When they inevitably catch you, these horrid fiends relocate your guts from the warzone that is your tum-tum. In a game like Resident Evil 7, the unkillable monstrosities stalking you look like they’ve been taking late-night ugly classes down at the community college. Oh, what’s that he said? No jump scares in a horror game?! Yes, Hello Neighbor is a game that wants you to float on the surface tension of its atmosphere, rather than drown in it. It’s not hard to see why - the game has all the mechanical trappings of a YouTube-friendly survival horror game, but it’s been designed to avoid potentially frightening jump scares and has been endowed with a cartoony aesthetic that feels more Toontown than Resident Evil 7. The kids I saw playing Hello Neighbor seemed like they were having a blast. If my reconnaissance told me anything, the team was absolutely successful in targeting young players. “Our target demographic is the ‘Minecraft Generation’,” Nichiporchik said to me at PAX South. According to TinyBuild CEO Alex Nichiporchik, that is absolutely intentional.

Or both! (See also: Minecraft.) Turns out I was right - the “stealth horror” title is fairly popular on YouTube, as you’d expect from a video game that feels like it owes more than a little to the Slender craze.

To me, that meant that either Hello Neighbor was a kid-friendly game or a popular YouTuber had gotten their hands on it. And I’m only 21 years old, so you know that when I say “kids,” I mean “actual children.” When I arrived at TinyBuild’s PAX South booth for my Hello Neighbor appointment, hoping to either get a hold of somebody or hop on a station myself, I noticed something that both piqued my interest and got me a little worried: a lot of kids were playing the game.

Hello neighbor rating