December 8th, 2017.
A day which will live in infamy.
Because the full Hello Neighbor game finally came out!
And we can unwrap all the answers we’ve been craving for so long.
Answers to questions like...if the neighbor is so crazy then how does he maintain such
attractive and trimmed facial hair?
Mr. Neighborman I...
By the way with the full game released it’s clear this mustachio’d antagonist isn’t
our father.
Phew!
But still...who is he?
And why has he constructed a house that only a crazy mccrazyface would construct?
A handsome mug with a stache to decorate it can only get you so far before people start
asking questions you arguile wearing, flamboyant-stretch doing, kidnapper!
The kidnapping is probably the main issue really.
Also driving skills not great
Who hits a pizza truck?
The kind of man our neighbor clearly is, that’s who.
But that’s the question isn’t it?
Who is the Neighbor exactly?
His motives and personality are the qmark that binds this entire chaos of evidence spanning
normal waking reality and lucid dreams.
Not to mention...dreams within dreams: a depth to the psyche which few games dare touch.
But what does it all mean?
Who is this gloved man of many nightmares?
And what is he hiding from the world?
From us?
Since those early alphas so long ago we’ve called him a monster.
A kidnapper!
The devil.
Finally with the full release we can put this man and his creepy house under a very flattering
spotlight.
But not too flattering.
I mean...it’s hard not to admire his...
Mmmmm.
Stranger danger never looked so appealing!
I mean...THAT’S A BUTT!
Stop!
It’s time for the schtick people!
So round up your mannequin collection, hang some weird pictures on your walls, and prepare
yourself!
For the story of tragedy, guilt, and the looming, spooky darkness they leave behind.
This is the story of a house that reflects the mind who built it, the story of Hello
Neighbor, the story you never knew.
Ah no!
You nimble, cold faced...man.
To unravel your psyche and what lead to your insanity...let’s rewind to the beginning.
To Act 1.
In the first cutscene, we are not the grown man we’ve come to know in the Betas and
Alphas.
We’re a child...playing with a ball.
And when we kick our ball and follow it we get another cutscene.
The infamous, neighbor dragging someone who is probably a kid into the basement with an
accompanied scream.
Not to mention, if your look right around this area you’ll see Simming children’s
posters.
NOT SIMMING CHILDREN!
I think we can all assume they’re supposed to say “missing”.
And we see a missing boy and a missing girl highlighted on these posters.
Is this screaming, unseen child one of them?
Who knows!
But it’s time to investigate!
Looking around the house we see the same-old same old from previous builds, eyeball paintings,
apple paintings, paintings of a husband wife and child, all great decorations!
They add a little artistic pizzazz.
But back to the story!
What really moves the plot forward are the...I guess you’d call them dream sequences, that
happen at random times between when the neighbor captures you and when you wake up across the
street.
The first one...is telling.
I mentioned it a little bit earlier.
Walking down a long hallway, if you look to the right you’ll see the neighbor letting
someone into a car, running around to the driver side and then driving off.
Only to get involved in an accident with a pizza truck where his passenger is either
dead or gravely injured.
Sirens, perhaps an ambulance can be heard approaching in the distance.
And look!
A high heel!
Judging by this feminine footwear and the chivalrous action of letting someone in then
getting in the car himself, I think we can assume our man of mystery lost or will lose
his wife.
Poor guy.
This is the first tragedy that befalls our neighbor.
An accident which may have been his fault.
These cars both ended up on the opposite side of the road from us, or more importantly,
on the same side of the road as each other so it’s likely somebody was on driving on
the wrong side.
And judging by the same red car parked...on the fence during Act 1..it’s not crazy to
assume the neighbor’s a bad driver.
So our neighbor played his part in his wife’s death.
And..even if he didn’t..even if he wasn’t at fault...our villain has lost his wife.
Is he even a villain at all?
The next dream sequence encounter with him is...more creepy and strange than tragic.
On the wall above us is a silhouette of the neighbor digging a hole for something..or
someone.
Probably both actually.
We’ll get to that.
The silhouette finishes digging, leaves and doesn’t come back.
So we walk through the door to find a GIANT neighbor searching the room for something.
Could it be what he wants to bury?
I think it is.
Act 2 leads me to believe this, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.
These dreams are very insightful but oh so mysterious!
