not childish) for the rest I'm an ignorant of the games you mentioned such as "Brown is Realistic", I don't know what it is
"Somewhere between 8 and 12 books" has the same energy as us not knowing exactly how many moons Jupiter and Saturn have. Theoretically there should be around 11 Hello Neighbor books but scientists can't confirm.
These types of games really rely on the M&M You need an interesting hook, so Mark will play it. Then you need a big ass lore puzzle for Mat to make a theory on. Every game did this for a while, they still do.
This video reveals a reason why I really hold Jim Henson in high regard. He invented the muppets, and when it became popular he was able to shut down the show at the height of its popularity. Everyone likely questioned his decision, but because he prioritized his ability over the brand he was able to create quality works. And because his works were well-made, many still remember the Muppets in good order decades after its debut.
@@Bealzabub i mean i think the muppet movie was fantastic 👀 felt like a love letter to the original show i’m not sure what other attempts there are but that may just be because the muppets weren’t that big of a factor in my childhood
muppets most wanted (which i think is the most recent one) is honestly one of my favourite movies so the muppets has done really well with its reputation
I think the reason why Hello Neighbor went down a path of platforming is because of exploiters and bug hunters. In the pre-alpha, some UA-camrs tried using as many in-game objects as possible to exploit their way out of the map and test invisible boundaries. The devs took that as a desire for gameplay people wanted, not realizing that it was only because of the thrill of exploiting in such a small map while the neighbor was still walking around.
it's like the game design equivalent of when my friend's uncle heard them listening to Sufjan Stevens's Christmas album one time, and thus decided they must really like Christmas music, and started showing them Michael Bublé albums thinking they'd be really into it lmao
The biggest problem with Hello Neighbor was both overexposure and the developer's false promises: TinyBuild sold us a game that everyone had already played and seen for months prior to the release date. On top of the fact that they had promised that everything we had already seen was barely scratching the surface, if I remember correctly, they had said that what we saw was only 15% of the whole game.
Legitimately shocked that this series won over marble hornets, yet still interested to see what you have to say about it. and looking forward to a MH video, dang!
As one of his patrons, as much as I love Marble Hornets, I *love* a good dragging of a terrible game. It also doesn't have a ton of commentary coverage post-2019, so I was excited to hear his take.
I'll be honest, the pre-alpha has the best sort of story telling for me. The beginning is just you snooping around in places that you're not supposed to be in, and the neighbour doesn't like your curiosity and through gameplay itself we have a story. It's simple and straight to the point, giving you an easy story to work off of. Why are you breaking into this old man's house over and over again? cause you wanna see what's in the basement after getting interrupted *while* playing yourself. The only thing locking you away from the basement is just a simple combination lock, which for me makes a good mystery. To add onto that, the fact that you can get little secrets and add-ons to the story through the game's main thing of snooping around like a stacker is engaging. Instead of going from point A to point B, with B having the story point, you can just ignore the little tid-bits of story through GAMEPLAY. You're already breaking into a house to figure out what's in the basement, so it only makes sense that you'd be snooping around trying to figure out this guy in general.
@@applejuice9468 it definitely had the most potential that the first alpha did build off of sure some points were dropped, but they still tried to build off of it instead of just adding....whatever the fuck they added
@@TheBestWanderbug Yeah, the game was much less cartooney, but still offered a distinguished artsyle without revealing too much lore, which is a no go for me in games like this.
I totally agree, the pre-alpha was probably my favorite version of the game. I feel the smaller house made it a lot more tense alongside the music the plays when you're near the neighbor.
The most jarring change to me was the music. Originally it was dissonant and grating but gave a huge sense of tension when being chased. Then they got rid of it for some reason and being chased was no longer scary. The big unrealistic circus house also ruined some of the immersion, but I think if they had better sound design it would have been forgivable. Good audio is very important in the genre of horror.
The original freaky song was great but I was fine with the music change since it fit the Neighbor's goofy look a bit more - no matter how scary the game is supposed to be, the dude still looks like *that.*
I totally feel you on the "Post-FNAF indie horror for kids" thing, even as someone who's not super into horror. It's just been really depressing seeing so many games pop up that are clearly just riding the coattails of the latest popular horror game, or ones that start out promising but end up reverting to ripping off the FNAF formula. At least there's still stuff like Resident Evil 8 coming out that's content just being itself.
Resi 8 Is just P.T. so not a good example. Also horror is the most varied genre in gaming. Its just FNAF showed that there was an easy in. Note: even this game sold a shit ton of merch.
@@RusticRonnie ("person talking about first-person horror and the only horror game theyve ever heard of before this was PT" voice) this game is just PT
Yeah It was really good on its own way, you move in, your neighbor makes his strange actions, and you as a civilized human being, decides to break in over and over and figure out whats happening Thats it, that was the lore and it was good enough, the rest was by yourself to figure out
@@roblue5470 because they build off of the vagueness they feed their child fans. Have you ever read a fictional short story written by a minor? It's jumbled, a lot of it is ripped from properties they're familiar with, there's no nuance. Makes sense that the story would be a mess considering they were crowdsourcing it from children.
it’s ironic how the “horror for kids” genre seems to have started from Freddy’s, because in my eyes, it isn’t and has never been a “for kids” game. It has a lot of elements that always spun me towards it having an intended demographic of young adult, but it fell into the pit of being a “for kids” game, and all without it trying to. Yes, it can be enjoyed by kids, but it just seems to focus a more teen to adult line. Even with newer games like FFPS and Security Breach seeming to have a colorful atmosphere, they’re still dark as hell and more strike me as “wacky futuristic tech and entertainment” than “hey there children come consume this content”, especially since the younger fans are probably aging over the 7 years of lifespan the game has had. Yet, I’ll be honest, the demographic of ‘young adult’ that I see in the series never stopped a younger me from getting into the it. I remember loving this series back when I wasn’t even 10 years old. I don’t know if it’s because I seem to be the ‘mature’ kid, but Freddy’s always fascinated me and some of my friends in a way that only young adult novels tend to have. It’s got an interesting storyline, but while it has the atmosphere of things that look kid friendly, it has some gruesome and dark topics beneath it all. TL;DR: FNaF isn’t and never has been a kids game, it just fell into the realm of being a kids game by accident, but is growing out of it due to the fans aging. (me included).
Fnaf 1 has an environment that instills genuine dread and anxiety imo, idk why I was so into that shit as a 9 year old, let alone one who was so easily scared.
I might be exaggerating but I'm starting to think the new yt algorithm with all these "family friendly" channels are to blame here for ruining the image and potentially the development decision going on with these games :(
honestly id only agree with it if it wasnt that security breach is rated for teens by the ESRB, which i feel heavily limits its ability to go all-out with the story and dark tones
I'd argue the original series was never for children but as the games continued they've sort of became a parody of themselves, with Security Breach essentially cementing them as kid horror.
I'd argue that it's because kids like things that are cool and stimulating. After all, they don't know much about this world yet, everything they encounter is a new adventure to them. If a new trend like tiktok, kpop, or the smash-hit new indie horror game interests teenagers and adults, what more for kids? On the other side of the spectrum, we can let kids be good boys and girls and let them watch Teen Titans Go. It's saturated and non-sense, that's what kids like, right? But kids in my day grew up with Avatar and the original Teen Titans, even Spongebob was like Tom and Jerry which my grandparents loved laughing at. Even if we'd watch mindlessly, we still loved the characters and their worlds.
I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking that the Alpha 1 was the best version. _Hello Neighbor_ is so weird in that because its development was so public, it’s like the game was released over and over, basically entirely different each time. _Hello Neighbor_ is itself a one-game series because of the radical differences between each version.
THIS. Lets Players usually focus on the good and dismiss a lot of negatives because they take every game as it is, it’s more profitable to them to seem like they’re having fun and enjoying whatever they’re doing. So when they stop, look at the camera and talk about the problems with a popular game that could possibly have sponsored/provided them more content?? Something is wrong. It’s a perfect way of saying “I don’t care how big this gets, this isn’t worth supporting” without directly saying it
@@softestshade7813 Markiplier's reaction to Security Breach. is one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever experienced because of this. Like, I dunno if I was imagining things, but it felt like you could tell that he was starting to hate the game as it went along, but he couldn't quite bring himself to be completely honest.
@@softestshade7813 I kinda disagree but agree at the same time, for example jacksepticeye always honestly talks about what he dislikes about even really good games at the end of them and it always feels like hes being honest and not just saying crazy things for views
@SoSoyGee « nobody likes Security Breach » no. A lot of people like it. Why would people want 20/20 mode, we already got UCN for this. The game was supposed to be great but way too buggy because it was released too early, probably because of the fans.
I feel like this and We Happy Few had the same issues, where development felt more like it was just the devs experimenting with different ideas each update until they have to eventually finish it. The lack of cohesiveness between the alphas feels like they were trying to make a completely different game each time.
@@detomnz2024 yep. The main story at least, not the DLCs, tell an interesting and cohesive story about those who are left behind by the masses. Gameplay is shaken between characters so it doesn't feel the same way each time. It's actually pretty good.
I wish they dropped the procedural and made a linear / survival story instead for We Happy Few, so much pontential wasted because it was all over the place in a big empty map with some incoherent buildings, could have been a kind of Bioshock game.
I think the Hello Neighbor devs started out with good intentions, but as soon as they saw that the game was remotely popular they turned focus into putting out new content as fast as possible instead of going back and polishing the game they had already made.
I actually looked up the reason to why hello neighbor changed so much since alpha 3 and the full release and I was shocked to find it out. The reason hello neighbor changed was because the developers dropped alpha 1 and 2 they were afraid that when the full game would drop the fans already knew what to do in the game and knew all the puzzles. So this is the reason they thought it would be better to make the house gigantic which I think is the dumbest reason for the downfall of this game
To this day I'll still never live down the publishers on twitter actively poking and basically _begging_ for Matpat to do a Game Theory on that animated series that apparently exists. It was absolutely pathetic Edit: It was the publishers. And What/ have I done?
@@protol6269 id argue the same could be said for fnaf. still spawning multiple fanmade games to this day. Slender isn’t completely irrelevant but to say it’s still relevant to the gaming landscape today would be wrong. Outside of the movie released back in 2018, it’s a pretty dormant franchise.
When alpha one came out, I didn't like the game play at all, but I really liked the story. As far as I cared, it didn't matter what was in the basement. I didn't even know they planned on putting anything in the basement. To me, the mystery wasn't the basement, it was an extremely paranoid guy snooping around an equally paranoid neighbor's house, both endlessly feeding into the other's increasing fear until one of them finally kills the other. In alpha 2, that seemed to be confirmed. IDK if that was always supposed to the be case, or if they changed their mind, but "you for no good reason decide something is seriously amiss and decide to be a protagonist about it until someone dies" is a much better horror concept than "get to the basement to unlock a poorly edited art student film that's completely disjointed from the gameplay"
Hello Neighbor went from a good interesting take on a horror game, where your enemy actually learns from you each time, which requires you to think more, which in on itself makes the game all the more fun. To a massive cash grab for brand expansion.
@@cluster4583 I'm still skeptical about the release of Hello Neighbor 2 due to how janky and unpolished the alphas were. Who knows, perhaps the developers would improve the game for themselves by listening to feedback and not repeating the past few mistakes they experienced.
Man, I used to be absolutely OBSESSED with Hello Neighbor. I still have my neighbor plushie sitting on my shelf right now. Then one day, the game seemed to just fall off the face of the earth, and I completely forgot about it. A few months ago I rediscovered this game and well... yeah, learning what the final game was, I was of course a bit disappointed. I'm saddened, really. This game that had such a hold on me In my preteen years, is just not all I hoped it would be :(
@@AbstractTraitorHero I agree. Downward would have been better and made more sense to their premise that we need to get to the basement. Expanding downward would add to our level of “not there yet” and take us further from safety at the same time thus another adage to our fear of being caught since were more isolated anyway in dark spaces
@@AbstractTraitorHero It's unfortunate seeing there would've been interesting ideas that never went into fruition. For example, what if the Neighbor's basement was a Backrooms-style underground labyrinth-like environment where the architecture stretches out for miles beyond the limits and subsequently becomes more and more deranged as you slowly descend down into the unknowable depths below? That would give the game a sense of progression and a drastic change of pace by playing out expectations. Alternatively, how about a Dante's Inferno-type concept where each level represents a new layer to the basement (symbolizing each of the Nine Circles of Hell), and each following layer would introduce its own abstract themes, subtle environmental storytelling about the lore (without the explanation trying too hard to be as vague and complicated as FNAF's overarching timeline), and mind-bending puzzles that scramble your brain accordingly. The whole idea of a seemingly ordinary, albeit an unsettling house owned by a creepy stranger across the neighborhood that was apparently built above a twisted interpretation of Hell inspired by Dante's Inferno sounds a lot more fascinating and creepier than something out of Dr. Seuss's fever dream or an emotionally-stunted kindergartener's sketchbook. Of course, the lowest and definitely the final floor to the basement would be frozen with ice everywhere and possibly involve numerous dead bodies kept on refridgerators (maybe his kidnapped victims?), and you must freeze the Neighbor by somehow locking him up in a meat locker without getting caught.
Expanding in scope is one thing... expanding in size is another. It would be fine to redesign with more depth but to simply "Add more" is just... lazy. Level design is something that should be seriously considered... not just slapped together.
my favorite fun fact about Tinybuild is that they approached YandereDev to take over the development of Yandere Simulator, and he breached the contract by firing the devs they assigned to his game and (iirc) now owes a LOT of money in legal funds to them. they also published local 2 hour long video essay darling Pathologic 2. it's like some sort of insane crossover event edit: said tinybuild developed Pathologic, but they're actually the publishers of it, development was done by Ice-Pick Lodge
@@Sinstarclair honestly what i find more jarring was hearing yanderedev drama being brought up again. Havent heard about that guy for a year, and last time I did it was all negative. Hows he doing? Did he improve his abhorrent behaivour yet? Did he actually complete the fucking game already lol?
I don't hate the idea of "horror for kids". When you rely on jumpscares and unsettling atmosphere, its possible to make something truly scary without relying on adult stuff like blood and death. If I was a kid, I would have loved to have a horror game that I could play. But I just hate how poorly executed and pandering it can all be. It just relies too heavily on the FNaF formula, which I would argue was never for kids in the first place.
I think the reason FNAF as a series tends to be so tame is because children get into the series and due to Scott's Christian values he felt uncomfortable making the games more explicit. At the start it worked because the horror came from the character designs and the anxiety-inducing situation. It was just convenient that Scott being tasteful with what was shown and what wasn't made the game tame enough for kids.
Tbh, I don't think that jumpscares would be a good way to do "horror", unless it's NOT overused, has legitimately good buildup, doesn't rely on loud noises, and is just overall actually scary. Basically, I think you're right, but they'd have to use jumpscares RIGHT. For example: Little Nightmares & its sequel are REALLY good. They don't have many jumpscares, compared to most "horror" games nowadays, yet they're legitamitely very scary compared to almost every other game in its genre nowadays.
Bruh people will literally say anything is for kids now. Cartoons, anime, any video game that exists, most popular movie franchises. Kids will play edgy shit and do it on purpose, gotta stop letting the idea of kids game live in your head rent free
It's a pity so much horror marketed at kids is so lazy, because some of the best horror I've ever seen or read is written for a younger audience. Coraline is still one of the scariest things to me, and Gravity Falls, while not exactly horror, could be straight-up terrifying. But those things never talked down to their audience. They didn't think kids are stupid or shallow, which the creators of Hello, Neighbor apparently do.
Coraline is terrifying, yet not in a way of "im just going to scare you" but in one that it actually has...substance and interest on it's plot, yet knows the audience it's aiming for. If you make a game for kids (or any content for that matter) expecting them to just like dumbed-down version of a story, it will never come out too well. Like, "kids" games feel more targetted towards 3 year olds that don't have a grasp of reality yet than games for kids between the ages of 12-14, which overall understand things a lot better and for the most part have started developing ideas of their own.
@@SiffrinISAT Coraline is probably my favorite movie and I can confirm. It has a chilling feeling yet you can't quite place what's wrong. Of course, the button eyes give something away, but it keeps enough mystery to make it suspenseful. It's probably one of my favorites because of those reasons. They didn't assume kids wouldnt be able to understand horror when it wasn't right in your face. Anybody who sees this comment and hasn't checked out the movie, I totally recommend it!
@@SiffrinISAT The horror in Coraline is what I generally call "creepy horror" or "psychological horror", where the point is to unsettle and unnerve the audience, to leave something lingering in their brain long after the credits roll, instead of just startling the audience.
Glad to see Coraline getting some love. Despite it being reviewed well it still feels very underappreciated, like all Lika films, except Boxtrolls, that one wasn't very good.
