However, as numbers dwindle, it just becomes more of a frustration. On one hand, I can see what the thought process was when limiting the inventory, giving the players reason to work together to carry everything they need. The Bagger has an extra inventory slot, greatly reducing the back and forth to collect and use these items. However, keeping it on you leaves only one space to carry the myriad of keys and key cards that you are going to need to collect and use. Sure, you can go without it, but it is going to present you with a strong disadvantage. With how dark most of the areas in the game are, keeping your starting flashlight is nearly completely necessary. As a child, your inventory is very small, allowing you to only carry two items at a time. Playing as the Bagger class simply makes the game more playable. However, by the time I rotated to giving that character a shot, I completely understood why they were. At first, I thought it might be a tactic to better blend into the crowd if you were seen transforming between neighbor and child forms. It doesn’t help that you are not told when one of the other kids gets captured, so you might be the only person left in the map without even knowing it.Īt first I was confused as to why a good 60-75% of players were choosing the same child/class when going into a match. My experience with others was having things thrown at me in order to determine which I was. It leads to a chaotic experience with people getting picked off one by one and being so distrustful of each other that you might not see another player for most of the time that you are playing. This leads to every player tending to take an “everyone for themselves” approach to getting things done. There’s no way to vote them out or anything like that. Here’s where the problem comes in, once you have figured it out, there’s not really much that you can do about it besides play a big game of keep away from that person. The idea here is that nobody knows who the titular and dangerous neighbor is and it’s your job to figure it out while also trying to get into the locked door. It’s an asymmetrical multiplayer game with a whole squad against one person. Secret Neighbor bills itself a social deduction game, but if I’m being honest, I don’t think that there is much deduction going on here. Is this some new supernatural element? Would it have been, perhaps, more cohesive to have one of the children be a spy for the neighbor than the neighbor in child form? Or am I just really overthinking what is just a little gameplay detail? Or the creeper with the sack It seems to imply that the neighbor has the ability to shapeshift to some extent, which wasn’t a factor in the original game to my knowledge. The implications of the setup are also just really strange. I guess if I wanted more story content, I would have to play the game that this one is spun off fro huh? The story doesn’t really go any deeper than the concept unfortunately, which is kind of what I assumed it would be given that this is an online multiplayer game, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t at least a little disappointing. It’s actually a concept that I could see making for a cool movie, like a kids thriller, but this isn’t a movie, it’s a game. Either you are a child who is trying to break another stolen child out of confinement behind several layers of locks on a door, or you are “the neighbor”, an adult who put them there for what I can only assume are nefarious purposes. In Secret Neighbor, you take one of two roles. Still, it seemed that Secret Neighbor was actually fairly standalone, so just the concept would be enough for me to do well, so I ended up diving in without much by way of expectations, so let’s see if this game ended up being a strong standalone title. However, after reviews at launch (from a prior early access state) were less than glowing, It was one that I just ended up ultimately passing on and it pretty much immediately faded out of the zeitgeist. Heck, I knew it was pretty big just by the fact that it had plushies in mainstream stores and as prizes at my local amusement park. It was so ubiquitous on YouTube in the mid-to-late 2010’s that it was hard to have been in the YouTube gaming sphere and not know at least that much. Of course I am familiar with the premise of Hello Neighbor. Mostly because it’s a spin off of another game that I have never really spent any time with. Secret Neighbor is not the sort of game that I normally would have chosen to review.
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