The neighbours from hell return! In this HD Remaster of the beloved childhood gems Neighbours From Hell 1 and 2, you play the star of a cheeky TV Show who is constantly pranking his nasty neighbour in the most creative and hilarious ways. You want to replace a candle with a firework? What about replacing the shaving cream with the whipped cream? Go for it!
2020 THQ Nordic AB, Sweden. Developed and published by THQ Nordic GmbH, Austria. Neighbours From Hell, THQ, THQ Nordic and their respective logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of THQ Nordic AB. All rights reserved. All other brands, product names and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
Neighbours From Hell arrived to some consternation from the staff, followed by a slight amount of passing around, until eventually it fell down to me. It's like a helter-skelter effect with new games, you see: one look at the box, or a quick five minutes, usually determines who's going to get the game, with the really odd ones spiralling down through the ranks until they arrive on my lap. Neighbours From Hell got to the bottom rung pretty quickly it has to be said, but after a day or so I'm certainly not complaining, which really is quite unexpected.
I wasn't, for example, expecting to be reminded of the golden days of the LucasArts point-and-clicker, or expecting to be greeted by a simplistic yet strangely effective 2D engine, and I certainly didn't expect to start panicking when the bumbling fat-arsed neighbour blundered into the lounge, completely blowing away my chances of pulling off a carefully arranged series of life-threatening booby traps that he'd caught me setting up.
Neighbours From Hell is sort of a cross between Spy vs. Spy and Monkey Island. You, as a chap called Woody, are a contestant on the eponymous reality TV show and your goal is to boost audience ratings by playing practical jokes on your hapless neighbour as effectively as possible. You never take anything into the neighbour's house with you, and so your first task will involve searching for objects that can help you along. This is where the Monkey Island part comes in, as you begin picking up random objects and using them with other random objects until something works.
While you're busying yourself with rifling through his personal effects, your neighbour will typically be going about his everyday business. On the episode selection screen, you get a brief outline of what he's likely to be up to; cooking his dinner, sunning himself, doing the laundry and so on, and this gives you some idea as to how you might be able to best utilise that pair of pliers or bottle of wine you've just stumbled across. The trickiest aspect of the game is staying out of his way at all times because the instant he sees you the show goes off air, so it's important to try and learn the other fellow's routine as quickly as possible and even utilise stealth to sneak past noisy pets or your slumbering neighbour, or hide in cupboards or under beds just to avoid discovery.
Chances are, however, that you're going to get caught in the act the first couple of tries, but with unlimited attempts at your disposal you can spend as much time as you like perfecting your routines and timing your trap set-ups. You'll eventually memorise exactly where useful objects are likely to be found and how long you're likely to get in each room of the house before your neighbour will wander in, and the game ends up as an exercise in trial-and-error. Randomising item locations could have done a lot more to keep the player on his toes.
NFH is made up of three seasons; six episodes in the first and two seasons of four episodes after that. If that doesn't sound like a lot, then you'd be right - the entire game will take you about three hours to complete, perhaps a little more if you're really determined to get a 100 per cent audience satisfaction rating on every level. To achieve that then you have to pull off every possible trick on that level and string them together in combinations, so that your neighbour doesn't get much of a chance to calm down - the longer he stays infuriated, the happier the audience will be and the higher the ratings will get. If you gain enough high ratings for the season, then you'll get a little trophy for your efforts.
But that's pretty much it. Excruciating brevity is Neighbours From Hell's most hideous drawback, and we can't imagine you sat there a week from purchase playing the same levels over and over. There's a disturbing lack of variety as well, as each season merely opens up a new room or two - the basement or the bedroom, for example - in the same neighbour's house, heightening the tension slightly by giving the neighbour more opportunity to stumble across you, but never really offering much in the way of fresh objectives or scenery to look at.
It's a shame Neighbours From Hell couldn't have been more expansive. The concept is fantastic, and for a while it's pulled off very well, but once you've electrocuted, burned, pricked, poisoned and injured the poor guy for more than an hour or so, you will find yourself hankering for more neighbours to visit and more houses to terrorise. We wouldn't blame you for changing the channel when they don't come.
Because I desperately need some perspective. I wake up every day in tears. I've been so unbelievably good, kind, caring and considerate towards my neighbours over the past decade and when I've made any kind of request to reduce noise during sleeping hours, it's blatantly ignored. I think it's this rather than the noise itself that's really affecting me badly. Feels especially bad to be living next door to then seeing as they're shielding and so am I.
Anyway, could you please tell me about your awful neighbours? I'd like to gain some understanding of how bad things really can be so that I can perhaps shift perspective and think, perhaps not so bad after all.