Y'know what'd be interesting, and could fix the issues with a single neighbour in a giant house problem? Introduce multiple neighbours. Make them all some kind of weird cult, and you slowly need to break into their houses to unravel a strange mystery they're hiding away. Different houses mean different puzzles, patterns, etc. Some neighbours work together to work around you, and adapt to your play style. Might just be me but I think it'd work a lot for a proper sequel or something.
I like the idea of the acts being able to change the house up, but I definitely think they went way too cartoony and surreal compared to the original idea. I think it would've worked having the house become either messier or more of a dilapidated mess of a mansion with loads of secret pathways to escape down.
@@MikhailPashkovski not if it's say like resident evil village. Where it's only like 4 to 5 people. Make it a small number. And make the story Interesting.
When the game was first announced and they showed the concept for a stealth game where the AI adapts to your break-ins, I was in love instantly. Really excited for the game. And then I kept watching MatPat play newer and newer versions and my hype died down really fast. I wish they just stuck with the original idea instead of turning the house into a theme park based around theory bait
Hello Neighbor always hurt me because of what it might have been, even from a lore perspective. The fact that they admitted the early teasers had nothing to do with the lore and they were grasping at straws hurt the most, because on the surface they made it seem like they had it all worked out. Also the whole...making merch and *books* before the full game was even out...was weird and the first hint that in the end, they were just trying to strike FNAF indie horror gold and get some cash doing it. It could have been a decent game if they had set up exactly what they wanted, and stuck to one medium. If you wanna do stealth, do stealth. If you wanna make a 3D platformer, make a 3D platformer. In the end, I think HN suffered from wanting to be the next big thing, as well as not knowing what it wanted to be.
the books weren't until after the game, and almost a year at that. they weren't even official to begin with, Carly Anne West was just making her own Hello Neighbor story and they later decided to make her stories canon. the developers didn't want it to be the next big thing, they had no idea it would blow up. people just expected hello neighbor to be the next big thing when it was the first PC game project by previously mobile game developers
@@Gavintheking2 you say they didn't want it to be the next big thing, but they were literally begging Game Theory for coverage. They knew exactly what they were doing.
@@UnusualFour you really know nothing about corporate speak and how people cover their asses. Do you really think that employee was bothering Matt pat just because?
You know the idea of a children's horror game, I never actually realized it was a thing until recently. When FNAF Security Breach came out, I saw so many comments saying how they grew up with the game and that it raised them since elementary school. It kinda surprised me because I didn't realize how much appeal it had on kids. Always assumed the youngest audience would be 13; thought FNAF would appeal most to teenagers.
I already knew about FNAF way back since 2014 (when the game was relatively new at the time), but I left the fandom and quit my own interest in this franchise somewhere around 2016 or 2017 when I realized it was getting a little bit toxic and overblown at that time.
My 5 year old is completely obsessed with FNAF. He has told me he's seen a few kids with FNAF merch at school as well as Poppy Playtime crap. I think it's kind of cool that kids are into this genre but it's a little unsettling too because they're the reason these games have gotten so watered down, and by the time they're older and have lost interest I feel like they never got to experience the darker side of the lore like in FNAF. I myself feel stupid lying to my kid about some of the original lore to make it less scary for him (he LOVES Springtrap but I'm not about to tell him the whole fucked up origin story)
@@ijustlikebees Okay so I've tried to make it as accurate as possible without including any gore basically. He knows about the original murders but I told him the children's ghosts possessed Bonnie, Chica etc. and that they only go after grown ups because they're trying to protect other children. He knows William Afton as the "bad guy" and that he "wears" the Spring Bonnie suit as a disguise. We played FNAF 4 together and he was absolutely shook and couldn't sleep over it, thinking that Foxy was gonna pop out of his closet at him while he was sleeping. So then I had to remind him that "FNAF guys only go after adults and the kid in the game was just having nightmares because he thought the guys looked scary and his brother was bullying him about it" It's actually really funny to me because he BEGS to play the games but then freaks the fuck out claiming they're way too scary lmao. That doesn't stop him from having action figures and plushies and coloring books and constantly talking about FNAF though. Anyway at no point in time in our lore do any kids get killed besides the original murders, and William Afton is the main villain, and the others try to protect children from him. We just started playing Security Breach which I didn't really have any interest in because of the aesthetic but I'm kind of grateful for it now because it's one he can actually play and enjoy. But it doesn't make sense to him that Chica is coming after him since "they don't attack kids" so I just told him it's because kids aren't supposed to be there and they just want to kick us out lol
@@margaretthatcher5486 I mean it was a pretty good premise but fan? isn't it like just 6 shorts that hasn't been updated for half a decade. I've never seen anyone be hardcore for such small content
I remember watching the alpha-1 footage years ago on Markiplier's channel and then being so confused why the game was so different upon full release from what it was when I watched it initially. I had actually thought I had misremembered or made up the original experience from alpha-1 because of how different the final product was. However, I do still think aspects of what they did if the final version could be done well, especially if they reversed the order of the house going from being extremely large when you're a child to normal when you're an adult. Imagine: you start out as a kid and the house is huge and scary and full of crazy things, because you're a child and the house seems bigger and discovering certain items that you've never seen before makes them seem more otherworldly and scary. Then, when you come back as an adult the house is normal sized because you're bigger and everything appears normal because it's no longer clouded by your child imagination. Make it a broken-down abandoned house if you want to make the setting "scarier" but the basement is still locked and you have to go through this abandoned house and solve different puzzles or have flashbacks/memories to being there as a child that you have to work through to find the items to open the basement door. Maybe even add a teen section between the other two so you can start with a fantastical house (the ending dream sequence in the original version) as a child, a normal but still creepy house as a teen (and you break into it like the alpha-1 gameplay, and maybe even get caught and buried), and then an old and abandoned one as an adult that you go through to finally get answers. Let your character come to terms with whatever happened in the house as a child through some memories similar to the dreams in the actual game but don't just make everything about the final act(s) into a dream. At least then it would make more sense for why everything is so huge and crazy during certain parts of the game and why the neighbor seems so monstrous initially. This way you get the best of both world's where everything can be big and expansive and the developers can add a bunch of content to extend the game, like they did in the real game, but have an in-game reason that isn't it just being a dream. Obviously this is still an issue if they don't change the platforming sections and improve the gameplay from what they actually released, I just think this way you can keep most of what they wanted without lessening the experience, maybe it even heightens it if you can connect the fantastical elements of the child section the the overarching plot that you learn about in the adult sections. As far as what the neighbor's backstory for the locked basement would end up being, there are quite a few options. Obviously you could go some more obvious routes if you want to aim the story/game at adults rather than children, but if you want to make it kid-friendly you could just have the neighbor be a normal guy who keeps getting harassed by the kid just because he keeps his basement locked (put whatever you want in the basement even if it's a man cave). Hopefully another developer will take the base of Hello Neighbors original gameplay and makes an actually interesting/fun game because I really love the idea of an everchanging map that the enemy alters based on your actions.
*Act 1: Child* You're a child playing in with your friend. The two of you are neighbors, and you both spent most of your childhood years together. Then, one day, your friend is gone. Not knowing the whole picture, you wander through the neighbor's house, the search amplified into a maze of colors and fantastical shapes by the curious mind of a child. However, there are subtle hints that something's...not right. Doors are locked. Furniture is broken. There are words muffled by angry voices. Finally, you make it to your friend's room, and-- *Act 2: Teenager* It's been ten years. You're now a teenager attending high school. On a whim, you find yourself back at your neighbor's house. You don't exactly live here anymore, so why are you here? In the back of your mind, you can remember...something, something odd. The more you try to remember, the more it slips away. You open the door, and something clicks. Something happened ten years ago. Something is in the basement. Most importantly, the neighbor is still here, after all these years. You could turn back now, and the game would end. But you won't, would you? After all, it's just your neighbor. He was always a little odd, but never... Wait... When did the house get so dark? *Act 3: Adult* It's been 5 years since the police came. You still remember the sirens. You still remember when the nice officer came and found you crying. Still, you're back at the house. In the last five years, you've had time to think, time to reflect. What the neighbor did was wrong, but you can't exactly blame him. It was only five years for you, but it's been much, much longer for him. The house is so much smaller now. The wallpaper isn't as vibrant as it was during your childhood, but not as dark as it was when you last came. Maybe it was always like this. The neighbor is in your friend's old room. The fifteen years made him a lot older than you remember. In his eyes, you catch the fleeting image of a small child, smiling and carefree, but the memory is gone too soon. All that's left is an apology... And then goodbye
you could even implement both art styles and have it start with the more dr seuss style and have it evolve into alpha 1’s preferred style that blended realism with cartoony
Honestly, I think Hello Neighbor as a public entity was doomed from the start for one simple reason: there should have been no publicly released alphas. The very first version of the game released to the public should have been the final release of the game. Now that might sound strange considering the final release is a contender for the worst version of the game, but hear me out. It didn't HAVE to be that way if they'd simple approached it from a different angle. Hello Neighbor is a game about a mystery. That mystery is "what's inside the basement?" and it's a mystery that's intrinsically tied to the gameplay. You want to know what's inside the basement? Go play the game and find out what's down there! But there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong about releasing successive versions of a game revolving around a tangible mystery when the specifics of that mystery change with each version. In fact, that goes for story-driven games in general. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single other story-driven game that released a public alpha, because on paper it's a really stupid idea. You're inviting players to invest themselves in a story and fixed gameplay that they know is going to be changed. Why do I care what's in the basement in this version, when you're just going to change it in the next one? Why do I care what's down there in the next version when I've already seen it in THIS one? To draw a comparison, imagine if Arthur Conan Doyle released "pre-writes" of his Sherlock Holmes novels, with an unfinished plot and a twist reveal that might change down the line in the actual book release. That would be really stupid, right? That's what's happening here. What the game needed from the very start was intensive in-house testing, more careful crafting of its gameplay loop and story elements, and a cohesive vision that carried all the way into the final release. Let me put it this way: I don't CARE what early versions of Five Nights at Freddy's looked like, and I doubt that I would want to play them over the finished version. If they had just kept the game under wraps until it was fully polished and complete, they might have had something special on their hands. tl;dr: public alphas are for sandbox and multiplayer games. not for story-driven single player games
Yeah it worked for Subnautica, but that's because the initial releases only had enough story to explain how you crashed and why you're the sole survivor. Everything about the story itself came later on in development.
That's apparently the main problem of most story-driven horror indie games, especially the ones that has its own vision that made it famous, then steered to be mainstream and abandon its original idea. Release a public alpha. Use its story or alpha as marketing. Change the story along the gameplay mechanics on next alpha. Repeat. It's just asking to make the game to be stagnant and soulless in the long run.
Does Hades count as a successful version? The way they did it, I think, was that the mystery, twist, and ending never changed, you just had more of the mystery revealed over time, along with more content being added overall, like characters and story bits. It was single player, it had a mystery, and while it wasn't in an alpha, it WAS in Early Access which is more or less a beta, but the crucial difference I think was that the mystery never changed with every new update. You just, as I said, get to see more of the world and find out more and more bits and pieces of the mystery.
One could avoid the change of story drawback... if the changes were preplanned and are a part of the story. Basically start out with an end goal already set and have those different stories during alpha actually tie in at the end.
Ive actually played happy humble burger farm... its nothing like FNAF. Its a weird feverdream that i cannot spoil, and it exponentially gets more surreal the more you play.
Indeed, and that's one of the things I love most about it! IMO Happy's Humble Burger Farm is WAY better than FNAF Security Breach, and arguably better than pretty much every game in the FNAF franchise!
i've seen a bit of the most recent version. i wish they went for the low poly graphics like in happys humble burger barn (which i think is the beta?? could be misremembering) instead of artificially polishing it but it's not that big of a deal
It's also part of a pre-established universe called the Scythe Saga Universe which started life as concept albums and later video games such as the Northbury Grove series which are inspired by 80s slasher films like Puppet Combo's games (to the point where people confuse the developers because they look so similar, which is even funnier if you know about the lore of the Scythe Saga Universe compared to the Puppet Combo lore. While I love Northbury Grove, Puppet Combo is scarier because of its use of silence and sound design). Scythe Dev Team also made games for the first two Dread X Collection games as well as music for the first game, interestingly, both games revolve around the planet Carthanc, a mysterious and important part of the lore (Dread X Collection was how I first found out about Scythe Dev Team, mostly To The End of Days, a prequel boomer shooter from the second Dread X Collection which was most well known for Sucker For Love).
Full agree. Too many games wanna “do what FNaF did”, and have what FNaF has. That always leads to them either falling to the wayside, or getting too full of themselves and crashing and burning. FNaF had an interesting premise, good atmosphere, setting and style. And as the franchise continues it tried to continue building upon and improving itself with every entry (barring some questionable decisions). It continues trying to branch out into new grounds. Bendy had a really strong opening with a unique premise, setting, style, and an unsettling atmosphere. Then it chased that 9-14 audience and spiraled into an incoherent attempt at a franchise that couldn’t even be bothered to wrap itself up properly. Hello Neighbor had an interesting premise, good atmosphere, setting and style. Then it devolved into madness as they desperately tried to chase that UA-cam audience, pull in those views, have what FNaF had. All of these games started off and got attention because they were interesting, scary, and unique. But then, they tried to capture what FNaF had. FNaF has books? Ok, we can write books! FNaF has matpat?? Ok we can get matpat (they couldn’t get matpat). Etcetera. Devs out there, don’t try to be the next FNaF. Don’t try to be the next Minecraft. Don’t try to be the next anything. Be the first you.
i agree. When it comes to gave dev its never bad to be inspired by something, of course. A lot of games are inspired. One of my favorite games, Stardew Valley, is HEAVILY inspired by Harvest Moon, but it still manages to do its own thing. There's a fine line between taking an idea and making it new again and not doing enough to change it (or even, changing it too much). And of course we'll see that a lot with games that make a lot of money or get a lot of attention, this is something that happens in both the AAA gave dev space and with indie devs. Its something to be super careful with.
@@Wildcard-Jack-47 Very true, if there was just 6-7 months more development maybe it would have been as terrifying as the other Fnaf games. I gotta say though, the map is phenomenal and I have no complaints about it other than getting softlocked
@@QUBIQUBED ehh I wouldn’t consider the other games terrifying it’s just the jumpscares that “scare” people I’m just talking about how not only the game but the story just feels unfinished
Matpat helped establish the "Horror for kids" trope. I remember when FNAF was seen as a legitimately terrifying game, now it's seen as the spooky chuck E cheese furry kids game with a thousand theories. Poppys Playtime is following this trend too, sadly.
Whenever I see a kid wearing something like a FNAF hat or shirt, or see the toys at Gamestop, I can't help but smile and laugh, because the whole franchise is *LITERALLY* about a bunch of murdered kids. It's like how Alien and Terminator were marketed as toys for kids, when the movies were most definitely not.
My last memory with this series, was trying to persuade my friends not to buy secret neighbor, and that they would be wasting their money. They bought it, and I swear they played it twice and never touched it again, go figure.
31:32 this honestly sounds like an elementary school teacher reading a book to a class… like they’re trying to solely depend on the voice acting to keep kid’s attention
In my opinion the FNaF Security Breach animatronics are really well thought out. At the beginning they look so marketable and child friendly but when you keep going through the game they get more damaged due to Gregory's little adventure. By the end they start to look completely different from the beginning and its terrifying. But that's just my opinion!
I love how they look at the end, if the game was just tighter, with improved level design and had better AI it could have been actually really scary. I think the game just needed like an additional year or two of development.
@@stupidhoirse The problem is: If they kept pushing it back, a small but vocal subset of the fanbase would probably harass the people at Steel Wool because they "weren't working hard enough" or something like that.
And the fact that gregory rip apart Montgomery and roxys eyes is so brutal Meanwhile gregory has no remorse whats so ever And his excuse? "Well they're still functional"
@@darkmodeenjoyer3367 Still, it’s hard to do that when not only the fans are harassing you every time you push back the game, but they were also likely pressured by SONY to get the game out by Christmas. That and the creator leaving during the pandemic, and only having a 12-man team, Security Breach was destined to have a rocky launch.
Honestly, that book's opening with the grandma is rather solid. Its use of uncomfortably tactile language combines with its depiction of a believably unsettling elderly relative to create a sense of classic childhood unease. The old woman's ritual of washing hands upon waking is both compelling and ominous. I only wish they leaned harder into the disquieting nature of the elderly as recalled from a child's perspective. Describe the grandmother's faintly wheezing breath, the way her gnarled hands clamp around the protagonist's fingers, the yellowish hue of her teeth as she sang old children's songs in a foreign tongue.