But dead wife and hole digging aside, let’s talk about the oh so tantalizing basement.
I mean it would be tantalizing IF IT WASN’T WEIRD AND CREEPY!
When we get the red key, we’re able to make our way down the stairs to the place where,
as far as I can tell, a child is being held against their will.
I mean, we can all agree that at this point right?
In my previous Hello Neighbor videos I argued for this to be a little girl by the scream
but truth be told child screams can be quite androgynous.
Not that I would know.
But I think this is a little boy.
A missing boy...who killed someone.
Someone close to him.
And yet a tragedy of this magnitude is only one of the reasons tearing our neighbor’s
mind apart
These gory details are what our child-protagonist aims to investigate, and that curiosity has
gotten him into this basement...where there is no child to be found.
There’s only a crude simulation of reality, as though trying to keep a prisoner feeling
like they aren’t in prison.
And judging by the food items around there’s little doubt someone has been living down
here.
A someone who has escaped.
Something our good protagonist surely wants to do as well.
Except...after being chased down a long corridor...oh no!
Oh no!
DON’T COME ANY CLOSER I HAVE A BOX I’M GONNA..BOX YOU.
NEIGHBOR MAN DON’T YOU DARE NEIGHBOR MANYOU’LLBESORRY I uuhhh...OH!
He captured us.
And we’re trapped here.
Trapped here until...we escape.
Which to be fair is usually how it works.
But yeah, the room we’re trapped in is locked.
So how does one escape from a locked room?
With help of course.
While meandering around in our little room of joy we hear a crash followed by the sound
of a door unlocking.
And sure enough, we’re free!
But hold on.
Who unlocked the door?
Surely our neighbor man (who put us down here in the first place) isn’t just letting us
go.
Thankfully we have a restart option!
This time, if we choose to look through the keyhole...maybe we can glimpse who…..*gasp*
Is that?!?
Hm...Yes.
The simming boy.
One and the same!
He was stuffed in the basement and put in a weird unconvincing reality simulator to
make him feel better about it.
It didn’t work!
So he escaped.
And thanks to his enginuity, we’re allowed to escape too.
But what does this have to do with the missing boy being a murderer?
And more importantly, why would that make the neighbor become the crazy man he has?
Well since we can safely assume this is the same kid who our neighbor locked in the basement
at the beginning of Act 1 we can begin making connections with the insights of Act 2.
So what are we waiting for?
We make our way out of this basement prison only to be greeted by a new neighbor house.
Jiminy Cricket, good lord man.
How long have we been stuck down there?
Regardless, our neighbor has gone even more off the deep end than before.
He’s now added some….improvements to his house.
Totally safe improvements.
Oh.
And a wall that would put Fenway’s Green Monster to shame around the perimeter of the
property.
Good to know our crazy handyman realizes the importance of blowing off steam with the wholistic
hobby of carpentry.
Step aside Jesus!
But yeah, we wind through and around this haunting house, deciphering the methods to
our neighbor’s madness until somewhere along the way we get even more dream sequences.
Very telling ones, I might add.
The first dream sequence is set in a sort of theme park.
The main attraction being a roller coaster operated by none other than the missing boy
who helped us in the basement earlier.
Except...how he’s red.
The color of EEEEVILLLLL.
Well he’s under a red light but could be symbolic.
Allow me to explain.
Hopping on the coaster we’re first taken through a warmly lit kitchen filled with the
sound of a family laughing.
A family of four.
These are happy times...until the next room begins.
It’s the same place, but everything has been flipped upside down, lights turned off,
and we hear only the sound of a man crying.
It’s as if our neighbor’s life between that scene and this has literally been turned
upside down.
These rooms aren’t just sections of a dream, they’re states of mind.
And something took a family from happy togetherness to lonely despair.
Continuing onward, the roller coaster crosses another threshold, this time having two little
pushy hands up front.
The suspenseful cart wheels forward until...the missing girl!
OH NO WE’RE GOING TO PUSH HER OFF HNNNNGGGGGG
Recall the missing boy was the operator of this dream rollercoaster...which means these
hands...this path we were taken on...was his.
First there was a happy family, then something changed all that.
Then another horror: a brother killing his sister.
This roller coaster is a timeline.
But why did we go down it?
How did these sad, sad dominoes fall in the way they did??
We’ve already gotten a whopping hammer of a hint from the car crash in Act 1.
