Last Neighbor Review

*Contains Spoilers*

A Work In Progress

Last Neighbor begins with you breaking into a neighbor’s house to steal valuables so you can sell them to play for your mother’s chemo treatments. As you immediately discover, however, you’re not alone…

First of all, I have to commend the game on finding a way to make me care about the character I’m playing as. If I were just breaking into my neighbor’s house to steal things because I wanted to, I would have a much harder time caring about the well-being of my character. However, the “stealing to help my mother, who has cancer” story tugs on your heart strings and helps establish a relationship between player and character. That, unfortunately, is where the game lost me.

The gameplay begins with a cutscene in which our character smashes through a window into a hallway and is confronted by a grey character who giggles with insanity as he brandishes a knife and leaps down the hallway. My character then turns to a locked door right next to him and tries to pick the lock to get through, all the while, pausing to shine his light right and left to prevent the grey man from killing him. Immediately, I have two questions:

1. Why didn’t the grey man just kill me then?
2. Why didn’t my character just leave through the broken window he came through?

I also wondered why the grey man is so deeply affected by light that he is forced to pause or retreat when confronted by our very average flashlight.

The mechanics to open the lock were not immediately clear to me. While I tried to figure it out, I was forced to endure the same excessive jump scare over and over again, to the point where it was no longer scary.

After I finally unlocked the door, I found myself in another room (not outside, like I hoped) with 4 doors that I was forced to close to prevent the grey man from entering. But the door only remains closed while you’re standing there, making little sense and adding to an already frustrating situation. At one point, I must have encountered a glitch because the grey man never appeared and I moved into yet another room with a lock. 

This time, I had a cabinet to hide in, but the combination of hiding, turning on the room lights, and working to unlock the door behind me, coupled with the grey man’s sporadic appearances was enough to make this section unplayable. Grey man would often show up without a sound and kill my character, even though I looked for him moments before and I found it too exhausting to bother finishing the game.

One thing Last Neighbor could benefit from is a better use of sound. Having little tells which let you know the grey man is near would be beneficial in helping the player better determine where to look instead of constant guessing. Every now and then, you can hear him giggle but I have found that does not always guarantee he will be there.

I would also like the puzzles to make sense with the story we are given. A normal person wouldn’t go deeper into a house they just entered when confronted with a shady and malicious being, so every new room I entered ruined any immersion I felt at the start.

Overall, I believe there is potential here, but Last Neighbor needs more work before it will be an enjoyable game. 

If you would like to see the full experience, check out the video: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/517336575

[Lady played Last Neighbor on PC with a mouse and keyboard. A special thanks to the developer, TrerPlay, for sharing a key for the game.]