Hello Stranger review

• Reviews by Micah Cooper
• Published:

Life-or-death FMV thriller makes a strong first impression but wears out its minigame-driven welcome with repetitive replays

Full-motion video has always held a special place in my heart. From interactive DVD extras to Netflix specials to full, multi-hour video games, something about the medium has always stood out. Though FMV adventures have never quite hit the heights reached back in the 90s, studios continue to release them – and horror seems to be a favorite theme. Hello Stranger, the newest game from British writer/director Paul Raschid (The Complex, Five Dates, The Gallery) and his PRM Games studio, attempts to follow in the footsteps of the Black Mirror TV series in presenting a technology-based thriller, but in the end it feels more like a lesser Twilight Zone episode.

We follow the agoraphobic Cam (played by Vikings actor George Blagden) as he is suddenly thrown into a life or death game set squarely in his own apartment – all thanks to the titular online program. It works like the real-world Omegle or Chatroulette, but today as Cam logs in we see him video chat with a few random people before he stumbles upon a person in a mask. They play a game of Rock Paper Scissors with Cam and, no matter the outcome, proceeds to lock down the protagonist’s smart device-filled apartment and forces him to play three different games in order to escape. Lose just one, and that’ll be the end of Cam.

For the most part Hello Stranger plays how you would expect: it largely consists of watching live-action, television-quality clips and then being presented with a choice that will take you to the next clip. The performances are all great here; the cast is mainly filled with established British actors (Derek Jacobi, a favorite of mine from his Big Finish audio dramas, does the male voice for your AI assistant), and you can tell quite a few of them were having fun filming this.

 It’s all shot very nicely too. The setting can get a bit stale – most of the game takes place in Cam’s room, after all. However, some interesting techniques are used to make things look more appealing, such as mood lighting from the smart home’s colored bulbs and some shots from fun angles, like from the inside of a water-filled sink looking up at Cam’s submerged face. The music, in turn, fits the video well. The tracks will carry you from scene to scene; they’re mostly electronic, perfect for the whole “trapped in a smart home” theme the game has going on. The score is light at the start, but gets intense when it needs to. It never took me out of the game, and some of the tunes are still in my head, especially the music that plays when making choices.

When you start Hello Stranger you get to choose whether you want the choices to be timed or if you want the narrative to pause while you make your decisions. I played with the timer on for a majority of my playthroughs, and I never felt too rushed by it, always having a handful of seconds left after I made my choice. You can also choose to play in a “story” mode, where certain minigames will be removed from the game entirely.

Yes, minigames. Your masked captor makes you pick between three different categories of games: “Solo,” “Competitive” and “Arcade.” You’ll need to go through all three to finish, but the order is up to you, and the games change depending on when you pick them. For instance, if you picked a Solo game first on a playthrough and then picked it as your second game on another, you’d wind up playing different minigames. The Solo and Competitive minigames work like the rest of the game, simply using your mouse to click an option when they appear. These dialogue-based games consist of familiar activities like “Guess Who,” “Truth or Dare” and “Higher or Lower.” The only real difference between the Solo and Competitive games is the fact that in the latter you’ll be playing against another character – another person trapped in their home by the masked stranger.

The Arcade games are where things change up. These play like Flash games, consisting of things such as a “Shoot ’em Up” and “Beat ’em Up,” flying a UFO through an obstacle course, and even a short first-person horror affair. They’re all relatively simple, each only requiring a handful of controls. The horror game just had me walking around a sewer, pressing buttons while a monster roamed, and I cleared the Beat ‘em Up relatively quickly by spamming punches. These tasks were rarely anything that required a lot of skill or effort to clear. The only friction I encountered was with the Shoot ’em Up game, which felt especially long – double the length of some of the others. But while they’re a novelty at first, they quickly start to wear out their welcome upon replaying the game, as Hello Stranger is very much designed to do.

The story here can be a bit difficult to talk about for one simple reason: choices do matter. The order you play the games in and the decisions you make while doing them will influence your ending – that much is expected. But other choices you make near the start of a run will determine at least part of the supporting cast. For instance, Cam is questioned about his relationship status pretty early on. Depending on the answer, you could either see Cam dealing with a long-distance girlfriend or be single but with a brother who’s trying to get him out of the house for a night on the town. These characters can play a dramatic part in the story too.