The neighbor’s wife was gravely injured, with an ambulance making its way to the scene.
It’s hard to know for sure if she was killed outright until this next dream sequence: the
hospital.
A heart monitor beeps next to a bed while the neighbor waits anxiously in the waiting
room.
Then the monitor flatlines.
There’s no indication here who this is who passed away, but when you look at all the
evidence the answer is clearly the wife.
Judging by the roller coaster dream and the car accident, the most likely havers of death
are both the wife and daughter.
So it had to have been one of them that flatlined here in the hospital.
Here’s the thing though, before Act 1 even began, there are missing posters hanging around
the neighborhood for a boy yes, but also a little girl.
If neighbor’s daughter was the one who died in the hospital then why would she be on a
missing poster?
When you die in a hospital, public records get updated pretty quick.
No.
This girl died outside of the public eye.
The wife was taken to the hospital after her very public crash, and passed away from her
injuries soon after, but the girl was killed at the hands of her brother.
At the hands of the only family our neighbor has left.
Recall that the house in Act 1 is already starting to look a little...funky.
The neighbor has already started to lose his mind because at this point his wife is already
dead.
Case in point, the house is messy and has its share of...questionable addons.
For instance!
This ladder in the back that leads to a janky platform on the roof!
A perfect place for children playing to end in tragedy.
And notice how it’s been blocked off.
As though something happened up here that must never happen again.
A brother killing his sister.
Or the neighbor didn’t want anyone entering through the hole in the roof.
But regardless, if it had to happen anywhere in this house, this would be the place where
someone was pushed off and died.
There’s a doll at the bottom to represent the daughter and also a guitar for the brother.
As seen by the puzzle in his room I never mentioned.
We also see this same doll in the basement and lying around the car crash dream sequence.
Is this doll in the places it is...
By accident?
Perhaps.
What we do know is there’s a casket buried in the backyard and within that casket is
a key to a little girl’s dollhouse.
The key, in this sense, is more of a symbolic representation of the daughter rather than
the daughter herself, as tinyBuild has chosen not to provide corpses to represent the deceased
- as also shown by the empty hospital bed, even though someone was definitely in it.
And so with his wife and daughter dead, what better way for a loving father to protect
his only remaining child than to hide him away so the world will never call him a murderer?
And what better way to hide the whole ordeal than to hang missing posters of his children
all over the neighborhood?
People will notice if his children aren’t around, but they won’t get suspicious if
it appears he’s looking for them.
And certainly no one will ask a grieving father if the accident that killed his wife is his
fault.
Our neighbor is putting on a facade, but it’s not so fake and misguided as we’ve thought
for so long.
He’s trying to cover his tracks and protect his son and himself from the repercussions
of accidents he played a part in creating.
First the car crash, then his daughter being pushed to her death off the rooftop he built.
Such guilt would drive any man insane.
It’s no wonder why the neighbor is so insistent on getting you to leave and then going to
all the trouble of walling you in after you’ve seen too much.
If you tell the world what you saw, our neighbor will lose the only family he has left.
He’ll lose the only sanity he has left.
Sure his son already escaped the basement, but if anyone else finds out the whole story...that’s
it for this family.
And there lies the answer to this mystery house’s creation: it’s a broken floorplan
designed by a broken mind.
It’s meant to keep you out so you don’t learn the truth, then keep you in once you’ve
learned too much.
Indeed, Act 2 ends with your escape and the neighbor not running after you with hate behind
his eyes, but rather letting you go with a concerned, suspicious look on his face.
He doesn’t hate you, he’s just worried about what you might tell the world.
The neighbor isn’t a properly moustached Joseph Stalin, he’s a loving father who
knows not how to deal with the tragedies he caused.
That’s the motive behind the neighbor: his tragic secret we’ve been dying to know for
so long.
We understand now what tore his family apart, what tore his mind apart, but what of the
surreal, Dr. Seuss house in Act 3?
What of the shadow man that haunts it?
And us?
Unfortunately I can only answer so much this episode.
The answers to those questions will give new meaning to what we’ve uncovered today.
They’ll tie together a story where nightmares and waking reality meet.
Where demons haunt us as an adult just as they did when we were a child.
Don’t forget to subscribe and hit that bell.
The darkness is approaching.
Can you contain it?
Find out next week in the story...you never knew.