It has pieces of something good in it, but its writing style reminds me a ton of the texts they had you read in elementary school. I can't put my finger on exactly why -- maybe it's how it feels like it wants to make everything a metaphor in order to teach kids what those are? Idk, but that's what it reminds me of.
@@sparksbet the structures kind of reminds me of the short stories we would have to read in my elementary school text books. The writing seems deliberate in a way that makes it seem like it was meant to be read by a child who was learning how to read.
Man the reason this game hooked me in was because of the adaptive Ai. I thought that the idea of the Ai learning your path and where you go the most and then setting traps to stop you was a cool idea. But then they completely lost focus on that and decided to just make the house bigger and the story more convoluted
I couldn't agree more with you on the whole "post-FNAF indie horror" mindset. Unfortunately it seems like ever since FNAF dominated the horror market, it feels like developers became more interested in basing their product off of a "ooooo deep lore ooooo" narrative and artifically stretching out the length of it's popularity rather than actually putting out something of quality. Not that it's necessarily FNAF's fault for this, but it's popularity helped spiral these types of games to become nothing more than fads for the sake of more fame for the time being.
kinda like the Shrek-franchise. great movies (except the third one), with a not-so-great impact on the animation industry. so many animated movies try to be the new Shrek franchise, but entirely miss the point, what made these movies work so well, to begin with.
It’s ironic cause FNAF’s lore (after the first game) never made any sense. The first game was pretty good lore-wise _because_ it was so small and contained. Even by the second game you thought about it at all and got more confused, and the sequel just gave fans more questions than answers. And every sequel after has done the same thing.
Like how after the release of Sword Art Online, 90% of anime seems to be "some loser in modern Tokyo wakes up in a fantasy world where he gets 11 girlfriends and is also Jesus"
Wow. The game had such potential but I remember the moment the final release dropped, it hardly even felt final. Just sorta came and went. Scarily, I remember the alphas themselves had more coverage and mystery than the final to the point where I thought they WERE the final version. I know the game is pretty much meant for children at this point. But unfortunately, people DO grow up, so it may only be a matter of time before the player base dies out. Not unless they can evolve and improve.
@@coldhaixx1905 The twitter thing is briefly shown in this video. Basically, the Hello Neighbor Twitter account kept spamming MatPat as the Alphas went on, begging him to do a theory video on him. They kept going "I think MatPat would like this...!" anytime they dropped new lore hints. A little while later MatPat called Hello Neighbor low budget and bad, so, it seemed to balance itself out in the end.
I read the books. _I regret it a little, but I did._ I can confirm, the events of the cartoon pilot are based on the books. But only by a little bit, because they took an event from the books (which also happened in the game) and completely altered it. In the third book, Nicky did get kidnapped by Peterson. However, he was completely alone when it happened, and it happened just how it did in the game, which begs the question: _where the hell does the cartoon come in?_
This is exactly how I felt about Tattletale. Only, the difference between the two is that one of a them is a well-made game with decent lore and the other was a forest fire.
Didn’t tattletale release the game + a single dlc and dipped? Tbh at least the game died a game, rather than hello neighbor dying as uh…”franchise” I hate calling it that.
@@reasons2live it Dident really did it just stopped its not like there still desperately trying to pick up scraps and release dlc they just stopped it passed away a good single player game that only has a campaign you can’t really say it’s dead it wasent supposed to have players after 2017
Man, I remember seeing this game everywhere on UA-cam back in the day. Gameplays, game theories, reactions, everyone loved it and then it just vanished and people stopped talking about it
@@guesswhatthisisnotmyrealna9510 The problem with Bendy and the Ink Machine is that Chapter 5 just ended vaguely and inconclusively, with several questions still unanswered, with the answers given being confusing at best. This practically made everyone within the community (especially myself) feel severely disappointed in the BATIM franchise since it doesn't even bother wrapping itself up. It also doesn't help that the next installment, Bendy and the Dark Revival, is forever stuck in a neverending cycle of development hell due to the numerous dramas and controversies on Joey Drew Studio (such as how they apparently fired 50 employees and accusations of work conditions, from what I heard).
I feel like the moment I started just genuinely being sad about this game and what it became was when I went to a local convention and saw a big cheap looking neighbor plush hanging up. Just how obviously commercialized the game became.
@@DeathnoteBB This isn't a big company, they should have focused on the development of the game instead of thinking that following the same pattern every update would be enough
surprisingly when a company chooses to target children and how easy it is to scam them, things tend to fall in a downward spiral for anything remotely good and worth anyones time other than a childs.
The creator of Andy’s Apple Farm actually said that the game wasn’t inspired by the Walten Files but I can definitely see why people would think that. That’s what I thought when I first saw it. Edit: Yeah he was probably lying lmao
I hope the "horror game for kids" thing dies out soon. Or at least, I hope that developers stop feeling like they need to make their games kid friendly. I know it'll probably never happen because of how much money you can squeeze out of kids, but god am I clamoring for a horror game that'll just let itself be scary. Sure, you don't need super dark and disturbing lore/theming to be scary, but for me it makes horror games more interesting. Honestly, I'm almost tempted to learn how to develop games just to make the sort of stuff I wanna see.
I don't think games like bendy, tattletail, etc. were intended to be "kid friendly" from the start. I think the internet and kid friendly channels ended up ruining the image of these games. I don't think Horror games with cartoonish characters need to die, they just need to stick to their original vision and not focus too much on appealing to just a young demographic.
@@blockotheblock5672 i mean, i think bendy and tattletail were almost certainly made for the post fnaf craze for horror games but that’s just me, which was almost entirely made to appeal to children
@@blockotheblock5672 I agree, I love when horror uses mascot characters. My issue is when horror games compromise their integrity and overall quality in order to be marketable and appealing to as wide an audience as possible.
What’s wrong with kids have their own horror games? It’s not like this trend is taking over the horror scene completely. Resident Evil 8 is out and there’s plenty of other horror games like it out there, some old, some new. What’s wrong with horror games appealing to a wider audience? If they’re good, than that’s all that matters. If you want more niche stuff, just dig around. They’re out there. Go look for them.
@@Moony1568 Exactly. Horror for kids is the most visible right now because anything for kids is the best performing content on UA-cam. But there's still tons of gory, disturbing, depressing, or all of the above games coming out all the time in the indie scene if you just dig a little bit. Kids love being scared and they deserve content catering to them. Personally I hope more good kid's horror games start coming out instead of the clusterfuck of barely functional cash grabs they have now.
One of the biggest mistakes in my opinion was doing more than one public alpha, they should’ve taken the feedback from the first one, added a little more and release a short but sweet game for 5 to 10 dollars. But every public release added more and more features and that ruined the game.
yes exactly these indie games that are still in development that get really popular on youtube always seem to make the same mistake of releasing multiple alphas/demos of an interesting concept at first but then they ruin the whole idea by letting the popularity effect the games development leading to feature creep that always ends up making the final product worse then the original alphas/demos
I do kinda have a soft spot for those “horror games for kids” because those types of games were my own introduction to horror as a whole and I know that it probably also was for a lot of others, but it definitely gets annoying when every Tuesday there’s a new game like that.
I think what a lot of the post-FNAF indie horror games don't realize is that FNAF was enjoyed by both kids AND adults. There was the "haha funny animals go brrr" side of FNAF and then there was the "oh yeah this is about a serial child murderer and possessed killer animatronics" side of FNAF. I enjoyed FNAF both when I was a wee 12 year old and even now that I'm almost an adult. Games like Hello Neighbor, BATIM, and even Poppy Playtime just... don't interest me at all. They all feel like they're trying to be vague for vagueness sake instead of trying to set up an enthralling mystery like FNAF did. Seriously, for as convoluted as FNAF lore became, it was structured in a way that kept people hooked and that's just not something other indie horror games trying to capture its magic have been able to replicate since. They all just end up fizzling out into obscurity like, maybe a year at most after their final releases.
I feel like this is one of many reasons why Undertale and Cuphead got so popular and are still relevant to this day. They both try to do their own things instead of trying to become the next FNAF.
@@lukasruston8618 I couldn't really think of any other indie horror game, so those were the first one to come to mine even though they weren't horror. But UT did have some horror elements.
The best thing about Hello Neighbor is the character design of said Neighbor tbh. No matter how many flaws about the game, his face is truly iconic despite being the game’s villain.
I personally like the silly caricature looking designs they had for that game. I don't think horror always has to rely on gory details or hyperrealism to really scare a player.
Dude, the Nancy Drew games freaked me the hell out as a kid. In the Message in the Haunted house game whenever you hear someone whispered, "I see you" as you climb the stairs I had to stop playing for awhile. Nothing quite compared to the feeling of playing those games and I wish they had more attention because they were way freakier than a lot of titles currently out.
Thank you!! I've been a fan of this series for two decades and am bothered by the lack of attention these games get. There really is nothing like a Nancy Drew game, and so many people are missing out.
When it was a Pixar like horror game about this dude who kept something in his Basement from the first two builds? This shit was absolutely amazing. I loved it. When we got all these updates and stuff I knew it was a lost cause. Such a damn shame that it was fed to the dogs. RIP original Hello Neighbor. We'll miss you.
I have a feeling the developer misunderstood the genre they originally had. Instead of going a wacky linear story route, they should have made this like a semi-endless/roguelike with Immersive Sim elements sprinkled here and there. In other words, think of it like Neighbours from Hell meets Hitman meets The Binding of Isaac. Have the neighbor AI learn, set traps, etc., so that every time you get caught, the game gets a little harder until it's over. Then, at the beginning of a run, the set is either selected by the player or at random from a variety of objective sets. The basic scenario, for instance, is that he is concealing something, and you want to gather evidence or figure out what. For instance, suppose you discover a bloody hammer in the trash, letters from a wife requesting a divorce, blood on the attic floor, and then a dead body in the freezer in the basement. Once you've located all the evidence, your objective is to take pictures of it before running away. If you make mistakes too frequently, the game is over and you must restart it or choose a different scenario. Have it be anything, like planning a surprise birthday party, kidnapping, or murder. There is a ton of replayability, you can still put "deeper lore" hints with a low spawn chance that would be food for theories, etc. Randomize the house's layout (in a semi-sensible way) with different room variety and increasingly challenging puzzles and traps set by the neighbor. They could even make several medium-sized houses or even make the house generated depending on the seed. You would come across the same rooms often but with different items and blockades for a mix of solutions. Every now and then you would get in a room that has some weird stuff for the lore and the game could still keep the not-gonna-tell-you-anything vibe but be consistent about it. Of course, there would be a lot less platforming and more access for the neighbor, maybe sometimes the player needs to distract him in a way that gives you a certain amount of time to do a puzzle. The player would have to learn how long different distractions take for the neighbor to recover from and come back for them. For added replayability, have the player find random items that will assist him. I'd also like to keep the protagonist as a child. Nothing too serious or sinister, just a curious child breaking into a neighbor's house. It would be interesting if each time you completed all of your objectives, you'll be rewarded with a new unlockable gadget or item for the next run. The enemy AI is the game's bread and butter, becoming a lot less predictable and adapting to your playstyle; build the game around that rather than some lore.
this series sort of exemplifies how the internet giving people the ability to give such insane amounts of feedback and hopes for a game is a double-edged sword. if a concept is promising, it's easier now than ever to get it to a bunch of people and have them go "we wanna see this made!!" but by the same token you also fall into the trap of hyperfocusing on one or two things with "shock factor" or whatever that stick out and sabotaging the rest of your product in service of being talked about by youtubers. idk it's hard to explain but it's the same thing that happened to bendy, the same thing that's bound to happen to poppy playtime, and god knows what it means for any other game that accidentally shows too much promise.
It's because often the ideas focused on by all these people online is something somewhat shallow, all the lore and lore expansion people love reading about or making is honestly more of a blight on game development, developers should want players to interpret truly interesting parts of lore not every single aspect and often times expanding too much on lore is actually fully detrimental. (I honestly think FNAF kept getting worse and worse over time.) Certain things need to be grounded and simply told to the player and some things should be left to the imagination, many of these games don't do the first part and lean on theory crafting videos and tiny tiny hints. As for gameplay, it's a classic more is good approach, most of the time more content is good but for this game they really should have just made levels instead of giant acts with a big house. The fans that should be listened to are often the niche ones, not the general ones.
I dislike that we have normalized bad writing in kids shows these days. I know most of them have terrible writing but I just think that it’s not fair and they should get good quality too. The argument about the bad writing just made me wanna write this. I just think excusing bad writing in a kids show isn’t valid and wanted to share so thanks for reading :).
Nah, kids content has had bad writing for decades (see a good chunk of kids TV between the 50’s-80’s, games even pre-FNAF, a good chunk of kids movies, etc,.), if not forever. Doesn’t excuse it, though.
@@DeathnoteBB Not sure about that one, chief. I think inverting someone's face is far more offensive to the senses than a race joke. You can be offensive without it being at the expense of any one or any group.
One thing missing from this video that puts everything else in perspective is that Hello Neighbor was initially announced as crowdfunding project in Kickstarter, focusing primarily on the Neighbor's AI and the adaptive challenge. It failed. Maybe Hello Neighbor would never have seen the light of day if not for this FNAFification, as much as it may have marred the initial concept.
The reason this game was so popular in the first place, was that it was something new, something unique. You are always breaking OUT of places in horror games. This time, you break in. I liked the idea of the pixar graphics and i think that is an underrated and underexplored area of horror games. The alphas were amazing, with constant leaks and out-of-map secrets. I think that too, is a part of the reason this game was so popular. There were so many small hidden things around, and it sparked a huge explosion of hacking videos and people exploring the secrets...up until the betas. The betas simply didnt have anything hidden out of the map. Not much was added, and the puzzles were turned from fun and interesting, to confusing and tedious. The old puzzles were actually very intuitive and you could tell what you were supposed to do via little hints around the world. The newest betas and the full version had no context clues for the puzzles, hence just making them confusing. They werent a mystery that you could solve, they were a bunch of random factors that you fiddled around with till you got them right, which is NOT something fun. The other big problem was the fact that, when the full game released, Act 3 was meant to be THE BIG house. The house full of crazy topsy-turvy structure, and a WHOLE LOT of puzzles. The problem with this, was that Beta 3 had almost the exact same puzzles as act 3, and everyone who played hello neighbor already watched the beta 3 videos, so it wasnt even a mystery anymore. Instead of taking 5-6 hours to beat act 3, it takes less than ONE. Not only that, a lot of things were just entirely platforming skill. The issue with that is that the movement system was pretty buggy. The old alphas were also a lot scarier than the full version. The ambience isnt even scary in the full version, stealth is kinda drowned out because the neighbor basically either knows where you are at all times, or cant get to you at all, and there is no in between. The old alpha chase music actually instilled terror in the player, but in the new versions, the chase music just sounded like some simple piano loop without much intensity. The wardrobes you could hide in wouldnt even work because the neighbor would basically always check them anyways. The old versions were just simply better. The storyline, while pretty interesting, doesnt have anything left to wonder about once you finish hide and seek and hello neighbor. This leaves the game uninteresting at the end, and basically killed it for good as soon as it died down on youtube.
It went from Don't Breathe if the setting takes place inside the "Milkman Conspiracy" level from Psychonauts to one of those weird clickbait Roblox games.
FNAF should be the example of what you should do to build up the game and keep what made it good while hello neighbor is what not to do forcing the game placing the brand everywhere not letting it go naturally and the game changed drastically of not being fun
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m " the "Milkman Conspiracy" level from Psychonauts " Just replying because I wanted to express my absolute fondness for that level. That level was the high point of that game.
It really wasn't new or unique though, whatever you want to break it down as: 2 years prior we had Alien: Isolation, another horror-stealth game with an invincible, learning AI hunting you while you try to solve puzzles. Obviously targeted at adults, it actually gave this 30-something nightmares and near-pants-bricking experiences, and I fully believe someone at Dynamic Pixels saw it and said, "Ivan! Get over here! Make a non-scary kids' version of this game to turn into a whole multimedia series!"
Hmm your post fnaf indie hypothesis was actually pretty spot on, and i would definitely relate to that feeling of "why do they have a book series now???!" I never realised this franchise has fallen by this much even though I've heard of it during the popular days. Either way, what in the actual fuck were the people from poppy's playstime doing?
I honestly prefer some of the alphas and betas more than the finished product. I was excited to see how the final game would end up but it was just like, mildly disappointing in general.
I'm reminded of Jackscepticeye's playtnrough whenever I think of this game. He got pretty far into the game (end of act 3 I think) but got sick of it during that one puzzle involving the multiple doors and completely abandoned the let's play.