Hello Stranger

Genre:	Thriller
Presentation:	Full motion video
Theme:	Psychological, Technology
Perspective:	First-Person
Graphic Style:	Live action
Gameplay:	Interactive movie, Choices matter, Minigames
Control:	Point-and-click
Game Length:	Short (1-5 hours)
Action:	Arcade
Difficulty:	Low

Seeing how the impact of your choices affects the game is interesting, at first, but sadly the story doesn’t capitalize on it. Cam, for all his screen time, never stops feeling like a blank slate of a man. There are some interesting elements to him that result in this video chat program being his only contact with the outside world, but the game fails to really explore them fully. Maybe it’s a sacrifice to the choice-driven nature of the game, but Cam can come off as a bit personality-less. The same can be said for the Stranger, who’s very monotone throughout and solely focused on the life-or-death game being played. The possibilities were rife for an intense battle of wills, but instead we’re left with a middle section being rather narratively uninteresting.

The saving grace comes from the side characters – the people Cam will meet on his chatroom dives and when playing against them in the Competitive minigames. There are five in total, though you won't see them all in a single run. Each one of these secondary characters is very distinct and fun to watch on-screen, from a teen going around trolling other chatters to an old piano-playing woman who’s being used by her granddaughter to create content. I found this supporting cast immensely interesting and wish the game had done more with them. As it stands, they never take up too much space in a run, which is a shame.

The variety of content is both Hello Stranger’s strength and its weakness. According to the “Stats” page there are about 460 total video clips in the game. A first playthrough will take roughly an hour and barely scratch the surface of these scenes. While this does promote replaying the game to see different outcomes and understand more of the story, the process quickly becomes an exercise in tedium.

This is because there’s no easy way to see the stuff you missed. A large flow chart is available, but there’s no way to interact with it; no chapter select. If you want to see a new ending or new paths indicated on the chart, you need to replay the game from the beginning. The tedium is minimized a bit thanks to a button to skip previously watched scenes, but you’ll be seeing a lot of the same clips regardless, as there’s an unskippable pause around your choices and scene changes. For example, at the very start of the game, you have to choose between two voices for your AI assistant– male or female. Even after I made my selection, I had to wait for both sample lines to finish. I’ve now heard Derek Jacobi almost peak the mic with his “Hush your prattle!” line more times than I can count.

I spent most new runs mashing the skip button, having to sit through two to three seconds of each new scene, and waiting even longer for my choices to register. That may not sound like a lot, but it adds up. Once you do a few runs and have seen everything the early game has to offer, you’ll have to sit through minutes of nothing but skipping scenes. It wears you down and I’d pretty much gotten the whole plot by my second ending anyway. While subsequent playthroughs gave me some new information, it didn’t impact my understanding of the overall story so it hardly felt worth it.

After getting two or three endings (not counting deaths by failing a minigame), I had learned why the Stranger targeted Cam and the reason behind these unusual games. Getting further endings added some additional details but ultimately only confirmed my understanding, and I was left with four words that kept repeating themselves in my head: “the end, no moral.” I was left thinking, “Oh, so that’s what happened” and haven’t thought more about it since. There’s just not much to chew on here, and while the endgame reveal is fun the first time, it doesn’t feel in service to anything besides the notion of: “wouldn’t this be messed up if it happened?”

I found some of the violence in this game to be pointless as well. And gruesome. I compared this game to a Twilight Zone episode in the intro, but maybe Creepshow would be a better fit. I was fine with the deaths – that’s part of the fun of these kinds of games, after all. They can be comical (Cam’s computer can blow up right in his face, for one) and for the most part they are tastefully depicted. However, in one scene during a “Would You Rather” minigame, Cam had to pierce his own nipple, and the game didn’t shy away from showing it in extreme close-ups that forced me to see the whole bloody, messy process.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m a fan of horror, but the scene was more reminiscent of the gore-porn films of the early aughts, which I’m less a fan of. I found the whole thing painful to watch, and oddly visceral for an otherwise pretty tame game. I encountered one other scene like this during a “Memory Test” challenge, where I was shown clips from previous films by the writer/director of this game and asked questions after. One of these clips was a rather long drawn-out scene of a zombie-like woman biting off and slowly eating two of her fingers. It feels gross for no other reason than to go for the gross-out. Oh, and speaking of horror tropes, I’d be remiss not to mention that there’s a jumpscare pretty early on too. 

Final Verdict

I can’t say I disliked this game, as my first and second runs were pretty fun and only after that did my enjoyment start to plummet. It’s always great to see new FMV adventures, and both the performances and cinematography are good here. And yet the more I replayed it – as the abundance of scenes and endings are clearly designed to promote – the less I liked it. Without a chapter select option, subsequent playthroughs start to feel tedious quickly, and the story isn’t deep enough to warrant all the repetition. Hello Stranger feels like eating an entire bag of potato chips – delicious at first, but the more you gorge yourself, the more sick of it you get. You wonder why you keep eating, and why it’s not filling you up. So if you do play, try to limit yourself to just a couple of playthroughs – or spread your play sessions out over time, because this is a game that is best consumed in moderation. 

Micah played Hello Stranger on PC using a review code provided by the game's publisher.