Memetic Mutation: A now-deleted series of tweets◊ by TinyBuild that all but beg Matpat to analyze the pilot of the animated series has become memetic online, usually used whenever a small creator obsequiously attempts to curry favor or interact with a larger creator in order to gain more publicity.
Never Live It Down: That same series of tweets. Go ahead, just TRY to find a video talking about the series as a whole that doesn't either mention or downright mock TinyBuild for quite literally begging Matpat to do a theory video about their game.
The Shadow, after being teased throughout the previous builds as a greaterevil the Neighbor might have made a Deal with the Devil with, is ultimately evaded in an Escort Mission-type sequence with a heavy focus on Trial-and-Error Gameplay to keep track of the child, with the Shadow itself being little more than an Enemy WithinCutscene Boss that repeatedly slams the house. The fact that the sequence is plagued by bugs and stilted animation doesn't help matters.
Arc Fatigue: Act 3 is the longest of the four acts, owing to the massive house making it hard to navigate and the various individual puzzles that require meticulous understanding of what goes where with little to no guidance outside of a walk-through. Whereas the other acts can roughly take an hour, the third can easily triple (or even quadruple) that in the worse case scenario.
Fan-Preferred Cut Content: It's not uncommon to see people say that the first game's alpha builds were better than the final product, with the common consensus being that the alpha showed promise with a simple but effective concept: playing a game against the AI-evolving Neighbor seemingly hiding a skeleton in the closet. Later builds complicated it to the point of barely even resembling the game that was promised. This group generally feels that they should have refined what they had rather than trying to add more to a game that arguably worked better without.
Friendly Fandoms: As for the horror side, it's friendly with the Five Nights At Freddys, Tattletail, and the Bendy and the Ink Machine fandoms. Halloween 2017 ended up getting an official, Bendy-themed crossover mod, while the Neighbor showed up in Bendy And The Ink Machine, replacing two of the most dangerous characters.
The ending where the protagonist seems to have conquered his childhood trauma and starts moving his stuff in his old house.
Hype Backlash: During its early access, the game was being heralded as the successor to Five Nights At Freddy's in indie horror. Once it came out, though, many players were put off by the frustrating A.I., bizarrepuzzles, wonky physics, stiff animations, and large amount of bugs, plus an odd Jigsaw Puzzle Plotof which the whole third act is implied to be All Just a Dream and very little is apparently resolved. Add in the release of Doki Doki Literature Club! (released a few months earlier to much acclaim) over the course of the year, and Freddy Fazbear's Pizzeria Simulator (which was released a mere four days prior) and Hello, Neighbor! ended up quickly buried.
The protagonist may be all too willing to invade the Neighbor's privacy, steal his stuff, wreck his belongings, and refuse to take a hint at the fact that this is highly illegal, but it's hard to hold it against him considering that he even has nightmares of the Neighbor who has a potentially Dark Secret.
The Neighbor, who, in the full release, is shown to have lost his wife in a car accident, and the missing children may be his dead daughter and the potentially murderous son who pushed her to her death.
In the pre-Alpha trailer and Alpha 1, the Neighbor crosses it with the manner in which he decides to do away with the protagonist after he gets too close to his secret. He buries him alive.
In the full game, the Neighbor kidnaps the player after he investigates too far into the basement.
Scrappy Mechanic: An annoyingly large number of the game's puzzles are based around either platform jumping (made worse by the fact the game's jumping controls aren't very good), stacking physics boxes to climb up to otherwise unreachable platforms, or a combination of both.
The dream sequences of The Neighbor losing his wife in a car accident and his daughter also being killed, possibly by being pushed to her death.
The events that the protagonist goes through. He starts off as an innocent kid who saw his neighbor seemingly lock someone in the basement. Curiosity gets the better of the boy and he tries to get inside to see what his neighbor is hiding. He winds up trapped in the basement, but he manages to escape after an unspecified amount of time. As an adult, he’s suffering from PTSD after being locked in his neighbor’s basement.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Early models of the first game were praised for their tension, emphasis on stealth, and the Neighbor's AI adapting well to different entrance strategies, forcing the player to change their tactics or watch for traps. Later builds of the game and the final release had less positive reactions due to buggy physics, downgrades in the Neighbor's AI, and a wackier tone with the zany new houses and emphasis on platforming and incomprehensible puzzles precluding stealth and tension.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The game paints the Neighbor as a Tragic Villain. The follow-up material which also clarifies that the killing of the girl was an accident on the son's part and the Neighbor is trying to keep him from being charged with manslaughter so he doesn't lose his last remaining family member, but it's not like he kept his son in great conditions, as he wanted to escape from what is essentially a prison. A "nice" prison, yes, but still a prison that kept him from freedom. He also imprisons the protagonist down there when he discovers this, outright kidnapping him and keeping him locked up to secure the protection of himself and his son.
The Show
Uncertain Audience: From what's been released so far, the show has kid protagonists and a lot of childish humor, but also has explicit deaths that are shown in graphic detail in the director's cuts, making it uncertain who the intended audience is, though the creators have stated that it's not meant for kids. It might possibly be going for a Stephen King-esque vibe though.
What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: In contrast to the relatively moody tone of the original game, cartoony art style aside, the animated series seemingly takes a kid-friendly tone with the protagonists being a group of kids who suspect something is up with their creepy neighbor. One would be forgiven for thinking that TinyBuild fully neutered the series to appeal to an even wider audience. But then the first actual episode of the series shows a realtor being run over by a truck, with a director's cut version showing blood and her mangled body in the wheels. This continues with the second, where one of the protagonist has vivid, graphic nightmares about the neighbor, who's implied to have killed another person with a drill. And indeed, the creators have confirmed that the series is not for kids, and will release both censored and director's cuts versions.
◊ by TinyBuild that all but beg Matpat to analyze the pilot of the animated series has become memetic online, usually used whenever a small creator obsequiously attempts to curry favor or interact with a larger creator in order to gain more publicity.