They could have made the neighbour so goddamn terrifying just with the simple act of having a small chance of him being able to get to wherever you are, even if you can't see a clear way he could get in and it feels safe. Suddenly you can't just go behind a fence and defeat the mighty antagonist for good, because the longer you stay there, the higher the chance of him getting the jump on you is. Having him always on your tail takes the shock out of it since you'd get used to it, while having a completely safe zone kills all tension. But hit the right balance of "a completely safe zone... almost", and you've got a winner for keeping the player on constant edge. Idk, maybe it's a stupid idea but that's sort of the running theme when talking about this wretched game
I was thinking the same thing watching this. Mechanical neighbor bullshit like him teleporting near your location or magically knowing where you are could easily be handwaved with, "Well, it's his house, he knows it better than you do."
I remember my brother got the switch version and my friend and I played it and had no idea what to do. We had seen markiplier play the alpha 1 a long time ago but when we got to the offical game we were so lost. We started looking up walkthroughs then realized on level 3 there’s no point in doing this when it’s just us looking up how to do everything
Honestly not all games need a sequel or mass increase in scale, Hello Neighbor had it's time to shine. It's finally time to let it be put to rest and let another game take it's spot.
In the full release, i was just playing act 2 and trying to escape. I threw a cup at a window and tried to go through the window. In doing so, i stepped on a cup and it launched me into the atmosphere and out of the fence. I completely skipped that chapter because of a cup
It was almost scary how fast this game disappeared. One minute, there were speculation videos and fanmade songs all over UA-cam and the next there was silence.
One day I was watching all I can about it, and then the next day I completely forgot about it
dude the JT Machinima song was a bop
it disppeared faster than GoT after season 8
Hello Neighbor is like a one hit wonder band trying to reclaim that spotlight
scarier than the game itself
The funniest part about Tiny Build desperately trying to get matpat to make a theory about the tv pilot is that like a week after Matpat called it a crappy low budget horror game
Oof I didn't think Matpat would be that mean
@@mrboerger1620 Well, it's not exactly mean. Most people would probably agree anyway.
the funnier thing is that person got fired and now everybody just thinks of that moment💀💀
Where did he say that?
Omg where did he say that
The saddest part is that the Game Theory about the neighbor making a deal with the devil sounds way cooler than the actual story.
Wait that's not the actual story..??
@@KD6-3005 I mean it's just a theory...
A gam-
@@KD6-3005 No, the real story is something like the neighbor losing his wife in a car crash and his son killed his daughter. The protagonist found the neighbor locking the son up to keep him from being taken away and the neighbor locked him up to so no one would find out.
All the rest is just a dream sequence about it.
@@swaggyspaceman9805 yeah the dream section is all about the protagonist (I forgot his name) overcoming his childhood trauma from being locked in and escaping the neighbours basement. The 3 abilities you get in act 3 represent his fears
@@swaggyspaceman9805 wow I never knew that I just really wanted matpats theory to be right honestly
Huh, ....I *guess* that's an interesting story of it's own
I just lost interest before I ever heard it until now
When i first heard of this game, i was hoping the twist would be that nothing was in the basement, that he was just a normal neighbor who had a love of engineering or perhaps was just paranoid because of the fact that the player kept breaking into their home.
I didn't know much about this game but the ending being that you were just an annoying brat who kept breaking into some misunderstood dude's home would have been quite nice. Sure it would probably hurt replayability (knowing that the neighbour isn't the bad guy) but it would have been nice.
@@Unethical.FandubsGames Second playthrough, you play as the neighbor trying to stop the kid from breaking in.
@@ChronicNewb Could have just gone the Hylics route and made the script feel like a madlibs game that's procedurally generated.
I remember in the concepts the story had to do something with the devil.
That would be funny
Such a huge disappointment. The game kept getting worse and worse with every update. This is why a game being popular on UA-cam can be both a blessing and a curse
The old art style was way better than the modern one.
Fr. The original horror concept is what drew people in along with how impressive the AI was at the time.
They changed the house into some sort of monstrosity that even the dude who frickin’ lives there can’t navigate without getting stuck in the geometry, did away with the horror/mystery elements in favour of a more adventure/platformer feel and completely decimated the AI with the new bulky ass house. So disappointing T_T
the early build with the small house was the best one
It's weird how a rushed fnaf game, Security Breach, has people immediately looking forward into the bug updates, theories, new minigames, puzzles, and dlc. While this game dies.
Oh yeah, the latter game has shitty platforming segments.
@@LowIntSpecimen Alpha 2.
It really says something horrifying when a game's *first alpha release* is considered better than anything that came after it.
Hopefully it was a learning experience for the developers and a lesson to aspiring game indie game developers. Sometimes less is more!
Feature creep at it's finest.
Just like CubeWorld lol
@@davidbass4834 Did the developer of that game abandoned their own passion project to pursue something else more mainstream in the market, despite the generous feedback it received from the playerbase during the early access stage? Or did they just give up trying to make amends from their mistakes and decidedly stray about as far from the premise of a voxel Minecraft-inspired RPG as it's possible to get?
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m The influx of players playing certainly got to them. When you suddenly have a game that receive a lot of player out of nowhere, that influx can have a really bad effect on them. They most likely were not prepared for that. A lot of feedback, criticism and improvement need to be made. In the end, they just give up in the middle of development and run away. It's scummy, but I'm not surprise. Jumps like this can be really damaging. They came back, just to release the game in a half finish form and be it like that. Most likely to get the cubeworld thought out of their head.
One of the best parts of the original demo was how the nieghbor would pay attention to how you broke in, and make that route harder, but it somehow feels like they lost that
the other best part was how he always stood inside the tv stand
I guess the game took longer to beat so the only option left is powering through the front door. And the house got way out of control
They built a new house and never rebuilt that feature, it probably took a long time to make.
The house was so small and claustrophobic it was actually scary too
@@EggZu_ Almost like an actual fucking house and not something out of a 3 year old's sketchbook
I remember MatPat getting visibly frustrated at the box stacking thing. I honestly lost interest when it got brighter and more colorful, yet less sinister. At this point it's weird to even call it a horror game anymore, even by kids standards.
Honestly. It went from an Indie Horror game to a Indie Puzzle game. I feel like they were trying to have a horror game with some puzzles, but it went the other way around. The reason why FNAF works is because it's split the lore apart into pieces of the game for you to find out. Imagine that Scott put everything, lore/lure (idk) and all, into one game. That's what Hello Neighbor is (or is like). Just toned down and the lore is explained in the game. I feel like they should've put a setting for kids and adults. So if you're a kid or a young teen, you would be counted as a kid. However, if you were an older teen or an adult, then you would go into the adult mode. (Since he said that older teens and adults were mainly complaining).
The kid mode would be this version while the adult mode would be what it was intended to be..
*KidAdult*
Now the only horror is the thought of playing it.
this! when it got more colourful, it lost its horror essence
Matt sucks but I also felt that way about the box stacking. Complete BS
My greatest memories of this game is totally watching Matt hate it, and just zoning out while I watched him freeze a globe and then thought "Why the HECK is he freezing a globe what did I miss."
What caused Hello Neighbor's downfall was definitely its heavy reliance on quantity over quality. With each alpha, the house kept getting bigger and bigger with new rooms and items, which just caused the graphics, frame rate, and overall experience to get worse and worse.
Not really, however, due to the big size of the houses it turned from the "Stealth Horror" game to a platformer.
@@phoenixcoursey6711 I kinda agree. I beat the first part of getting in pretty straightforward but once we are stuck inside I got Hella confused. And I don't think ever figured out how I was supposed to get out.
But I did get out, by using platforming and utilizing some of the water I just launched the kid out of bounds and it auto cut to the cutscene of me escaping
The frame rate wasn't really an issue. It was just the overall gameplay that was not worked on.
That and they relied too much on the mystery factor, they were expecting the community to flock to the game in hopes of digging into the mystery and lore aspects despite the game's lackluster gameplay.
Nah, I would definitely agree with OP. The original house was so great because it functioned with the "less is more" philosophy. The house was designed around the AI and the AI was finely tuned to that environment. As soon as they started shaking up the house design for more convoluted, abstract takes, however, that's when the AI started experiencing fits and spasms trying to comprehend the alien environment it was now trying to operate in.
I watched people Lets Play this early on, and I distinctly remember a general disdain building towards the various alphas as the game deviated away from that tightly designed experience to something unnecessarily big that was throwing additional mass in for the sake of having more. More rooms. More height to the house. More more more without any rationalization for why that was or any attempt to adjust the AI. They couldn't even be bothered to have the AI do something basic like despawn once a certain floor or section is reached so that it can respawn elsewhere. Games with infinitely smaller budgets learned this.
Had they done something as basic as that, they theoretically could have built an infinitely expanding tower and it would still work so long as not too many platforming segments broke up the AI's pathing. But they didn't. They went with quantity over quality.
My favorite thing about this game is the fact that they kept on telling matpat to make videos about them
LMAO they needed someone to shill their game to keep it alive.
And MatPat just went ride or die
I heard that the employee who did that was a matpat stan and was fired but idk if that's true
@@bahrlee yes he was
@@callsignmaverick3979 That hilarious
Sometimes less is more. Not every game needs huge sprawling maps.
no shit sherlock
Man, this is such an obvious thing but so many indie devs struggle to realize this.
@@froggychair570 "Sadly.
This. I fucking hate games with big sprawling open worlds but there's nothing interesting to do in any of them. If a "big open world" only means it takes 5 minutes to get to your destination instead of 1, either shrink the world or put more interesting stuff in it.
@@ScrambledAndBenedict red dead online is the perfect example of it, I'm convinced that most of the time I've played it was spent riding from one town to another on a horse.
Ending literally anything with "it was just a dream" is the biggest middle finger ever
"All your emotional investment was for nothing. Thanks for playing/reading/watching! 🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂"
Pisses me off.
That twist can be done well. The devs didn’t do it well at all.
My teachers were telling people not to do that when I was 8, if a primary school child is doing better than you then you've got a real problem
@@mapleflag6518 Can you give an example, I can't think of one
@@thisisthenameofhandle does Inception count?
I think Hello Neighbor was meant to be much darker and mature initially, but the game became so popular with little kids that the devs seriously toned it down into something much more kid friendly.
I know a game like this, it was basically meant to be a dark scary, DBD esque game. You may call it a ripoff, but it was worked on by DBDs devs themself and it was a mobile version with separate lore and some mechanics different. The game also had hooks, hunters with scary weapons and a dark gloomy vibe all around.
Until Chinese government restrictions and the age rating for this game had to be pushed down, resulting in the game keeping it's dark lore only for those who search for the chatacters (many of the first chatacters put in the game are based on historical murderers, like Amelie Dyer, for example, the newer ones do not seem to follow this pattern, probably in fear of censorship).
The games lore was fantastic, the story mode that was included in the beta had to be scrapped and implemented 3 years later after tons of tweaks and changes to make it less dark. It killed the games vibe so muchm
@@worstkiterchan9207 is it identity v?, it sounds kinda similar to what you're describing
@@SmashTheAdam Yes indeed. I used to play from early 2019 and I still play sometimes, following some of the content. And well, my nick is a dead giveaway, worstkiterchan lmao.
Dumb move as you lose the rest of the audience
@@worstkiterchan9207 I use to play it too sometimes and honestly i feel like now with the back lore being slowly made that same mysterious vibe that the characters had back in the first months of the game is slowly coming back, feels more of a interesting relief
Oh, so Hello Neighbor is the game development equivalent of spending time in a character creator where you tweak every individual facial feature to be perfect and then the end result is so much worse than the face you started with.
Say that to Mass Effect: Andromeda.
So many lighting systems have burned me in that regard.
@@DrakeHunter324 Shoot. I distincly remember a "Dungeon Siege II" type game that had you create your character in a tunnel, being released from jail, and I spent half an hour. Then, I happily watched the character walk beautifully through the dark tunnel, only to emerge into the sun like a damn Picasso napkin sketch.
From Legolas to Hephaestus in no time flat
been there
The horror games for kids thing is something I never really thought about until now, thinking about it it really explains why bendy specifically never took advantage of its concepts even though they had the potential to be genuinely terrifying
Like imagine if Ink Bendy could stretch his limbs out to grab Henry or enlarge his fists to crush him.
@@alijahaskew4644 this type of stuff along with maybe body horror based on toon physics would have been actually super cool. There were so many ways to use that 30's cartoon style in scary ways and they ended up doing nothing interesting.
Bendy himself isn't even really relevant either, makes me feel like it really was just for marketing
@@alijahaskew4644 cough cough, dark Gaia's minions. Sonic unleashed. Not horror and I'm an idiot, cough cough.
@@kinggalactix What are you talking about?
@@mr.mcklockwork3828 Exactly! Heck, why stop there?
You know how Susie Campbell, Alice Angel's original voice actor, said she voiced talking chairs and dancing chickens right?
Why not make those into enemies like the Butcher Gang?
Like, maybe those chicken enemies, which I call Kickers, flock around the studio and kick Henry with razor sharp talon?
And those chair enemies, which I call Sneakers, have rows of teeth and can camouflage themselves with regular furniture.
Also it really is weird how little relevance Bendy himself has in the story despite A: Being the mascot of the series, B: He's the most feared in the studio, and C: HIS NAME IS LITERALLY IN THE TITLE.
This is the worst way a game can die, not by being hated so much it’s every where, but by being so bad it’s forgotten and slips into obscurity
Yes, agreed 💯
I didn't even realize people stopped playing it
The story matpat theorized was so cool, that the neighbor made a deal with the devil to be successful/rich/whatever and he was kidnapping women with their children in exchange, all for it to end up being just a dream
The joke is made that Scott Cawthon just steals Matt's theories to write the story of fnaf but honestly that's what should've actually been done for Hello Neighbor. Wouldn't have saved the game exactly but at least one aspect of the experience would be kind of worthwhile.
well not exactly, nothing in the game was a dream
That was actually the original story of the game, though it had a bit more to it, then they decided to change it for some reason!
@@boe_jo9778 not quite, the deal part may be true but the rest doesn't seem like it
I agree. It should have been a more straightforward plot, rather than the convoluted existential mishmash we ended up with. And don't get me wrong, I HATE the whole woman in a fridge trope, but even that would have been a hundred times better than what we got.
What makes me sad is that their original concept of being trapped in a small, claustrophobic feeling house with an enemy whose ai learns how to block your most used paths ended up being the reason why that stupid granny game became so popular a couple of years ago
Hey what do you mean that granny game was pretty Epic
@@user-hr1uw4cj2z that shit looked like and probably was a unity asset flip.
@@char7035 shut it was gud
If only the aforementioned Granny game stayed relatively small and uncomplicated, had a lot more competent development team with more experience, less repetitive puzzles, polished gameplay, smoother animations, a smarter and unpredictable AI that is genuinely threatening to the player, higher-quality graphics to enhance the whole visual presentation, and an actual budget or passion behind it, then it would be a potentially serviceable game with a lot going for.
@@DanielsAlt503 I think it’s extremely popular because of the kids nowadays, since they always gravitate towards something that’s trending because of the UA-camrs (especially Flamingo). To be honest, I never really had any interest in the popularity of Piggy from the beginning, aside from the fact that they’ve also decided to make a crossover collaboration with Dark Deception (from what I heard).
I watched all of MatPat’s livestream playthroughs. Even he was wildly frustrated by the game both in its story and mechanics and came down pretty hard on it. I can really understand him just dropping it after all that.
Tbh m rly looking forward to hello neighbor 2 like there's some much stuffs in it it's just amazing m sure it won't disappoint and turn out to be an legendary master piece which everyone didn't expect much from
@@cluster4583 if ever there's a 2, I hope it's a comepletely different thing from the first game. Obviously all the mechanics should still be there, but I would want to see a new house, new characters, better plot/story, things that need to be changed, and has no relation to the first game besides the similar mechanics.
edit: ok I didnt know there was a 2 until I was near the end zamn
@@kemma_ I just said it's an open world with alot of characters watch all hello neighbor 2 stuffs in tiny builds channel u will get sneak peaks, some leaks and stuffs
@@kemma_ on Xbox u can play the demo of hello neighbor 2
It's so sad to see his playthroughs
It's honestly kind of impressive that they managed to make a game that got worse with every update.
Seems that's not too rare of a feat these last several years actually... for example I'm still playing on Minecraft 1.15.
@@Falkuzrules tbh minecraft doesnt get worse every update, just more convoluted.
@@Falkuzrules I think up to 1.18.2 is pretty good. I refuse to play 1.19 because of the chat report feature.
