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Have you ever feared that your dreams are not your own?
That somewhere deep in your subconscious is a haunting presence pulling your strings?
Not only while you sleep, but also while you’re wide awake.
Such a fear is...perhaps...irrational.
Perhaps not.
In the last Hello Neighbor video, we uncovered the terrifying truth about our neighbor and
his family.
What used to be a joyous, carefree life of laughter quickly turned to a miserable life
of regret and loneliness heading towards insanity.
The spooky house began with moderately questionable addons and quickly devolved into further chaos
- clearly as a way to keep you in once you knew too much.
There were walls around the perimeter and puzzles that had to be solved within a maze
to win your freedom.
Our neighbor may be losing his mind, he may be our kidnapper, but somewhere behind those
cold, dead eyes is the memory of a life he holds onto so dearly: a life with children,
with a wife and without the gnawing pain of regret.
Our neighbor lost his daughter to his own son, he lost his wife to a car accident but...what
happens next?
What of the surreal house we find ourselves navigating in Act 3?
What of the shadow man?
These are the questions we have left and the ones which feel the most daunting...at least
to me.
THIS HOUSE IS CRAZY!
And the shadow man...it’s like he’s everywhere and nowhere.
WHAT’S HIS DEAL?
I see.
The shadow means business.
SHADOW BUSINESS!
Which is a dumb way of saying SHADY business.
Up to no good in this neighborhood!
Indeed in the final part of the game we have left to cover, there’s a lot going on.
So I have a suggestion…..PREPARE YOURSELF!
For the story of a traumatized child who comes of age, for the story of a tragedy forever
written into time, for the story...you never knew.
*
We left off at the end of Act 2.
Right after we escape the craziness of our well-trimmed neighbors house.
The next thing we’re shown after we run away is a scene from an apartment in the city.
We’re no longer a kid.
Some time has passed.
Quite a bit of it, in fact.
We’re a full blown ADULT!
The things we saw as a child were, a long time ago now.
However life as real-life adult ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.
We may not be getting locked in basements but we are getting ecivted!
It means evicted.
Cause we’re broke!
Probably.
Shoulda bought into crypto.
DOGECOIN IS ALMOST VALUED AT A PENNY!
BUY BUY BUY!
But now, with nowhere else to go, we make our way back to our old house house.
The one right across the street from home depot’s.
#1 customer over here!
Turns out...our house is all boarded up now and the neighbors house is a partially constructed
shell of what it used to be.
BUT SERVES HIM RIGHT FOR CAPTURING US!
For all I know he’s dead at this point but HAH!
KARMAS A BIATCH AIN’T IT NEIGHBOR MAN?
So we wander on over to the remains and scope it out.
Where we look around and -- what’s that?
Some sort of Shadow thing.
A.k.a.
The Shadowman.
The sight of this causes our protagonist to freak out.
Welp.
This ain’t good.
TIME TO GO HOME!
And answer the phone!
Of course, no one is on the other line.
SO CREEPY!
And AGAIN we see the Shadowman across the street!
Panic attack ensues and we curl up on the couch to sleep it all away.
I mean, I dunno how this guy can sleep with all this paranormal whatchamahoosit going
on but maybe he’s a virtual Zak Bagans.
Zak Bagans everybody!
After falling asleep, Act 3 begins.
We suddenly wake up to the same scream we heard at the beginning of Act 1, and the same
neighbor/child struggle as before.
Except this is...different.
While Act 1 and 2 was us playing as the main character as a child, this seems to be us
playing as our grown up character...but back in the time when he was a child.
What I mean by that is the house that we see in Act 3 is clearly the same as the house
in Act 2 except...more surreal and bizarre.
It’s as though our memory of how this house was has been warped and exaggerated then projected
into a dream.
That is to say...this house is a nightmare.
Literally!
But don’t be going off thinking “it’s all just a dream.”
Oh no.
Act 3 may occur in the dream dimension but that doesn’t make it not important.
And it certainly doesn’t make it not real.
This is as real as it gets.
But why would Tiny Build choose to continue the plot in a dream instead of real life?
In order to understand the method to their madness, we must unravel the mysteries of
the nightmare house, itself.