Many thanks
My neighbour tried to dictate exactly what can go in my garden and where and what we needed to change.
Every time we set foot out our front door they were at our backs saying what they didn't like in our garden.
He was told where to go and we don't speak.
My landlord is my neighbour and it's a nightmare. Comments on the garden, if I've not taken furniture to the tip immediately, banging on the party wall if the telly is too loud (it's not loud but I do watch with subtitles now). He has even came into my garden and removed flowers and bushes that he didn't like ??. Was supposed to have moved months ago but the world decided to stop and solicitors are taking aaaaaggggessss to get moving.
Oh and when he sits out on his decking, they see right into my living room. Plus I'm sure he has been in whilst I've been out.
We had a terrible terrible neighbour. Honestly you couldn't make it up so I won't bother sharing the details.
Then, very very unexpectedly, she moved and now we have amazing neighbours. I'm so glad we never found a house we liked enough to move ourselves, I'd have been so sad to leave my house over her.
My neighbours are noisy, inconsiderate and rude. They recently battered my wall because I asked them politely to turn their music down at around 1:30am. They've accused me more than once of damaging their cars. They've accused my cat of terrorising their rabbit. My cats don't get out. They just won't listen to any reasonable conversation, it always turns into an argument.
Well.... just the tip of the iceberg: kids climbing up the garden fence & watching every move & asking for food if we dare to eat outside. (They are fed and watered, just rude).
We have a semi & there is a dart board on the pati wall- constant thud noise from 22:00 until early morning hours most weekends. Their visitors blocking driveway regularly.
(This was a few years ago: every morning without fail, taxi blocking drive when I was going to work or getting home. Obviously waiting for them to move their arse. In the end complained to the taxi company, as drivers were ignorant!)
...
They were the worst family of clampits ever. There were about six of them in a small three bedroom terrace. When we moved in, the eldest was a teenager and would shout and scream at the parents constantly. He thankfully moved out after about five years. The dad was constantly out in the garden doing some form of 'man stuff' in his shed all while smoking weed. He would have his mates round in the garden drinking and smoking weed until all hours even on a weekday. The mum was a pisshead who I would see hanging her washing up at 10am whilst drinking a can of Stella on a Tuesday morning. Second eldest son became a drug dealer around 15 and we had gangs of lads hanging around outside constantly. He got his girlfriend knocked up when they were 16. She moved in for a bit, but then disappeared. According to other neighbours she couldn't cope with being a mum and went back home. Their daughter is now being raised by her pisshead granny. The two youngest children in were feral. Daughter would throw things into our garden including once when she'd obviously had an accident, a pair of shitty knickers. She also wet herself on purpose over a bouncy castle another neighbour had hired for their kids birthday. She was 11 at the time. The youngest son once managed to escape from the house at midnight on a Saturday night when all the adults were drunk smoking weed in the back garden and was missing for two hours. We regularly found him in our garden and he would climb over our fence and destroy anything we left in our garden.
I won't even start about the other ones on the other side.
Mine's not really from hell - just purgatory but after the months of lockdown and facing the next year stuck at home - it's veering down the circles of hell.
We have the couple out the back, who have the world's most yappy dog (which is annoying but tolerable except they never bring him in when he starts yapping - which is the second he goes out) but fucking hell one of them is an ugly drunk. They like to get pissed in the garden during lockdown with their immediate neighbours and then they start doing stuff like yelling and making poo noises if they see one of the bathroom lights in our houses backing onto them going on, and she'll start bawling and effing and blinding that anyone's "making my fucking dog bark" if they commit the crime of going into their own back gardens.
Guy on one side is fab apart from power tools a lot - but he's a builder and if we ever have something go wrong he'll come and help us so that one is swings and roundabouts and I'm sure our kids annoy him sometimes.
Pair on the other side - well it's a father and son duo and they're living it up like Men Behaving Badly - barbecues every night from March to October (thankfully they've replaced the stinky one that made me wretch with whatever they were using to light it with the most humongous gas one ever). Have garden parties every few weeks throughout - where they have about 20 of them getting increasingly pissed and singing along to the point you can't sleep in our back bedroom (we've swapped the kids out of that room as a result of his fucknuggetry) - tends to stop about 5am. Sit out in the garden, with a parrot sat on the table with them squarking till late every single night - and he bought a honking horn and vuvuzela for Clap for Carers but they'd do the clap, then his mates would go round into his garden and they'd get pissed - and we'd have random honks and parps constantly the entire bloody week. Egged on by the birds out the back getting pissed and yelling "wooo he's being horny again"... think neighbour thought he was onto something there but they're a lesbian couple!
They're all just getting on my wick now after lockdown. I'm sure we annoy them as much.