Hello Neighbor, the stealth-creepo game about spying on the weirdo next door (who may or may not be a murderous lunatic), was slated to come out on August 29. That's not going to happen, however, as publisher TinyBuild announced today that it's been pushed back to December 8, a delay that it said is "100 percent our fault."
The news isn't all bad. Beta 3, with roughly 40 percent of the content that will be in the full game, is now out in Early Access, and includes a boss, a basement, and "reworked Fear rooms." The AI can now climb ladders, so you'll no longer be able to escape by moving up or down floors, and "stability is good," which is always a plus. The second alpha build, with the first-ever Hello Neighbor tutorial, is now free for everyone as well at helloneighborgame.com.
But "everything went to hell" when the engine was updated to ready the game for release—it "broke the pathfinding, the AI, and the stability," as TinyBuild's Alex Nichiporchik explains in the producer's update video below—and the time required to fix all of that bit too deeply into what had been allocated for the QA process. Thus, in the finest tradition of "a delayed game can eventually be good but a bad game is bad forever," TinyBuild elected to push it back.
The video also digs into new design issues, including the removal of the "Fear Factory" and major changes to the "Fear Supermarket," which sounds like an interesting place to go shopping. Players now spawn inside their own house, the "haunted door" is now gone, and the giant Neighbor from pre-alpha also makes a return—apparently you'll need an umbrella to deal with him. The full rundown is up at tinybuild.com.