And so into the contraption we go!
Hmmm...there’s still the electrical switch on the left side of the house.
Well-remembered, subconscious mind!
Not to mention the grave-looking hole in the back, the janky ladder leading to the janky
roof, and also...a railroad.
Cornelius Vanderbilt watch out!
But hold on.
The answers we seek lie not in the specifics of the house, it’s not about what things
are where but rather what we experience as we venture onwards.
Inwards...perhaps.
Case in point!
The minigames.
The supermarket, the school, the pantry.
If this house is a re-creation of a past experience, is it such a stretch to say these minigames
are re-creations of other past experiences?
I think not!
The Supermarket gave us the hiding ability, as though we were scared and timid as a child,
fearing that the fellow shoppers were after us much like the neighbor was.
The School gave us the push ability which also stemmed from us being afraid and needing
protection from either the teacher or a bully by pushing them out of the way.
The Pantry gave us the double jump ability because, as a small child, we couldn’t reach
the light...metaphorically of course.
Because it was dark in that basement and the darkness followed us into adulthood.
It’s as though playing through these warped memories of a childhood filled with fear is
a past life regression where we are able to conquer previously unconquerable traumas.
So much so, that we’re not only able to move past them but also learn from them.
Using these newfound abilities, and some Hello Neighbor-esque puzzle solving, we make our
way down to the dreamy basement..perhaps where the climax of our inner demons will occur...if
I know anything about storytelling.
This basement is very similar to the Act 1 basement except it’s a bit more disheveled
and definitely more scary.
We use the supermarket hiding ability to sneak past the Shadowman and the push ability to
get past the neighbor and sprint away and into a room!
Oh the symbolism!
Cutting it close we latch the door behind us, blocking the neighbor from catching us.
We’re free to go now.
But wait.
The neighbor sounds...sad.
He’s clearly upset as you can tell by the banging, but there’s also a sadness..the
same sadness we’ve seen from our neighbor so many times before.
For so long we’ve accused him of being maniacal, for being insane, crazed, evil!
Yet I would never expect the devil to cry.
UNLESS HE WAS TRYING TO MANIPULATE ME!
But I don’t think so.
As we continue down the hallway we come into a room with the familiar cutout of the simming
boy.
The simming boy.
This is his room!
At least a representation of it.
And OH GOD!
The neighbor is giant!
And in a vast ocean of white, nothingness.
Like in the betas.
TINY BUILD WHAT COULD THIS POSSIBLY MEAN??!
HNNNNNG
Alright.
Just gotta collect some stuff, flip some switches, shoot the neighbor with a firework and ultimately
bring him to his gigantic knees by shooting him in the knee.
He took a firework to the knee!
Hah memes..
That way we can climb into the house on his back and trigger this sweet dream sequence.
There are stacks of wanted posters everywhere.
If we look to our left there’s the shadow man floating over a grave.
Then over here we see the neighbor crying next to a wanted poster with the shadow man
just...watching.
With the crow!
Did I mention the crow?
Eh it’s not that important.
What is important is the shadow man.
Not just here...but here!
Our childhood self is playing with toys when suddenly he gets spooked!
Running to the window we see him!
It.
The shadow is lumbering towards the house.
As our younger self sits down, we have to block the gargantuan shadow man’s attacks.
Each time a section of the house is ripped out, but so long as we’re blocking ourselves
from its onslaught we shield our past while growing bigger with each success.
So symbolic!
And continuing in that healthy symbolic fashion, we confront the shadow in spite of its size.
It explodes!
And wouldn’t you know it, we end up back in the vast sea of whiteness.
With...a house...the same one that was on the neighbor’s back.
Looking in we see the neighbor is scared...upset.
In the room next to him is the shadowman...also clearly upset with its wavy arm gestures.
It wants to get to the neighbor but the way is blocked.
And it looks like things will stay that way.
That’s all we get in this place, a visual representation of the neighbor’s relationship
with the shadowman.
What we experienced all those years ago has taken on a life of its own.
It controls itself more than we control it.
That is, until we walk through that heavenly exit.
When it’s over it’s over.