@@Schnort so you want to be able to verbally assault kids huh 😂😂
@@toptiertech7291
1. Absolutely
2. I'd like to have some semblance of privacy, and a permanent ban? Bullshit.
I never understood why they had an excellent idea that probably could've set a trend of a learning AI enemy that is scary because it is unpredictable and feels alive and they instead just chased the general trends.
money
They tried to expand instead of polishing what little they had, a common mistake in indie circles, like Mighty Number 9
I think Alien Isolation tried to do that in 2014 and they did pretty well.
They must have been in the pretty tough situation that any game developed from the original concept could be played through in about an hour.
A single tiny house and a single enemy can only be stretched so much.
I suppose they could have padded it out with a long introduction in another location and maybe multiple different houses, but... Making it a puzzle-filled mansion is the obvious and inevitable choice.
@@paumpaumwerson3191 yes I loved that game
I'm totally with you on that 'post fnaf indie horror game' thing. I remember even as a kid I hated that evil furby game because my tiny brain realized I was being marketed to
Oooo yea! Taddletale
Personally, I think Tattletail was one of the more better ones of that genre.
Honestly I'm glad that tattletail didn't come a franchise it is a good game and didn't need several games
i mean ok, tattletail was actually kinda decent
zomg its squiddo from the popular youtube channel known as squiddo
Don't use "it's made for kids" to excuse bad design or writing or similar. They have a sense of taste, too, what they haven't developed yet is a sense of standards yet. Just because they'll tolerate anything doesn't mean that media aimed at them should get away with not trying at all.
But...it clearly is made for kids
Who mostly watches cartoons? Kids
Who mostly play board/card games? Kids
Who plays mostly bright colored games? Kids
A kid would find this game more amazing than an adult or a teenager because a kid isn't as focused as a grown up to a story, a kid would rather play the game, end it and then watch a video of it's favorite youtuber analyzing the story of the game in detail. I'm 20 now but I was a kid too and I too did all the stuff that I just wrote
Play the game/watch a gameplay
Find a video from one of my fav youtubers that makes theories or just narrates the story of it
@@thatguyzerg The kids who FLOCK to FNAF are all pretty much there for the lore and horror, not for the fun game or creepycute characters.
Also I know a bunch of adults who do the exact same thing you said kids do. You basically just listed things that aren't inherently "childish" and said they ARE childish.
The only games I can think of that aren't "brightly-colored" are the slop of "BROWN IS REALISTIC" games we had as an epidemic for a while (followed by the SICKLY GREEN IS REALISTIC wave, then the DESATURATED IS REALISTIC one), and horror games that think you have to be unable to see 10 feet in front of you to be scary.
Yep. Unironically if we make poorly designed media for child, their brain will be rotten
@@thatguyzerg I mean, minecraft is also a colorful cartoon game suitable for kids, and at this point I think there's more adults that play the game than kids
@@neoqwerty the kids that were there for FNAF initially most probably didn't even care about the story because it was not that much noticible at the time, the game became known for the youtubers putting it on youtube, ppl (so I mean of every age) mostly started caring about a lore in those games after FNAF 2 came out, because for everyone for sure the first FNAF was in a nutshell this: "I'm standing still, I can't move I can only close and open the doors, check the cameras and survive if I'm lucky enough" and that is it, the mechanics weren't as known as today, ppl thought it was a mix of luck and instinct on closing the doors to protect yourself and that's it.
That bunch of adults you mention probably were kids or teenagers when these game came out, I didn't listed things to say they are childish, I listed them because those element is what attract more children most of the time, which is true. Just because I listed stuff that attract children...it doesn't mean they are childish or that they must be childish (stupid example: Family Guy is a cartoon with bright colors since it has to keep the cartoonish aspect of it right?...but it's totally not suited for children and it's totally not childish) for the rest I'm an ignorant of the games you mentioned such as "Brown is Realistic", I don't know what it is
The developers begging MatPat to dissect the cartoon like a frog in a science class will never not be funny
the story of hello neighbor is by far one of the top 3 best stories in any horror style game ever.
@@Jooduh4.5uhhhhh did you ever play Silent Hill?
@@Jooduh4.5Not rlly.
@@lolz3895 it’s an opinion.
if you beg people to analyze and make theories about your story, you neither understood writing nor the point of theories.
"Somewhere between 8 and 12 books" has the same energy as us not knowing exactly how many moons Jupiter and Saturn have. Theoretically there should be around 11 Hello Neighbor books but scientists can't confirm.
7 books, 2 graphic novels, 1 guidebook
@@Gavintheking2 but do guides count as books?
for all we know, that could be missing 2 zeros.
@@storm_fling1062 guess not
7 books 2 stone tablets 1 word prism
These types of games really rely on the M&M
You need an interesting hook, so Mark will play it.
Then you need a big ass lore puzzle for Mat to make a theory on.
Every game did this for a while, they still do.
M&M, very good acronym
Then boom, it blows up for a few months and it either falls or comes back
Poppy playtime managed this before they basically killed all good will by trying to sell NFT.
@@thanatoast Wait, what??
@@thanatoast, they did *what?!*
This video reveals a reason why I really hold Jim Henson in high regard. He invented the muppets, and when it became popular he was able to shut down the show at the height of its popularity. Everyone likely questioned his decision, but because he prioritized his ability over the brand he was able to create quality works. And because his works were well-made, many still remember the Muppets in good order decades after its debut.
I also think this is one of the reasons why Disney is failing so hard at trying to restart the Muppets repeatedly as well
@@Bealzabub i mean i think the muppet movie was fantastic 👀 felt like a love letter to the original show
i’m not sure what other attempts there are but that may just be because the muppets weren’t that big of a factor in my childhood
I admire any creator who has the guts to NOT ruin their works by doing too many sequels.
muppets most wanted (which i think is the most recent one) is honestly one of my favourite movies so the muppets has done really well with its reputation
I think the reason why Hello Neighbor went down a path of platforming is because of exploiters and bug hunters. In the pre-alpha, some UA-camrs tried using as many in-game objects as possible to exploit their way out of the map and test invisible boundaries. The devs took that as a desire for gameplay people wanted, not realizing that it was only because of the thrill of exploiting in such a small map while the neighbor was still walking around.
it's like the game design equivalent of when my friend's uncle heard them listening to Sufjan Stevens's Christmas album one time, and thus decided they must really like Christmas music, and started showing them Michael Bublé albums thinking they'd be really into it lmao
The biggest problem with Hello Neighbor was both overexposure and the developer's false promises: TinyBuild sold us a game that everyone had already played and seen for months prior to the release date. On top of the fact that they had promised that everything we had already seen was barely scratching the surface, if I remember correctly, they had said that what we saw was only 15% of the whole game.
Then it turned out to be 0% of the game
@@DeathnoteBB I can still remember the disappointment on UA-camrs faces when they reached the end and the credits rolled.
idk why “poppy’s playtime baldy nft friday night funkin bendy and the neighbor machine” made me laugh so hard
he said it as i was reading this comment 😭
LMAO SAME
When?!
@@Michaelb-g3b 35:55
@@gwishinn628 thanks
"Monster House" (2006) already did it better than the "Hello Neighbor" pilot.
Facts
love that movie
@@secondscurryfold Dude I wish my copy of chicken run still worked
The PS2 game also great. It has the horror shooter vibe that mixed together with kiddy theme but still captures the Monster House's dark mood.
hell yeah
It's like they slowly unlearned how to make a game.
As the neighbor’s AI advanced, theirs went away..
1 step forward, 2 steps back
"There's something wrong with this game"
It wasn't play tested; there is no clear cut way to get to the objectives; and it's unfinished.
how the fuck did you comment 15 years ago
@@boredplayer7425 :?
@@boredplayer7425 the 15 years ago is part of their name lol
@@boredplayer7425 gottemmmmmmm
@@boredplayer7425 gotemmmmm
Legitimately shocked that this series won over marble hornets, yet still interested to see what you have to say about it. and looking forward to a MH video, dang!
I’m not, as influential as MH was I feel there’s a large LARGE sum of people who don’t know of it unless you call it “The original Slenderman arg”
@@ziongamer6905 that's where I fall and I'm still interested in the vid because I genuinely don't know so an explainer video would be nice
As one of his patrons, as much as I love Marble Hornets, I *love* a good dragging of a terrible game. It also doesn't have a ton of commentary coverage post-2019, so I was excited to hear his take.
@@Hambo325 You’re in for a treat. If you get impatient or are interested after this vid drops, do check Nightmind’s coverage as well!
Idek what MH is
I'll be honest, the pre-alpha has the best sort of story telling for me.
The beginning is just you snooping around in places that you're not supposed to be in, and the neighbour doesn't like your curiosity and through gameplay itself we have a story. It's simple and straight to the point, giving you an easy story to work off of. Why are you breaking into this old man's house over and over again? cause you wanna see what's in the basement after getting interrupted *while* playing yourself. The only thing locking you away from the basement is just a simple combination lock, which for me makes a good mystery. To add onto that, the fact that you can get little secrets and add-ons to the story through the game's main thing of snooping around like a stacker is engaging. Instead of going from point A to point B, with B having the story point, you can just ignore the little tid-bits of story through GAMEPLAY. You're already breaking into a house to figure out what's in the basement, so it only makes sense that you'd be snooping around trying to figure out this guy in general.
I hope you respond: SAME. The pre-alpha was the best version. It was creepy, not bery abstract and crazy, and everything was veru unknown.
@@applejuice9468 it definitely had the most potential that the first alpha did build off of
sure some points were dropped, but they still tried to build off of it instead of just adding....whatever the fuck they added
@@TheBestWanderbug Yeah, the game was much less cartooney, but still offered a distinguished artsyle without revealing too much lore, which is a no go for me in games like this.
I totally agree, the pre-alpha was probably my favorite version of the game. I feel the smaller house made it a lot more tense alongside the music the plays when you're near the neighbor.
The most jarring change to me was the music. Originally it was dissonant and grating but gave a huge sense of tension when being chased. Then they got rid of it for some reason and being chased was no longer scary.
The big unrealistic circus house also ruined some of the immersion, but I think if they had better sound design it would have been forgivable. Good audio is very important in the genre of horror.
The original freaky song was great but I was fine with the music change since it fit the Neighbor's goofy look a bit more - no matter how scary the game is supposed to be, the dude still looks like *that.*
I totally feel you on the "Post-FNAF indie horror for kids" thing, even as someone who's not super into horror. It's just been really depressing seeing so many games pop up that are clearly just riding the coattails of the latest popular horror game, or ones that start out promising but end up reverting to ripping off the FNAF formula. At least there's still stuff like Resident Evil 8 coming out that's content just being itself.
Resi 8 Is just P.T. so not a good example.
Also horror is the most varied genre in gaming. Its just FNAF showed that there was an easy in.
Note: even this game sold a shit ton of merch.
@@RusticRonnie resident evil 7 and 8 play nothing like PT. It’s just RE gameplay but in first person, RE8 is explicitly based on RE4.
@@RusticRonnie Re 8 is pt how
@@RusticRonnie ("person talking about first-person horror and the only horror game theyve ever heard of before this was PT" voice) this game is just PT
Poppys playtime....(I'm so sorry to anyone who likes it, but that game just looks so generic)
As soon as they decided to make lore based story, I was like "oh....not again"
It just...I never imagined Hello Neighbor to be that kind of game.
Yeah
It was really good on its own way, you move in, your neighbor makes his strange actions, and you as a civilized human being, decides to break in over and over and figure out whats happening
Thats it, that was the lore and it was good enough, the rest was by yourself to figure out
And the stories never feel organised or neat to look at.
Yeah, not every game needs lore. There's nothing wrong with simplicity
@@smb_64youtube5 exactly. trying to add lore and an entire story behind it was just not it.
@@roblue5470 because they build off of the vagueness they feed their child fans. Have you ever read a fictional short story written by a minor? It's jumbled, a lot of it is ripped from properties they're familiar with, there's no nuance. Makes sense that the story would be a mess considering they were crowdsourcing it from children.
it’s ironic how the “horror for kids” genre seems to have started from Freddy’s, because in my eyes, it isn’t and has never been a “for kids” game.
It has a lot of elements that always spun me towards it having an intended demographic of young adult, but it fell into the pit of being a “for kids” game, and all without it trying to. Yes, it can be enjoyed by kids, but it just seems to focus a more teen to adult line.
Even with newer games like FFPS and Security Breach seeming to have a colorful atmosphere, they’re still dark as hell and more strike me as “wacky futuristic tech and entertainment” than “hey there children come consume this content”, especially since the younger fans are probably aging over the 7 years of lifespan the game has had.
Yet, I’ll be honest, the demographic of ‘young adult’ that I see in the series never stopped a younger me from getting into the it. I remember loving this series back when I wasn’t even 10 years old. I don’t know if it’s because I seem to be the ‘mature’ kid, but Freddy’s always fascinated me and some of my friends in a way that only young adult novels tend to have. It’s got an interesting storyline, but while it has the atmosphere of things that look kid friendly, it has some gruesome and dark topics beneath it all.
TL;DR: FNaF isn’t and never has been a kids game, it just fell into the realm of being a kids game by accident, but is growing out of it due to the fans aging. (me included).
Fnaf 1 has an environment that instills genuine dread and anxiety imo, idk why I was so into that shit as a 9 year old, let alone one who was so easily scared.
I might be exaggerating but I'm starting to think the new yt algorithm with all these "family friendly" channels are to blame here for ruining the image and potentially the development decision going on with these games :(
honestly id only agree with it if it wasnt that security breach is rated for teens by the ESRB, which i feel heavily limits its ability to go all-out with the story and dark tones
I'd argue the original series was never for children but as the games continued they've sort of became a parody of themselves, with Security Breach essentially cementing them as kid horror.
I'd argue that it's because kids like things that are cool and stimulating. After all, they don't know much about this world yet, everything they encounter is a new adventure to them. If a new trend like tiktok, kpop, or the smash-hit new indie horror game interests teenagers and adults, what more for kids?
On the other side of the spectrum, we can let kids be good boys and girls and let them watch Teen Titans Go. It's saturated and non-sense, that's what kids like, right? But kids in my day grew up with Avatar and the original Teen Titans, even Spongebob was like Tom and Jerry which my grandparents loved laughing at. Even if we'd watch mindlessly, we still loved the characters and their worlds.
I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking that the Alpha 1 was the best version. _Hello Neighbor_ is so weird in that because its development was so public, it’s like the game was released over and over, basically entirely different each time. _Hello Neighbor_ is itself a one-game series because of the radical differences between each version.
the big changes were because they didn't have a set idea on what they wanted, they were just test builds
Hello neighbor is the perfect definition of "Great idea, Awful execution"
Unrelated but I love your pfp 😂
@@creaturenamedalistair thanks, it's been a while since someone's mentioned it lol
@@creativename_ haha no problem
@@creaturenamedalistair I thought you said underrated at first
When a Let's Player actually gives their honest opinion on the game they are playing, you know something's wrong.
What do you mean by this?
THIS. Lets Players usually focus on the good and dismiss a lot of negatives because they take every game as it is, it’s more profitable to them to seem like they’re having fun and enjoying whatever they’re doing. So when they stop, look at the camera and talk about the problems with a popular game that could possibly have sponsored/provided them more content?? Something is wrong. It’s a perfect way of saying “I don’t care how big this gets, this isn’t worth supporting” without directly saying it
@@softestshade7813 Markiplier's reaction to Security Breach. is one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever experienced because of this. Like, I dunno if I was imagining things, but it felt like you could tell that he was starting to hate the game as it went along, but he couldn't quite bring himself to be completely honest.
@@softestshade7813 I kinda disagree but agree at the same time, for example jacksepticeye always honestly talks about what he dislikes about even really good games at the end of them and it always feels like hes being honest and not just saying crazy things for views
@SoSoyGee « nobody likes Security Breach » no. A lot of people like it. Why would people want 20/20 mode, we already got UCN for this. The game was supposed to be great but way too buggy because it was released too early, probably because of the fans.
I feel like this and We Happy Few had the same issues, where development felt more like it was just the devs experimenting with different ideas each update until they have to eventually finish it. The lack of cohesiveness between the alphas feels like they were trying to make a completely different game each time.
Except one is actually a pretty decent game, and the other is a weird amalgamation of two genres.
@@n646n We happy few is the decent game right?
@@manwithinternet i take a yes
@@detomnz2024 yep. The main story at least, not the DLCs, tell an interesting and cohesive story about those who are left behind by the masses. Gameplay is shaken between characters so it doesn't feel the same way each time. It's actually pretty good.
I wish they dropped the procedural and made a linear / survival story instead for We Happy Few, so much pontential wasted because it was all over the place in a big empty map with some incoherent buildings, could have been a kind of Bioshock game.
I think the Hello Neighbor devs started out with good intentions, but as soon as they saw that the game was remotely popular they turned focus into putting out new content as fast as possible instead of going back and polishing the game they had already made.
