Sure, you’ll have a few items chucked at you, but ultimately, the Neighbor is too powerful to stop, and the only hope the kids have of reaching victory is by avoiding the Neighbor entirely and working together (a near impossibility if you’re matchmaking with strangers).Īs for any sort of longevity or real enjoyment, this almost entirely hinges on whether you’re able to play with friends. The game is simply too unbalanced if your disguise is uncovered by the kids, it really doesn’t matter. It’s a neat concept and can be fun, at least until you realise just how easy it is to win matches when playing as the Neighbor. Now, if you wish, you can simply switch over to the Neighbor immediately and chase your opponents around the house until you catch them all (which is also tedious, and not very difficult), or you can play it cool, act the part for a while, and catch the kids while they’re isolated and off guard. You start off in the guise of one of the kids, matching up with whichever character design you choose in the main menu. Playing as the Neighbor, on the other hand, is infinitely more fun and rewarding, albeit completely unbalanced. You can search through all the drawers and cupboards, but it feels incredibly tedious after just a few short rounds. The problem is that there just isn’t anything interesting to look for bar the crucial keys. Much of the house is shrouded in darkness, so you have a torch to keep you company, but you can swap this out for different items as you progress through the various rooms. Navigating the house and locating the relevant keys to expand your search is fun for a short while, but quickly loses its charm thanks to the aforementioned janky controls (even with the sensitivity increased) and bland environmental design. We’ve lost count of the number of times we witnessed the entire group of players just meandering around the house entrance, chucking boxes at each other whilst yelling “neighbor, neighbor!”. What didn’t help, however, is that if you’re matchmaking with strangers, don’t be surprised if some of them simply refuse to play nice. After some trial-and-error and a bit of luck finding the right items, the aim of the game slowly began to sink in. We’ll be the first to admit this, but when we started playing as a kid, we didn’t have a clue what we needed to do. When you load into a match, the game will tell you whether you’re playing as a kid or the dastardly Neighbor, with some basic instructions on what to do during the game. On a positive note, however, matchmaking is pretty much instantaneous, with very minimal wait times, at least if you opt for the default game mode. We suspect this may be a tactical choice, to enable the Neighbor to blend in more with the crowd, but it’s difficult to confirm this for certain. You can choose which kid to play as out of a small selection of different characters, but we often saw people choosing the same character type. Playing as a kid or the Neighbor himself is completely random when matchmaking.

My secret neighbor com