We wake up in the rundown house across the street from the empty husk that held us in
its maze all those years ago.
Something about the scene feels refreshing, like we’re finally able to move on.
Ah sweet relief.
We unload boxes with a lightness about us as though to start a brand new life, with
a brand new outlook...in the very place that brought back so much negativity.
AND A CREEPY PHONE CALL.
It’s as though to move on, we only had to understand what happened to us.
We, the nameless protagonist were beckoned back by to this place by a strange kind of
fate.
By our inability to pay rent!
The memories, the emotions and caged demons were still swirling in our head despite trying
to bury them with passed time and physical distance.
But it’s all behind us now isn’t it?
The shadowman is gone.
He exploded!
But why?
Who was he to begin with?
Why was he trying to get at the neighborman in that weird shack?
Why couldn’t he get at the neighborman in that weird shack?
Well I believe we can understand the shadowman by not asking who he was...but what it was.
Let’s not forget that all of this, the Act 3 main house, the bizarre minigames, the spooky
basement, and ultimately the scene we see before us now all occurs in our head.
In a dream.
Dreams like the car accident, like the roller coaster.
You’ll notice in these if you look at your shadow that this is adult protagonist.
These insightful flashes into our neighbors tragic backstory don’t come to us until
we’re fully grown.
So we can assume these revelations happened sometime between when we were a child and
when we catch up to our protagonist at the end of Act 2.
Overtime we’ve been processing what happened, slowly coming to terms with it, slowly understanding
it, until our mental chaos comes to a climax in a dream-state where we overcome the residual
effects of the terrifying mystery we witnessed all those years ago.
We see these residual negative effects on our psyche when a trip to the grocery store
and walking through school feel threatening.
It’s only when we overcome these residual effects and the further bad memories they
caused that we learn new abilities which help us sneak past the shadow, thwart the neighbor
who we’ve built up in our head as a literal gargantuan, roaring monster, and ultimately
allow us to come to terms with everything all at once.
The shadow was at the torn down house, over the grave, in the basement, watching our sobbing
neighbor, and finally attacking us because it is the manifestation of all our mental
anguish that’s been building since childhood.
It’s only after dreams tell us what caused our neighbor’s decline, after we conquer
our memory of the house, and after we finally stare the shadow in the face that we see the
black mist for what it is: an entity that never was...an entity separate from the neighbor,
an entity that represents him and everything he did to us.
The shadow: the idea of what happened that became so deeply negative that it manifested
as an entity in our mind...it was not what it appeared to be.
Since our last Hello Neighbor video we understood the neighbor isn’t a bad guy.
He may have played a part in a series of unfortunately accidents that killed his family, but he isn’t
evil...nor were his intentions.
It was only after the nightmare...the dream that was Act 3..that our protagonist understood
this too.
Act 3 was not a meaningless dream that lets us explain away everything that’s happened,
but rather one which strings together memories long repressed and allows us to reexperience
them in the forms they’ve taken on after a decade of being tucked away in the cobwebby,
nooks and crannies of our mind.
These memories of a kidnapping, of being lost in the chaotic house of the kidnapper and
its dark, winding basement...these memories have evolved into what we saw throughout the
final act...including the house and shadow man, and they’re far scarier than anything
we saw in the previous Acts.
Far scarier than anything that actually happened.
Our protagonist...finally knows the truth.
And so the shadow evaporates...errr...explodes.
That’s the story of a child’s fears lingering into adulthood, the story of what it means
to understand tragedy, the story of Hello Neighbor, the story...you never knew.
But wait!
I’ve still got some deets to drop on you!
If you want to know more about Hello Neighbor and what we think about it, or any other franchise
for that matter, you should absolutely join our discord!
We get so many comments every day that its way more likely you’ll get a response when
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Well, that and we’re planning on hanging out there for a few hours after this video
gets released.
So come say hi!
Also there’s an amazing community to talk with, play games with and hang out with!
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And if you stop by our server, we might just be doing some giveaways on there in the upcoming
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So join our discord community and make some awesome friends while supporting us and Discord!
It’s a win for everyone and I hope to talk to you on there!
I’m Grant and I’ll see you all later.
Bye everyone!