I actually looked up the reason to why hello neighbor changed so much since alpha 3 and the full release and I was shocked to find it out. The reason hello neighbor changed was because the developers dropped alpha 1 and 2 they were afraid that when the full game would drop the fans already knew what to do in the game and knew all the puzzles. So this is the reason they thought it would be better to make the house gigantic which I think is the dumbest reason for the downfall of this game
It does make SOME sense, but they could have made new unreleased ones for the final version? SOMETHING ELSE??
They could have made multiple houses, like he's moving out every now and then.
Honestly, it’s better to have a good predictable game, than an unpredictable bad one.
@@cosmicspacething3474 yep
@@PetitTasdeBoue THERE YOU GO
To this day I'll still never live down the publishers on twitter actively poking and basically _begging_ for Matpat to do a Game Theory on that animated series that apparently exists.
It was absolutely pathetic
Edit: It was the publishers.
And What/ have I done?
What/
@@dylansharp8471 What/
@@tylerdaniell2270 What/
@@mlgsamantha5863 What/
@@Gavintheking2 What/
Still nothing compared to when Slender came out. The indie game scene went absolute nuts and every other game was a "collect 8 something" game
fnaf kind of blew slender out of the water and is massively more impactful and successful to be honest
@@hyoroga86 tO be honest brrt brrt
@@hyoroga86 Slender was more impactful, but only for a small time. Fnaf continued on for years
@@hyoroga86 The fact that you're talking about Slender after all these years just proves its impact.
@@protol6269 id argue the same could be said for fnaf. still spawning multiple fanmade games to this day. Slender isn’t completely irrelevant but to say it’s still relevant to the gaming landscape today would be wrong. Outside of the movie released back in 2018, it’s a pretty dormant franchise.
When alpha one came out, I didn't like the game play at all, but I really liked the story. As far as I cared, it didn't matter what was in the basement. I didn't even know they planned on putting anything in the basement. To me, the mystery wasn't the basement, it was an extremely paranoid guy snooping around an equally paranoid neighbor's house, both endlessly feeding into the other's increasing fear until one of them finally kills the other.
In alpha 2, that seemed to be confirmed. IDK if that was always supposed to the be case, or if they changed their mind, but "you for no good reason decide something is seriously amiss and decide to be a protagonist about it until someone dies" is a much better horror concept than "get to the basement to unlock a poorly edited art student film that's completely disjointed from the gameplay"
Wow you are very right about the first paragraph. I've never thought about it that say before.
Hello Neighbor went from a good interesting take on a horror game, where your enemy actually learns from you each time, which requires you to think more, which in on itself makes the game all the more fun. To a massive cash grab for brand expansion.
M still looking forward to hello neighbor 2 it's such an open world thr r alot of stuffs to do I bet it will be an master piece
basically yeah
@@cluster4583 I'm still skeptical about the release of Hello Neighbor 2 due to how janky and unpolished the alphas were. Who knows, perhaps the developers would improve the game for themselves by listening to feedback and not repeating the past few mistakes they experienced.
Sounds like the SCP that is an interactive horror movie in which you try to guide the girl in outsmartting the killer.
@@chadcuckproducer1037 What's the name of the SCP?
Man, I used to be absolutely OBSESSED with Hello Neighbor. I still have my neighbor plushie sitting on my shelf right now. Then one day, the game seemed to just fall off the face of the earth, and I completely forgot about it. A few months ago I rediscovered this game and well... yeah, learning what the final game was, I was of course a bit disappointed. I'm saddened, really. This game that had such a hold on me In my preteen years, is just not all I hoped it would be :(
Buying a hello neighbor plushie was really cringe in my opinion
@@abbemartensson3850 it was joke gift gave to me by a dear friend that just collects dust now, would've never owned one otherwise
the books were really good. Hope the sequel will do it justice
@@bahrlee It’s not cringe. that guys opinion on what is cringe is cringe in itself lmao
@@absin8078 exactly
Honestly, the moment that the house expanded upward I was like
"They're really running out of ideas, huh."
Expanding downward seemed like the best idea to me if they had to expand.
@@AbstractTraitorHero I agree. Downward would have been better and made more sense to their premise that we need to get to the basement. Expanding downward would add to our level of “not there yet” and take us further from safety at the same time thus another adage to our fear of being caught since were more isolated anyway in dark spaces
@@AbstractTraitorHero Especially considering the basement having been pretty much the end goal for THE ENTIRE GAME.
@@AbstractTraitorHero It's unfortunate seeing there would've been interesting ideas that never went into fruition. For example, what if the Neighbor's basement was a Backrooms-style underground labyrinth-like environment where the architecture stretches out for miles beyond the limits and subsequently becomes more and more deranged as you slowly descend down into the unknowable depths below? That would give the game a sense of progression and a drastic change of pace by playing out expectations. Alternatively, how about a Dante's Inferno-type concept where each level represents a new layer to the basement (symbolizing each of the Nine Circles of Hell), and each following layer would introduce its own abstract themes, subtle environmental storytelling about the lore (without the explanation trying too hard to be as vague and complicated as FNAF's overarching timeline), and mind-bending puzzles that scramble your brain accordingly. The whole idea of a seemingly ordinary, albeit an unsettling house owned by a creepy stranger across the neighborhood that was apparently built above a twisted interpretation of Hell inspired by Dante's Inferno sounds a lot more fascinating and creepier than something out of Dr. Seuss's fever dream or an emotionally-stunted kindergartener's sketchbook.
Of course, the lowest and definitely the final floor to the basement would be frozen with ice everywhere and possibly involve numerous dead bodies kept on refridgerators (maybe his kidnapped victims?), and you must freeze the Neighbor by somehow locking him up in a meat locker without getting caught.
Expanding in scope is one thing... expanding in size is another.
It would be fine to redesign with more depth but to simply "Add more" is just... lazy. Level design is something that should be seriously considered... not just slapped together.
my favorite fun fact about Tinybuild is that they approached YandereDev to take over the development of Yandere Simulator, and he breached the contract by firing the devs they assigned to his game and (iirc) now owes a LOT of money in legal funds to them. they also published local 2 hour long video essay darling Pathologic 2. it's like some sort of insane crossover event
edit: said tinybuild developed Pathologic, but they're actually the publishers of it, development was done by Ice-Pick Lodge
tinyBuild only published Pathologic 2, it was developed by Ice-Pick Lodge
The only game tinyBuild developed themselves is No Time to Explain, everything else they've just published
This comment just hit me like a brick covered in hardened cement. It's very jarring to hear that Hello Neighbor and Pathologic have the same Prod/Dev.
@@Sinstarclair honestly what i find more jarring was hearing yanderedev drama being brought up again. Havent heard about that guy for a year, and last time I did it was all negative. Hows he doing? Did he improve his abhorrent behaivour yet? Did he actually complete the fucking game already lol?
@@deadlytoaster1422 I think he's doing Fiverr commissions now. But he's still the same.
I don't hate the idea of "horror for kids". When you rely on jumpscares and unsettling atmosphere, its possible to make something truly scary without relying on adult stuff like blood and death. If I was a kid, I would have loved to have a horror game that I could play. But I just hate how poorly executed and pandering it can all be. It just relies too heavily on the FNaF formula, which I would argue was never for kids in the first place.
@@mommalion7028 I find it ironic that FNAF has basically become synonymous with "kids" when the series' lore is founded on child murder
I think the reason FNAF as a series tends to be so tame is because children get into the series and due to Scott's Christian values he felt uncomfortable making the games more explicit. At the start it worked because the horror came from the character designs and the anxiety-inducing situation. It was just convenient that Scott being tasteful with what was shown and what wasn't made the game tame enough for kids.
Tbh, I don't think that jumpscares would be a good way to do "horror", unless it's NOT overused, has legitimately good buildup, doesn't rely on loud noises, and is just overall actually scary.
Basically, I think you're right, but they'd have to use jumpscares RIGHT.
For example: Little Nightmares & its sequel are REALLY good. They don't have many jumpscares, compared to most "horror" games nowadays, yet they're legitamitely very scary compared to almost every other game in its genre nowadays.
Bruh people will literally say anything is for kids now. Cartoons, anime, any video game that exists, most popular movie franchises.
Kids will play edgy shit and do it on purpose, gotta stop letting the idea of kids game live in your head rent free
Ik this is about games but Courage the cowardly dog did horror for kids amazingly
It's a pity so much horror marketed at kids is so lazy, because some of the best horror I've ever seen or read is written for a younger audience. Coraline is still one of the scariest things to me, and Gravity Falls, while not exactly horror, could be straight-up terrifying. But those things never talked down to their audience. They didn't think kids are stupid or shallow, which the creators of Hello, Neighbor apparently do.
Coraline is terrifying, yet not in a way of "im just going to scare you" but in one that it actually has...substance and interest on it's plot, yet knows the audience it's aiming for. If you make a game for kids (or any content for that matter) expecting them to just like dumbed-down version of a story, it will never come out too well.
Like, "kids" games feel more targetted towards 3 year olds that don't have a grasp of reality yet than games for kids between the ages of 12-14, which overall understand things a lot better and for the most part have started developing ideas of their own.
@@SiffrinISAT Coraline is probably my favorite movie and I can confirm. It has a chilling feeling yet you can't quite place what's wrong. Of course, the button eyes give something away, but it keeps enough mystery to make it suspenseful. It's probably one of my favorites because of those reasons. They didn't assume kids wouldnt be able to understand horror when it wasn't right in your face. Anybody who sees this comment and hasn't checked out the movie, I totally recommend it!
@@SiffrinISAT Its why Megamind is an amazing movie
@@SiffrinISAT The horror in Coraline is what I generally call "creepy horror" or "psychological horror", where the point is to unsettle and unnerve the audience, to leave something lingering in their brain long after the credits roll, instead of just startling the audience.
Glad to see Coraline getting some love. Despite it being reviewed well it still feels very underappreciated, like all Lika films, except Boxtrolls, that one wasn't very good.
Y'know what'd be interesting, and could fix the issues with a single neighbour in a giant house problem?
Introduce multiple neighbours. Make them all some kind of weird cult, and you slowly need to break into their houses to unravel a strange mystery they're hiding away.
Different houses mean different puzzles, patterns, etc. Some neighbours work together to work around you, and adapt to your play style.
Might just be me but I think it'd work a lot for a proper sequel or something.
Heck, that's probably what the first game should've been. One of the big problems was trying to stretch one house into a full game.
I like the idea of the acts being able to change the house up, but I definitely think they went way too cartoony and surreal compared to the original idea. I think it would've worked having the house become either messier or more of a dilapidated mess of a mansion with loads of secret pathways to escape down.
I'm not sure about that. The more people you add the less scary it becomes.
@@MikhailPashkovski not if it's say like resident evil village. Where it's only like 4 to 5 people. Make it a small number. And make the story Interesting.
hey guess what hello neighbour 2 is doing :)
When the game was first announced and they showed the concept for a stealth game where the AI adapts to your break-ins, I was in love instantly. Really excited for the game. And then I kept watching MatPat play newer and newer versions and my hype died down really fast. I wish they just stuck with the original idea instead of turning the house into a theme park based around theory bait
Hello Neighbor always hurt me because of what it might have been, even from a lore perspective. The fact that they admitted the early teasers had nothing to do with the lore and they were grasping at straws hurt the most, because on the surface they made it seem like they had it all worked out.
Also the whole...making merch and *books* before the full game was even out...was weird and the first hint that in the end, they were just trying to strike FNAF indie horror gold and get some cash doing it.
It could have been a decent game if they had set up exactly what they wanted, and stuck to one medium. If you wanna do stealth, do stealth. If you wanna make a 3D platformer, make a 3D platformer. In the end, I think HN suffered from wanting to be the next big thing, as well as not knowing what it wanted to be.
the books weren't until after the game, and almost a year at that. they weren't even official to begin with, Carly Anne West was just making her own Hello Neighbor story and they later decided to make her stories canon.
the developers didn't want it to be the next big thing, they had no idea it would blow up. people just expected hello neighbor to be the next big thing when it was the first PC game project by previously mobile game developers
@@Gavintheking2 you say they didn't want it to be the next big thing, but they were literally begging Game Theory for coverage. They knew exactly what they were doing.
@@mothichorror446 A community manager on the HN discord said that the employer who made those tweets was fired.
@@mothichorror446 i was talking about the developers
@@UnusualFour you really know nothing about corporate speak and how people cover their asses. Do you really think that employee was bothering Matt pat just because?
You know the idea of a children's horror game, I never actually realized it was a thing until recently. When FNAF Security Breach came out, I saw so many comments saying how they grew up with the game and that it raised them since elementary school. It kinda surprised me because I didn't realize how much appeal it had on kids. Always assumed the youngest audience would be 13; thought FNAF would appeal most to teenagers.
I already knew about FNAF way back since 2014 (when the game was relatively new at the time), but I left the fandom and quit my own interest in this franchise somewhere around 2016 or 2017 when I realized it was getting a little bit toxic and overblown at that time.
Children’s Horror Game just means Jump Scare Simulator, anyways.
My 5 year old is completely obsessed with FNAF. He has told me he's seen a few kids with FNAF merch at school as well as Poppy Playtime crap. I think it's kind of cool that kids are into this genre but it's a little unsettling too because they're the reason these games have gotten so watered down, and by the time they're older and have lost interest I feel like they never got to experience the darker side of the lore like in FNAF. I myself feel stupid lying to my kid about some of the original lore to make it less scary for him (he LOVES Springtrap but I'm not about to tell him the whole fucked up origin story)
@@Feya-rc6et ....so what do you tell him instead of the original lore? I must know the new lore you've invented lol
@@ijustlikebees Okay so I've tried to make it as accurate as possible without including any gore basically. He knows about the original murders but I told him the children's ghosts possessed Bonnie, Chica etc. and that they only go after grown ups because they're trying to protect other children. He knows William Afton as the "bad guy" and that he "wears" the Spring Bonnie suit as a disguise. We played FNAF 4 together and he was absolutely shook and couldn't sleep over it, thinking that Foxy was gonna pop out of his closet at him while he was sleeping. So then I had to remind him that "FNAF guys only go after adults and the kid in the game was just having nightmares because he thought the guys looked scary and his brother was bullying him about it" It's actually really funny to me because he BEGS to play the games but then freaks the fuck out claiming they're way too scary lmao. That doesn't stop him from having action figures and plushies and coloring books and constantly talking about FNAF though. Anyway at no point in time in our lore do any kids get killed besides the original murders, and William Afton is the main villain, and the others try to protect children from him. We just started playing Security Breach which I didn't really have any interest in because of the aesthetic but I'm kind of grateful for it now because it's one he can actually play and enjoy. But it doesn't make sense to him that Chica is coming after him since "they don't attack kids" so I just told him it's because kids aren't supposed to be there and they just want to kick us out lol
I feel like a lot of indie horror games also owe a lot to “don’t hug me, I’m scared”
dhmis is so good ive been a hardcore fan for like 7 years lmao
"What's your favorite idea? Mine is being creative!"
still waiting for more dhmis
@@margaretthatcher5486 I mean it was a pretty good premise but fan? isn't it like just 6 shorts that hasn't been updated for half a decade. I've never seen anyone be hardcore for such small content
Holy shit memory unlocked, I didn't remember those
I remember watching the alpha-1 footage years ago on Markiplier's channel and then being so confused why the game was so different upon full release from what it was when I watched it initially. I had actually thought I had misremembered or made up the original experience from alpha-1 because of how different the final product was. However, I do still think aspects of what they did if the final version could be done well, especially if they reversed the order of the house going from being extremely large when you're a child to normal when you're an adult.
Imagine: you start out as a kid and the house is huge and scary and full of crazy things, because you're a child and the house seems bigger and discovering certain items that you've never seen before makes them seem more otherworldly and scary. Then, when you come back as an adult the house is normal sized because you're bigger and everything appears normal because it's no longer clouded by your child imagination. Make it a broken-down abandoned house if you want to make the setting "scarier" but the basement is still locked and you have to go through this abandoned house and solve different puzzles or have flashbacks/memories to being there as a child that you have to work through to find the items to open the basement door.
Maybe even add a teen section between the other two so you can start with a fantastical house (the ending dream sequence in the original version) as a child, a normal but still creepy house as a teen (and you break into it like the alpha-1 gameplay, and maybe even get caught and buried), and then an old and abandoned one as an adult that you go through to finally get answers. Let your character come to terms with whatever happened in the house as a child through some memories similar to the dreams in the actual game but don't just make everything about the final act(s) into a dream. At least then it would make more sense for why everything is so huge and crazy during certain parts of the game and why the neighbor seems so monstrous initially. This way you get the best of both world's where everything can be big and expansive and the developers can add a bunch of content to extend the game, like they did in the real game, but have an in-game reason that isn't it just being a dream. Obviously this is still an issue if they don't change the platforming sections and improve the gameplay from what they actually released, I just think this way you can keep most of what they wanted without lessening the experience, maybe it even heightens it if you can connect the fantastical elements of the child section the the overarching plot that you learn about in the adult sections.
