Hello Neighbor

The Neighbor greets you on the main menu before you've touched a thing. He's painted in a round frame on the right side of the screen, a scowling man with a mustache and a purple sweater vest gripping a shovel, and under him sits a tag that reads ACT 2 & ACT 3 next to a green padlock.

That tag is a buy button, and it tells you most of what you need to know about the free version. Act 1 plays as a trial, and when I picked Act 2 from Select Act, the game congratulated me on finishing it and asked me to buy the full version to see what my neighbor is hiding in his basement.

So I played Hello Neighbor through VipMod, which adds a MOD menu with three switches: Full Game Unlocked (Act 2 & Act 3), Play Any Act and Play Offline. Here's what the free act looks like, where the game stops you, and what happened when I turned each switch on and off.

A crooked blue house across a quiet street

Act 1 starts outside in daylight. You're standing at the curb of a leafy suburban street, and across the lawn is a blue wooden house with a small porch and a pale door, drawn in the slightly lopsided, cartoon shapes the whole game uses. A yellow house sits next door, and power lines run between the trees.

The controls stay out of the way. A small white dot in the middle of the screen shows where you're looking, a pause button sits in the top right corner, and three buttons with hand and running icons line the right edge.

I'll be honest about how far I got. I spent my time going into each act and looking around rather than finishing every puzzle, so I can't tell you how each one is solved or how long a full playthrough takes. What I can tell you is where the game lets you in and where it shuts the door.

What the store page says about him

The game sells itself as stealth horror. You sneak into the house across the street to find out what the man living there keeps in his basement, solving puzzles on the way and getting out before he catches you, and the short pitch on Google Play calls it hide and seek in a sandbox full of puzzles.

The big promise is the Neighbor himself. According to the store page, he learns from how you play, so if you keep climbing through the same window he may set a trap there, and if you always take the same way out he may block it. It also talks about stacking boxes, throwing things to distract him and hiding in the shadows.

That's the game's pitch rather than something I can vouch for, since I didn't stay long enough to watch him change his habits. One thing I can say for sure is that nothing in the MOD menu touches him, so the sneaking, the hiding and the running are still entirely up to you in every act.

Four acts, and only the first one is free

The game is split into four parts: Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 and a Finale. They're all listed on the Select Act screen, where picking one shows a picture of where it takes place, along with an OK button to start it. Act 2's picture shows a dark corridor full of pipes, with a vent glowing red near the floor.

On a fresh start you won't see that picture, though. Select Act only opens the parts you've already reached, so Act 2 showed nothing but a big gray padlock. From what we found, buying the game doesn't change that either, because the list keeps following how far you've actually played.

The real wall comes when you try to move past Act 1 without paying. A panel pops up over the Select Act screen with three choices, which are to buy the full game, to restore an earlier purchase or to head back to the main menu. That's the same full game the tag under the Neighbor's portrait is selling.

Google Play in the US lists the game's in-app purchases at $0.99 to $14.99 per item. The listing also says it contains ads, but in about twenty minutes of play I didn't see a single one, so the panel at the end of Act 1 is where the free version really stops you.

Three switches behind the red VIP badge

In VipMod, a red VIP badge sits on the left edge of the screen, and tapping it opens the MOD menu over the game. Play Offline is free and comes switched on already, while Full Game Unlocked and Play Any Act both need VIP 1.

I started with Full Game Unlocked. I flipped it on in the middle of a session and picked Act 2 again, and this time it simply loaded into a bedroom with green striped wallpaper instead of the buy panel. Back on the main menu, the ACT 2 & ACT 3 tag under his portrait was gone, too.

Then I switched it off while the game was still running and tried Act 3, and the buy panel came straight back. Turning it on again opened Act 3 and then the Finale without a restart, which shows the unlock lives in the switch and is never saved as a real purchase.

Play Any Act is the one that needs a fresh start. With it off, Act 2 still showed the padlock, and switching it on mid-session didn't change that, even after I backed out and opened Select Act again. Once I tapped the Restart button near the top of the MOD menu and the game came back, Act 2 had its picture and an OK button.

It's meant to work together with Full Game Unlocked. With only Play Any Act on, the game opened with its trial screen to remind me I was on the free version, so turn on both if you want to get past Act 1.

Play Offline cuts the internet for this game alone, and with it on, Act 1, Act 2, Act 3 and the Finale all loaded with no connection at all. You don't need to root your phone, and the copy you installed from Google Play stays as it is. A few things to know up front:

• Full Game Unlocked only counts while the switch is on. The game never records the full version as bought, so turning it off drops you back to the free act.
• Play Any Act needs the game to reopen after you switch it on, and the Restart button in the MOD menu is the quickest way to do that.
• Nothing in the menu keeps the Neighbor from catching you. If he gets you, that's the game working the way it always does.
• Cloud saves need a connection, so turn Play Offline off for a moment whenever you want your progress to sync.

One permission to give before your first launch

If you got the game from Google Play and your phone runs Android 11 or newer, there's one setup step worth doing first. Without it, the game may stop on a message saying "Download failed because the resources could not be found" before you ever see the main menu.

Open Settings › Apps › VipMod › Install unknown apps and switch it on, then start the game again from VipMod. That first launch copies about 1.1 GB of game data, so the screen can sit still for a few seconds before the menu with the Neighbor's portrait shows up.

From a sunny street to a room with a cardboard boy

With the full game unlocked, each act felt like a different place. Act 2 opened in that bedroom with green striped wallpaper, a tall window full of daylight and a small warm light glowing by the wall, with a rumpled bed filling the bottom of the view.

Act 3 was much darker. I was in a brown room with an old TV on a little table and shelves of books on the wall, looking through a doorway into a kitchen with a fridge, a triangular clock and a blue lamp hanging over a small round table.

The Finale went the other way. It's a bright room with diamond-patterned green wallpaper, two crooked windows and a bed in the middle, with a huge wedge-shaped speaker on one side. A flat cardboard cutout of a boy stands next to the bed, and it's exactly the kind of odd detail that makes you want to know who lived here.

I liked how much the look changes from act to act. The lopsided shapes and bright colors make it feel closer to a creepy cartoon than a gory horror game, which fits the Everyone 10+ rating it carries on Google Play.

English only, and fine without a connection

The game came up in English even on a phone set to another language. There isn't much text to read anyway, mostly the menus, the act names and those purchase panels, so it shouldn't get in anyone's way.

Because every act still loaded with Play Offline on and the internet cut, it's a reasonable pick for a flight, a long bus ride or anywhere else the signal tends to drop out on you.

On Google Play in the US, Hello Neighbor holds 3.9 stars from about 550,000 ratings and has passed 50 million downloads. It first came out on July 25, 2018, and its most recent update arrived on April 15, 2025.

So who should knock on his door

If you like horror built on sneaking and puzzles rather than jump scares, the free act is a fair first taste. The idea of a neighbor who adjusts to your habits is what the whole game is built around, and Act 1 is where you'll find out whether it works on you.

And if Act 1 already won you over and the padlock on Act 2 is the only thing in your way, Full Game Unlocked opens the rest of the house, and Play Any Act lets you jump between acts after a restart. The Neighbor himself is still yours to outsmart, which is how it should be.