It made trying to enjoy what was offered kind of a slog. The biggest way the beta got the better of me was in its many bugs and glitches around the map. It feels pretty rewarding when you make progress as this is a game that really leaves it up to you to figure things out on your own. There’s a lot of backtracking in this game between its many locations, each with its own puzzles and clues to find. That leads me to my favorite thing about Hello Neighbor 2 so far the open world. Traversing the monstrous locations and solving their puzzles are always the best parts of these games and adding more layers to that makes the experience all the more enticing. This wasn’t present in the first title but feels like something right at home with the theme of sneaking around these environments anyway you can.

The first great mechanic is the ability to open windows. On the flip side, you have some really interesting new mechanics and ideas that further expand upon things that I loved from the original. Interacting with objects was kind of a pain because of this as well. I’m sure that on PC the gameplay is a bit smoother but on Xbox, this needs some more tuning for sure. The controls are really stiff, which was my biggest bone to pick with the original. Right out of the gate, Hello Neighbor 2 feels exactly like the original, for better or worse.