As far as what the neighbor's backstory for the locked basement would end up being, there are quite a few options. Obviously you could go some more obvious routes if you want to aim the story/game at adults rather than children, but if you want to make it kid-friendly you could just have the neighbor be a normal guy who keeps getting harassed by the kid just because he keeps his basement locked (put whatever you want in the basement even if it's a man cave). Hopefully another developer will take the base of Hello Neighbors original gameplay and makes an actually interesting/fun game because I really love the idea of an everchanging map that the enemy alters based on your actions.
*Act 1: Child*
You're a child playing in with your friend. The two of you are neighbors, and you both spent most of your childhood years together. Then, one day, your friend is gone. Not knowing the whole picture, you wander through the neighbor's house, the search amplified into a maze of colors and fantastical shapes by the curious mind of a child.
However, there are subtle hints that something's...not right. Doors are locked. Furniture is broken. There are words muffled by angry voices.
Finally, you make it to your friend's room, and--
*Act 2: Teenager*
It's been ten years. You're now a teenager attending high school. On a whim, you find yourself back at your neighbor's house. You don't exactly live here anymore, so why are you here? In the back of your mind, you can remember...something, something odd.
The more you try to remember, the more it slips away.
You open the door, and something clicks.
Something happened ten years ago.
Something is in the basement.
Most importantly, the neighbor is still here, after all these years.
You could turn back now, and the game would end. But you won't, would you? After all, it's just your neighbor. He was always a little odd, but never...
Wait...
When did the house get so dark?
*Act 3: Adult*
It's been 5 years since the police came. You still remember the sirens. You still remember when the nice officer came and found you crying.
Still, you're back at the house.
In the last five years, you've had time to think, time to reflect. What the neighbor did was wrong, but you can't exactly blame him. It was only five years for you, but it's been much, much longer for him.
The house is so much smaller now. The wallpaper isn't as vibrant as it was during your childhood, but not as dark as it was when you last came. Maybe it was always like this.
The neighbor is in your friend's old room. The fifteen years made him a lot older than you remember. In his eyes, you catch the fleeting image of a small child, smiling and carefree, but the memory is gone too soon.
All that's left is an apology...
And then goodbye
@@davidhong1934 holy shit that’s good
you could even implement both art styles and have it start with the more dr seuss style and have it evolve into alpha 1’s preferred style that blended realism with cartoony
Man I remember how exciting this game was when it came out and then it went downhill from there. Sad, such a good concept
I remember even as an 11 year old finding this plot unorganized and having no direction. 6 years and nothing has changed.
lol yeah
Bro you're still a little fetus.
Is it really they old?
God.
It was made unorganized and cryptic. Because they wanted that game theory episode.
christ its been 6 fucking years
Honestly, I think Hello Neighbor as a public entity was doomed from the start for one simple reason: there should have been no publicly released alphas. The very first version of the game released to the public should have been the final release of the game.
Now that might sound strange considering the final release is a contender for the worst version of the game, but hear me out. It didn't HAVE to be that way if they'd simple approached it from a different angle. Hello Neighbor is a game about a mystery. That mystery is "what's inside the basement?" and it's a mystery that's intrinsically tied to the gameplay. You want to know what's inside the basement? Go play the game and find out what's down there!
But there's something deeply and fundamentally wrong about releasing successive versions of a game revolving around a tangible mystery when the specifics of that mystery change with each version. In fact, that goes for story-driven games in general. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single other story-driven game that released a public alpha, because on paper it's a really stupid idea. You're inviting players to invest themselves in a story and fixed gameplay that they know is going to be changed. Why do I care what's in the basement in this version, when you're just going to change it in the next one? Why do I care what's down there in the next version when I've already seen it in THIS one?
To draw a comparison, imagine if Arthur Conan Doyle released "pre-writes" of his Sherlock Holmes novels, with an unfinished plot and a twist reveal that might change down the line in the actual book release. That would be really stupid, right? That's what's happening here.
What the game needed from the very start was intensive in-house testing, more careful crafting of its gameplay loop and story elements, and a cohesive vision that carried all the way into the final release. Let me put it this way: I don't CARE what early versions of Five Nights at Freddy's looked like, and I doubt that I would want to play them over the finished version. If they had just kept the game under wraps until it was fully polished and complete, they might have had something special on their hands.
tl;dr: public alphas are for sandbox and multiplayer games. not for story-driven single player games
Yeah it worked for Subnautica, but that's because the initial releases only had enough story to explain how you crashed and why you're the sole survivor. Everything about the story itself came later on in development.
That's apparently the main problem of most story-driven horror indie games, especially the ones that has its own vision that made it famous, then steered to be mainstream and abandon its original idea.
Release a public alpha.
Use its story or alpha as marketing.
Change the story along the gameplay mechanics on next alpha.
Repeat.
It's just asking to make the game to be stagnant and soulless in the long run.
Does Hades count as a successful version? The way they did it, I think, was that the mystery, twist, and ending never changed, you just had more of the mystery revealed over time, along with more content being added overall, like characters and story bits. It was single player, it had a mystery, and while it wasn't in an alpha, it WAS in Early Access which is more or less a beta, but the crucial difference I think was that the mystery never changed with every new update. You just, as I said, get to see more of the world and find out more and more bits and pieces of the mystery.
One could avoid the change of story drawback... if the changes were preplanned and are a part of the story. Basically start out with an end goal already set and have those different stories during alpha actually tie in at the end.
in *house* testing, haha I see that lmao.
Ive actually played happy humble burger farm... its nothing like FNAF. Its a weird feverdream that i cannot spoil, and it exponentially gets more surreal the more you play.
Indeed, and that's one of the things I love most about it! IMO Happy's Humble Burger Farm is WAY better than FNAF Security Breach, and arguably better than pretty much every game in the FNAF franchise!
@@rottytopszombiewaifu5249 i-
i've seen a bit of the most recent version. i wish they went for the low poly graphics like in happys humble burger barn (which i think is the beta?? could be misremembering) instead of artificially polishing it but it's not that big of a deal
@@the-postal-dude It's not the beta, Farm was actually a sequel to Barn.
It's also part of a pre-established universe called the Scythe Saga Universe which started life as concept albums and later video games such as the Northbury Grove series which are inspired by 80s slasher films like Puppet Combo's games (to the point where people confuse the developers because they look so similar, which is even funnier if you know about the lore of the Scythe Saga Universe compared to the Puppet Combo lore. While I love Northbury Grove, Puppet Combo is scarier because of its use of silence and sound design). Scythe Dev Team also made games for the first two Dread X Collection games as well as music for the first game, interestingly, both games revolve around the planet Carthanc, a mysterious and important part of the lore (Dread X Collection was how I first found out about Scythe Dev Team, mostly To The End of Days, a prequel boomer shooter from the second Dread X Collection which was most well known for Sucker For Love).
Full agree. Too many games wanna “do what FNaF did”, and have what FNaF has. That always leads to them either falling to the wayside, or getting too full of themselves and crashing and burning.
FNaF had an interesting premise, good atmosphere, setting and style. And as the franchise continues it tried to continue building upon and improving itself with every entry (barring some questionable decisions). It continues trying to branch out into new grounds.
Bendy had a really strong opening with a unique premise, setting, style, and an unsettling atmosphere. Then it chased that 9-14 audience and spiraled into an incoherent attempt at a franchise that couldn’t even be bothered to wrap itself up properly.
Hello Neighbor had an interesting premise, good atmosphere, setting and style. Then it devolved into madness as they desperately tried to chase that UA-cam audience, pull in those views, have what FNaF had.
All of these games started off and got attention because they were interesting, scary, and unique. But then, they tried to capture what FNaF had. FNaF has books? Ok, we can write books! FNaF has matpat?? Ok we can get matpat (they couldn’t get matpat). Etcetera.
Devs out there, don’t try to be the next FNaF. Don’t try to be the next Minecraft. Don’t try to be the next anything. Be the first you.
I would argue that Security Breach has so many problems not out of a lack of effort, rather an excess of ambition. Either way I agree.
@@thanatoast I think that it was also rushed for Christmas which is always a shame the game might have been good if not rushed
i agree. When it comes to gave dev its never bad to be inspired by something, of course. A lot of games are inspired. One of my favorite games, Stardew Valley, is HEAVILY inspired by Harvest Moon, but it still manages to do its own thing. There's a fine line between taking an idea and making it new again and not doing enough to change it (or even, changing it too much). And of course we'll see that a lot with games that make a lot of money or get a lot of attention, this is something that happens in both the AAA gave dev space and with indie devs. Its something to be super careful with.
@@Wildcard-Jack-47 Very true, if there was just 6-7 months more development maybe it would have been as terrifying as the other Fnaf
games. I gotta say though, the map is phenomenal and I have no complaints about it other than getting softlocked
@@QUBIQUBED ehh I wouldn’t consider the other games terrifying it’s just the jumpscares that “scare” people
I’m just talking about how not only the game but the story just feels unfinished
Matpat helped establish the "Horror for kids" trope. I remember when FNAF was seen as a legitimately terrifying game, now it's seen as the spooky chuck E cheese furry kids game with a thousand theories. Poppys Playtime is following this trend too, sadly.
Its called selling out
Whenever I see a kid wearing something like a FNAF hat or shirt, or see the toys at Gamestop, I can't help but smile and laugh, because the whole franchise is *LITERALLY* about a bunch of murdered kids. It's like how Alien and Terminator were marketed as toys for kids, when the movies were most definitely not.
when i first saw poppy playtime my first thought was "so its like fnaf"
the nfts made me hate the game even more tbh
@@the-postal-dude what the heck do NFTs have to do with Poppy Playtime?
@@It-Will-All-Be-Okay-I-Promise the creators of poppy playtime made nfts for it
My last memory with this series, was trying to persuade my friends not to buy secret neighbor, and that they would be wasting their money. They bought it, and I swear they played it twice and never touched it again, go figure.
31:32 this honestly sounds like an elementary school teacher reading a book to a class… like they’re trying to solely depend on the voice acting to keep kid’s attention
In my opinion the FNaF Security Breach animatronics are really well thought out. At the beginning they look so marketable and child friendly but when you keep going through the game they get more damaged due to Gregory's little adventure. By the end they start to look completely different from the beginning and its terrifying. But that's just my opinion!
I love how they look at the end, if the game was just tighter, with improved level design and had better AI it could have been actually really scary.
I think the game just needed like an additional year or two of development.
@@stupidhoirse The problem is: If they kept pushing it back, a small but vocal subset of the fanbase would probably harass the people at Steel Wool because they "weren't working hard enough" or something like that.
@@thanatoast yeah but there small
I think pushing game back 2 years would have been great...
And the fact that gregory rip apart Montgomery and roxys eyes is so brutal
Meanwhile gregory has no remorse whats so ever
And his excuse?
"Well they're still functional"
@@darkmodeenjoyer3367
Still, it’s hard to do that when not only the fans are harassing you every time you push back the game, but they were also likely pressured by SONY to get the game out by Christmas.
That and the creator leaving during the pandemic, and only having a 12-man team, Security Breach was destined to have a rocky launch.
Honestly, that book's opening with the grandma is rather solid. Its use of uncomfortably tactile language combines with its depiction of a believably unsettling elderly relative to create a sense of classic childhood unease. The old woman's ritual of washing hands upon waking is both compelling and ominous.
I only wish they leaned harder into the disquieting nature of the elderly as recalled from a child's perspective. Describe the grandmother's faintly wheezing breath, the way her gnarled hands clamp around the protagonist's fingers, the yellowish hue of her teeth as she sang old children's songs in a foreign tongue.
It has pieces of something good in it, but its writing style reminds me a ton of the texts they had you read in elementary school. I can't put my finger on exactly why -- maybe it's how it feels like it wants to make everything a metaphor in order to teach kids what those are? Idk, but that's what it reminds me of.
@@sparksbet the structures kind of reminds me of the short stories we would have to read in my elementary school text books. The writing seems deliberate in a way that makes it seem like it was meant to be read by a child who was learning how to read.
It's pretty much all show instead of tell, pretty disappointing tbh.
it was weirdly descriptive for like... a hello neighbor book
I made this exact comment before scrolling down, lol c:
You can tell the exact paragraph where the author just gives up.
Sucks Tiny build fell this far with the games they publish No time to explain is still one of my favorite games of all time.
Oh my god that's a memory unlock! I love that game so much but I remember the main theme giving me a panic attack every time I heard it
they publish a LOT of games, there's gonna be some bad ones.
Happy's Humble Burger Farm is pretty solid
They also published Party Hard, which was news to me, that game was my shit
it's like every publishers ever, good and bad ones, not gonna say they fell far with the games they publish, "publish" is not the same word as "make"
Man the reason this game hooked me in was because of the adaptive Ai. I thought that the idea of the Ai learning your path and where you go the most and then setting traps to stop you was a cool idea. But then they completely lost focus on that and decided to just make the house bigger and the story more convoluted
I couldn't agree more with you on the whole "post-FNAF indie horror" mindset. Unfortunately it seems like ever since FNAF dominated the horror market, it feels like developers became more interested in basing their product off of a "ooooo deep lore ooooo" narrative and artifically stretching out the length of it's popularity rather than actually putting out something of quality. Not that it's necessarily FNAF's fault for this, but it's popularity helped spiral these types of games to become nothing more than fads for the sake of more fame for the time being.
kinda like the Shrek-franchise.
great movies (except the third one), with a not-so-great impact on the animation industry.
so many animated movies try to be the new Shrek franchise, but entirely miss the point, what made these movies work so well, to begin with.
And FNAF wasn't even originally a lore heavy game until the 2nd game onwards.
It’s ironic cause FNAF’s lore (after the first game) never made any sense. The first game was pretty good lore-wise _because_ it was so small and contained. Even by the second game you thought about it at all and got more confused, and the sequel just gave fans more questions than answers. And every sequel after has done the same thing.
Hell, Poppy Playtime even tried to monetize the lore with that little NFT stunt.
Like how after the release of Sword Art Online, 90% of anime seems to be "some loser in modern Tokyo wakes up in a fantasy world where he gets 11 girlfriends and is also Jesus"
Wow. The game had such potential but I remember the moment the final release dropped, it hardly even felt final. Just sorta came and went.
Scarily, I remember the alphas themselves had more coverage and mystery than the final to the point where I thought they WERE the final version.
I know the game is pretty much meant for children at this point. But unfortunately, people DO grow up, so it may only be a matter of time before the player base dies out. Not unless they can evolve and improve.
I remember when they tried to get matpat to help them out on Twitter god that was sad
@Night Café hopefully they can move on at least
What happened? Sorry I'm not really active on twitter
@@coldhaixx1905 The twitter thing is briefly shown in this video. Basically, the Hello Neighbor Twitter account kept spamming MatPat as the Alphas went on, begging him to do a theory video on him. They kept going "I think MatPat would like this...!" anytime they dropped new lore hints. A little while later MatPat called Hello Neighbor low budget and bad, so, it seemed to balance itself out in the end.
I read the books.
_I regret it a little, but I did._
I can confirm, the events of the cartoon pilot are based on the books. But only by a little bit, because they took an event from the books (which also happened in the game) and completely altered it. In the third book, Nicky did get kidnapped by Peterson. However, he was completely alone when it happened, and it happened just how it did in the game, which begs the question: _where the hell does the cartoon come in?_
This is exactly how I felt about Tattletale. Only, the difference between the two is that one of a them is a well-made game with decent lore and the other was a forest fire.
I enjoyed Tattletail. However it got pretty repetitive after a while.
Didn’t tattletale release the game + a single dlc and dipped? Tbh at least the game died a game, rather than hello neighbor dying as uh…”franchise”
I hate calling it that.
@@reasons2live
Hello Neighbor “”””franchise””””.
@@reasons2live it Dident really did it just stopped its not like there still desperately trying to pick up scraps and release dlc they just stopped it passed away a good single player game that only has a campaign you can’t really say it’s dead it wasent supposed to have players after 2017
t-Tattletale thats me
Man, I remember seeing this game everywhere on UA-cam back in the day. Gameplays, game theories, reactions, everyone loved it and then it just vanished and people stopped talking about it
You could apply this to other horror games such as Bendy and the Ink Machine and Tattletail.
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m I thought bendy just ended.
