Aside from the creepy music, most of the game is about as scary as a child playing keep-away with a toy from an adult. The game is advertised as horror/stealth but there are almost no scary moments whatsoever aside from a few moments here and there and even then it's not genuinely that spooky in the slightest.Since being caught by the Neighbor just results in the player respawning in the backyard as if nothing had occurred, it does not deplete your inventory or impede your progress, implying that it only discourages the player from engaging in such behavior. It just teleports you back to the beginning of the level your inventory and progress are unchanged. Similar to being nabbed by the neighbor, "restarting" a section somehow doesn't effectively reset anything. There's no punishment for avoiding the neighbor.They should’ve focused on that and stealth elements rather than try to make it a weird amalgamation of different genres. What initially drew people to the game was the AI of the neighbor learning from your previous failures (boarding up windows, checking closets, etc.). It’s a stealth game where you avoid the neighbor, and has horror elements, platforming, puzzles, and deep, convoluted lore. Combine that with the idea that the devs seemed more focused on making the game seem like it has intriguing lore like FNAF, and you have a game that tries to be too many things at once. It feels as if the developers had all these ideas and threw them all in at once rather than extending and refining the fundamental gameplay elements they originally started with.By the time you reached Act 3, the house is a glorified mansion where he can't even access most of the rooms. The Neighbor would've been an excellent antagonist if he was simply placed in a bog-standards labyrinth, where everything was built to accommodate his mechanics, but they didn't program his pathfinding functions to really be able to navigate his own house, so most of the time he's only a threat if you're on the first floor. This, in turn, makes the Neighbor feel like a poorly executed obstacle.
Not to mention, the neighbor may get stuck on certain parts of the environment itself and can't even reach the player when they're standing on higher ground. The AI however got progressively worse through every alpha, leading up to the betas, resulting in the final version of AI being severely watered down to the point it's considered to be embarrassingly broken in terms of functionalities and bafflingly inconsistent. One of the game's biggest selling points was that it would have an adaptive AI so the Neighbor would learn from all of your previous attempts to get into his basement (similar to the Xenomorph's AI from Alien Isolation), such as setting up traps, taking interconnected shortcuts within the house, and frequently camping at territories you'll constantly go through.The only method to get those stuff back is to reload the game from a previous save. There is a chance that items may potentially fall across the map due to poor collision detection and therefore soft-locking your progress completely, sometimes these that are essential to proceed in puzzles.If you do this correctly you can beat the level in a minute. Act 2 is the best example as you can climb the ladder in the front of the house, take 5 boxes, jump and stack them on top of each other, and then run and jump to the trampoline. One of the biggest issues is how easy it is to exploit and cheese through the game.The game was rushed for the holidays, making various aspects of this game unpolished and riddled to the brim with questionable design choices in regards to the gameplay.
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