Title: Neighbours From Hell
Genre: Puzzle
Big Word: Detached
Strap: Surely such folk would constantly set fire to the garden fence?

Peculiar, that describing the premise of a game could be more complicated than not only playing it, but actually completing it. It goes something like this: First and foremost, it’s a puzzle game. The puzzle is to move your character around a 2-D house, viewed from the front with the near wall removed, setting up traps for the neighbour to fall into, without ever getting caught. So it’s a case of dodging in and out of doorways, hiding in cupboards, or diving under beds when the neighbour crosses your path in his daily routine, all the while picking up objects and laying pranks.

But now you have to understand that it’s also a television programme. What sort of programme is a little ambiguous – there’s a studio audience, but it’s billed as a fly-on-the-wall set-up. E.g. the neighbour doesn’t know he’s a part of this programme, despite your character’s constant looking to camera, and the apparent television filming paraphernalia around, er, and the set-like design. So now it starts getting confusing.

And a bit more. You complete a level, or ‘episode’, by managing to complete a certain percentage of the pranks in the time limit. These percentages get higher as you get to higher levels. But strangely, that’s not it. You also are marked by how much your audience enjoyed the episode, which is linked to how annoyed your neighbour is, which is indicated by a thermometer measuring angry-ness, which increases when you string traps together, which makes the audiences laugh more, which makes ratings go up. Is our best guess.

So you’ve got that all? Good. Now stop caring. Neighbours From Hell takes three hours to complete, and is pathetically easy for the first thirteen of fourteen levels. Most levels are easily completed on the first turn, and certainly never taking more than three tries. By the fourteenth ‘episode’, suddenly a half-decent puzzle game looks like it might emerge: the pace picks up, the obstacles get trickier, and it takes a bit of planning to identify a pattern that works. And then abruptly ends.

It’s not satisfying to solve the puzzles - Neighbours either has click-everything-on-everything solutions (click the steroids on the fishtank), or painfully obvious (click the fuse on the fuse box). There’s never a sense of having second-guessed the game, and hence no sense of victory. Merely a sense that you did what it wanted you to do in the order it wanted you to do it.