@@guesswhatthisisnotmyrealna9510 The problem with Bendy and the Ink Machine is that Chapter 5 just ended vaguely and inconclusively, with several questions still unanswered, with the answers given being confusing at best. This practically made everyone within the community (especially myself) feel severely disappointed in the BATIM franchise since it doesn't even bother wrapping itself up. It also doesn't help that the next installment, Bendy and the Dark Revival, is forever stuck in a neverending cycle of development hell due to the numerous dramas and controversies on Joey Drew Studio (such as how they apparently fired 50 employees and accusations of work conditions, from what I heard).
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m tattletail was good but it was short and the studio behind it seemingly went to the upside down
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m what's happening at Joey Drew Studios?
I feel like the moment I started just genuinely being sad about this game and what it became was when I went to a local convention and saw a big cheap looking neighbor plush hanging up. Just how obviously commercialized the game became.
I mean… yeah it’s a game. The thing is literally a commercial product
Feels like a problem with a lot of popular horror games these days. Pretty much one of the main reasons I lost interest in FNAF.
Video games are commercial times though.
@@DeathnoteBB It wasn't needed, the game was already a hype train, the fact that the developers decided to do this shows what they were focused on
@@DeathnoteBB This isn't a big company, they should have focused on the development of the game instead of thinking that following the same pattern every update would be enough
surprisingly when a company chooses to target children and how easy it is to scam them, things tend to fall in a downward spiral for anything remotely good and worth anyones time other than a childs.
This is why it's better to sell to parents.
The creator of Andy’s Apple Farm actually said that the game wasn’t inspired by the Walten Files but I can definitely see why people would think that. That’s what I thought when I first saw it.
Edit: Yeah he was probably lying lmao
I mean they can say that, buuuuut...
@@AnvilPro100 It honestly feels more inspired by fnaf. Specially, fnaf vr. Both games follow the plotline of souls being trapped in a videogame.
that's cap
@@AnvilPro100 buuuuut what? who knows what they was inspired by other than them?
@@channel1344 ehh
I hope the "horror game for kids" thing dies out soon. Or at least, I hope that developers stop feeling like they need to make their games kid friendly. I know it'll probably never happen because of how much money you can squeeze out of kids, but god am I clamoring for a horror game that'll just let itself be scary. Sure, you don't need super dark and disturbing lore/theming to be scary, but for me it makes horror games more interesting. Honestly, I'm almost tempted to learn how to develop games just to make the sort of stuff I wanna see.
I don't think games like bendy, tattletail, etc. were intended to be "kid friendly" from the start. I think the internet and kid friendly channels ended up ruining the image of these games. I don't think Horror games with cartoonish characters need to die, they just need to stick to their original vision and not focus too much on appealing to just a young demographic.
@@blockotheblock5672 i mean, i think bendy and tattletail were almost certainly made for the post fnaf craze for horror games but that’s just me, which was almost entirely made to appeal to children
@@blockotheblock5672 I agree, I love when horror uses mascot characters. My issue is when horror games compromise their integrity and overall quality in order to be marketable and appealing to as wide an audience as possible.
What’s wrong with kids have their own horror games? It’s not like this trend is taking over the horror scene completely. Resident Evil 8 is out and there’s plenty of other horror games like it out there, some old, some new. What’s wrong with horror games appealing to a wider audience? If they’re good, than that’s all that matters. If you want more niche stuff, just dig around. They’re out there. Go look for them.
@@Moony1568 Exactly. Horror for kids is the most visible right now because anything for kids is the best performing content on UA-cam. But there's still tons of gory, disturbing, depressing, or all of the above games coming out all the time in the indie scene if you just dig a little bit. Kids love being scared and they deserve content catering to them. Personally I hope more good kid's horror games start coming out instead of the clusterfuck of barely functional cash grabs they have now.
One of the biggest mistakes in my opinion was doing more than one public alpha, they should’ve taken the feedback from the first one, added a little more and release a short but sweet game for 5 to 10 dollars. But every public release added more and more features and that ruined the game.
ah yes, the yandere simulator school of game design
yes exactly these indie games that are still in development that get really popular on youtube always seem to make the same mistake of releasing multiple alphas/demos of an interesting concept at first but then they ruin the whole idea by letting the popularity effect the games development leading to feature creep that always ends up making the final product worse then the original alphas/demos
I do kinda have a soft spot for those “horror games for kids” because those types of games were my own introduction to horror as a whole and I know that it probably also was for a lot of others, but it definitely gets annoying when every Tuesday there’s a new game like that.
I think what a lot of the post-FNAF indie horror games don't realize is that FNAF was enjoyed by both kids AND adults. There was the "haha funny animals go brrr" side of FNAF and then there was the "oh yeah this is about a serial child murderer and possessed killer animatronics" side of FNAF. I enjoyed FNAF both when I was a wee 12 year old and even now that I'm almost an adult.
Games like Hello Neighbor, BATIM, and even Poppy Playtime just... don't interest me at all. They all feel like they're trying to be vague for vagueness sake instead of trying to set up an enthralling mystery like FNAF did. Seriously, for as convoluted as FNAF lore became, it was structured in a way that kept people hooked and that's just not something other indie horror games trying to capture its magic have been able to replicate since. They all just end up fizzling out into obscurity like, maybe a year at most after their final releases.
I feel like this is one of many reasons why Undertale and Cuphead got so popular and are still relevant to this day. They both try to do their own things instead of trying to become the next FNAF.
@@kittykittybangbang9367 Except those games aren't even horror games so they were never really related to it in the first place?
@@lukasruston8618 I couldn't really think of any other indie horror game, so those were the first one to come to mine even though they weren't horror. But UT did have some horror elements.
@@kittykittybangbang9367 Tbf those games had nothing to do with FNAF and I’m pretty sure at least Undertale happened before FNAF did
@@DeathnoteBB Undertale came out after FNaF. about a year after, to be precise.
The best thing about Hello Neighbor is the character design of said Neighbor tbh. No matter how many flaws about the game, his face is truly iconic despite being the game’s villain.
The neighbour's design is way too funny and wacky, and I love it but I don't think thats the best design for a villain.
I personally like the silly caricature looking designs they had for that game. I don't think horror always has to rely on gory details or hyperrealism to really scare a player.
Dude, the Nancy Drew games freaked me the hell out as a kid. In the Message in the Haunted house game whenever you hear someone whispered, "I see you" as you climb the stairs I had to stop playing for awhile. Nothing quite compared to the feeling of playing those games and I wish they had more attention because they were way freakier than a lot of titles currently out.
Thank you!! I've been a fan of this series for two decades and am bothered by the lack of attention these games get. There really is nothing like a Nancy Drew game, and so many people are missing out.
@@Aster_Risk Right? Curse of Blackmoor Manor SCARED me for ages to the point I wouldn't play without someone else in the room as a kid.
When it was a Pixar like horror game about this dude who kept something in his Basement from the first two builds? This shit was absolutely amazing. I loved it. When we got all these updates and stuff I knew it was a lost cause. Such a damn shame that it was fed to the dogs. RIP original Hello Neighbor. We'll miss you.
I have a feeling the developer misunderstood the genre they originally had. Instead of going a wacky linear story route, they should have made this like a semi-endless/roguelike with Immersive Sim elements sprinkled here and there. In other words, think of it like Neighbours from Hell meets Hitman meets The Binding of Isaac.
Have the neighbor AI learn, set traps, etc., so that every time you get caught, the game gets a little harder until it's over. Then, at the beginning of a run, the set is either selected by the player or at random from a variety of objective sets. The basic scenario, for instance, is that he is concealing something, and you want to gather evidence or figure out what. For instance, suppose you discover a bloody hammer in the trash, letters from a wife requesting a divorce, blood on the attic floor, and then a dead body in the freezer in the basement. Once you've located all the evidence, your objective is to take pictures of it before running away. If you make mistakes too frequently, the game is over and you must restart it or choose a different scenario. Have it be anything, like planning a surprise birthday party, kidnapping, or murder. There is a ton of replayability, you can still put "deeper lore" hints with a low spawn chance that would be food for theories, etc.
Randomize the house's layout (in a semi-sensible way) with different room variety and increasingly challenging puzzles and traps set by the neighbor. They could even make several medium-sized houses or even make the house generated depending on the seed. You would come across the same rooms often but with different items and blockades for a mix of solutions. Every now and then you would get in a room that has some weird stuff for the lore and the game could still keep the not-gonna-tell-you-anything vibe but be consistent about it. Of course, there would be a lot less platforming and more access for the neighbor, maybe sometimes the player needs to distract him in a way that gives you a certain amount of time to do a puzzle. The player would have to learn how long different distractions take for the neighbor to recover from and come back for them.
For added replayability, have the player find random items that will assist him. I'd also like to keep the protagonist as a child. Nothing too serious or sinister, just a curious child breaking into a neighbor's house. It would be interesting if each time you completed all of your objectives, you'll be rewarded with a new unlockable gadget or item for the next run.
The enemy AI is the game's bread and butter, becoming a lot less predictable and adapting to your playstyle; build the game around that rather than some lore.
@@HankJWimbleton-v1mScary Teacher If It Tried To Be Horror:
this series sort of exemplifies how the internet giving people the ability to give such insane amounts of feedback and hopes for a game is a double-edged sword. if a concept is promising, it's easier now than ever to get it to a bunch of people and have them go "we wanna see this made!!" but by the same token you also fall into the trap of hyperfocusing on one or two things with "shock factor" or whatever that stick out and sabotaging the rest of your product in service of being talked about by youtubers. idk it's hard to explain but it's the same thing that happened to bendy, the same thing that's bound to happen to poppy playtime, and god knows what it means for any other game that accidentally shows too much promise.
…dashcon
Well that's technically what killed Star wars... listening to star wars fans
It's because often the ideas focused on by all these people online is something somewhat shallow, all the lore and lore expansion people love reading about or making is honestly more of a blight on game development, developers should want players to interpret truly interesting parts of lore not every single aspect and often times expanding too much on lore is actually fully detrimental. (I honestly think FNAF kept getting worse and worse over time.)
Certain things need to be grounded and simply told to the player and some things should be left to the imagination, many of these games don't do the first part and lean on theory crafting videos and tiny tiny hints.
As for gameplay, it's a classic more is good approach, most of the time more content is good but for this game they really should have just made levels instead of giant acts with a big house.
The fans that should be listened to are often the niche ones, not the general ones.
I dislike that we have normalized bad writing in kids shows these days. I know most of them have terrible writing but I just think that it’s not fair and they should get good quality too. The argument about the bad writing just made me wanna write this. I just think excusing bad writing in a kids show isn’t valid and wanted to share so thanks for reading :).
@SteelyMan's Hermit Funkclub Why is being inoffensive to children political now?
@@DeathnoteBB Depends on your message. If you're Sesame Street, you want to be inoffensive. If you're Gravity Falls, you want to push the envelope.
Nah, kids content has had bad writing for decades (see a good chunk of kids TV between the 50’s-80’s, games even pre-FNAF, a good chunk of kids movies, etc,.), if not forever.
Doesn’t excuse it, though.
@@NitroNinja324 Except Gravity Falls wasn’t offensive
@@DeathnoteBB Not sure about that one, chief. I think inverting someone's face is far more offensive to the senses than a race joke. You can be offensive without it being at the expense of any one or any group.
“Babe wake up, Sagan Hawkes just uploaded”
One thing missing from this video that puts everything else in perspective is that Hello Neighbor was initially announced as crowdfunding project in Kickstarter, focusing primarily on the Neighbor's AI and the adaptive challenge.
It failed.
Maybe Hello Neighbor would never have seen the light of day if not for this FNAFification, as much as it may have marred the initial concept.
The reason this game was so popular in the first place, was that it was something new, something unique. You are always breaking OUT of places in horror games. This time, you break in. I liked the idea of the pixar graphics and i think that is an underrated and underexplored area of horror games. The alphas were amazing, with constant leaks and out-of-map secrets. I think that too, is a part of the reason this game was so popular. There were so many small hidden things around, and it sparked a huge explosion of hacking videos and people exploring the secrets...up until the betas. The betas simply didnt have anything hidden out of the map. Not much was added, and the puzzles were turned from fun and interesting, to confusing and tedious. The old puzzles were actually very intuitive and you could tell what you were supposed to do via little hints around the world. The newest betas and the full version had no context clues for the puzzles, hence just making them confusing. They werent a mystery that you could solve, they were a bunch of random factors that you fiddled around with till you got them right, which is NOT something fun. The other big problem was the fact that, when the full game released, Act 3 was meant to be THE BIG house. The house full of crazy topsy-turvy structure, and a WHOLE LOT of puzzles. The problem with this, was that Beta 3 had almost the exact same puzzles as act 3, and everyone who played hello neighbor already watched the beta 3 videos, so it wasnt even a mystery anymore. Instead of taking 5-6 hours to beat act 3, it takes less than ONE. Not only that, a lot of things were just entirely platforming skill. The issue with that is that the movement system was pretty buggy. The old alphas were also a lot scarier than the full version. The ambience isnt even scary in the full version, stealth is kinda drowned out because the neighbor basically either knows where you are at all times, or cant get to you at all, and there is no in between. The old alpha chase music actually instilled terror in the player, but in the new versions, the chase music just sounded like some simple piano loop without much intensity. The wardrobes you could hide in wouldnt even work because the neighbor would basically always check them anyways. The old versions were just simply better. The storyline, while pretty interesting, doesnt have anything left to wonder about once you finish hide and seek and hello neighbor. This leaves the game uninteresting at the end, and basically killed it for good as soon as it died down on youtube.
It went from Don't Breathe if the setting takes place inside the "Milkman Conspiracy" level from Psychonauts to one of those weird clickbait Roblox games.
FNAF should be the example of what you should do to build up the game and keep what made it good while hello neighbor is what not to do forcing the game placing the brand everywhere not letting it go naturally and the game changed drastically of not being fun
@@HankJWimbleton-v1m " the "Milkman Conspiracy" level from Psychonauts "
Just replying because I wanted to express my absolute fondness for that level. That level was the high point of that game.
It really wasn't new or unique though, whatever you want to break it down as: 2 years prior we had Alien: Isolation, another horror-stealth game with an invincible, learning AI hunting you while you try to solve puzzles. Obviously targeted at adults, it actually gave this 30-something nightmares and near-pants-bricking experiences, and I fully believe someone at Dynamic Pixels saw it and said, "Ivan! Get over here! Make a non-scary kids' version of this game to turn into a whole multimedia series!"
@@CLove511 Alien Isolation fell off in popularity and there weren't much others like it so ehh
Hmm your post fnaf indie hypothesis was actually pretty spot on, and i would definitely relate to that feeling of "why do they have a book series now???!" I never realised this franchise has fallen by this much even though I've heard of it during the popular days.
Either way, what in the actual fuck were the people from poppy's playstime doing?
holy crap youmu konpaku
holy crap youmu konpaku
holy crap youmu konpaku
holy crap youmu konpaku
holy crap youmu konpaku
I honestly prefer some of the alphas and betas more than the finished product. I was excited to see how the final game would end up but it was just like, mildly disappointing in general.
I'm reminded of Jackscepticeye's playtnrough whenever I think of this game. He got pretty far into the game (end of act 3 I think) but got sick of it during that one puzzle involving the multiple doors and completely abandoned the let's play.
They could have made the neighbour so goddamn terrifying just with the simple act of having a small chance of him being able to get to wherever you are, even if you can't see a clear way he could get in and it feels safe. Suddenly you can't just go behind a fence and defeat the mighty antagonist for good, because the longer you stay there, the higher the chance of him getting the jump on you is.
Having him always on your tail takes the shock out of it since you'd get used to it, while having a completely safe zone kills all tension. But hit the right balance of "a completely safe zone... almost", and you've got a winner for keeping the player on constant edge.
Idk, maybe it's a stupid idea but that's sort of the running theme when talking about this wretched game
I was thinking the same thing watching this. Mechanical neighbor bullshit like him teleporting near your location or magically knowing where you are could easily be handwaved with, "Well, it's his house, he knows it better than you do."
That’s a cool idea actually
I remember my brother got the switch version and my friend and I played it and had no idea what to do. We had seen markiplier play the alpha 1 a long time ago but when we got to the offical game we were so lost. We started looking up walkthroughs then realized on level 3 there’s no point in doing this when it’s just us looking up how to do everything
Honestly not all games need a sequel or mass increase in scale, Hello Neighbor had it's time to shine. It's finally time to let it be put to rest and let another game take it's spot.
Yeah I think that's what happened years ago
In the full release, i was just playing act 2 and trying to escape. I threw a cup at a window and tried to go through the window. In doing so, i stepped on a cup and it launched me into the atmosphere and out of the fence. I completely skipped that chapter because of a cup
ALL HAIL THE CUP
ALL HAIL THE CUP