Home Safety Hotline (2024)

Home Safety Hotline is a sort of a horror puzzle game. You work at a help desk and get phone messages detailing various possibly paranormal phenomena. You need to browse through database entries for different kinds of home safety hazards, both regular and paranormal, and then guess what the phone message was talking about. That's basically the whole game. Well, almost. You also get some extra video clips for world-building and occasionally there's connection problems at the help desk preventing you from reading the database entries when guessing.

It's a nice idea, easily playable and presented in a fun Windows 95 style UI. There's very little to the game though. The game gets repetitive almost immediately so if guessing phenomena based on sketchy descriptions doesn't sound like fun, it doesn't get any different as the game goes on. I also don't really know about the lore or story of the game even after finishing it. There's something weird going on with the helpdesk company but, with the game's storytelling, it's hard to care.

Also, the final "stage" of the game is kind of a bummer. Before that, you can guess wrong. This leads you to get angry messages from people saying that your "diagnosis" was wrong and the problem persists. If you get all guesses right, you get a silly advertisement to your fake email inbox as a reward. In the last stage, you need to get all guesses correct (at least that's what I presume) or you won't see the real ending. I didn't really have patience for this and just checked the right answers the second time around.

If you want like 3 hours of light entertainment that is purely for the brains and none for the reflexes, you could do worse. The 19,99€ price is steep for that, though, so keep an eye for discounts if you're interested.

Home Safety Hotline isn't exactly a fun game, but it has a lot of personality in its presentation, and it kind of brought that out in me, too.

The closest game I can think of to this is Papers Please in how we take this extremely weird and dark work, and make it just crushingly mundane. I kind of felt myself role playing as a bored worker who would be presented with an absurdly dangerous sounding problem and then going like "Oh yeah. For sure. That's a Memory Wisp. Lemme send over our info packet. Have a nice day."

It is kind of a fun detective game. The callers will mention things that sound familiar, but I'm not super sure. So then I'll scour the articles to find the most likely cause. Some of the problems are pretty esoteric, though. I had to try Wednesday three times. The game does seem to be pretty lenient.

The best part of Home Safety Hotline is the presentation. The lore of the creatures is very well fleshed out. I almost kind of want to steal some of it for TTRPGs that I run. I like how it slowly escalates from hobs, which are basically benign or even helpful, to gnomes which are a little sinister, but also relatively harmless, to creatures that mutate you, or eat your pets and replace them. The videos on the ingame desktop are also fun, especially the Thunder Mountain hiking one.

The game overall is a little underwhelming, but the ending is very fun. I enjoy the analog horror genre, so maybe try it if you do, too.

I LOVE computer sim games. Anything with a virtual desktop or phone, that has you poking around is just a weird niche I can’t get enough of - games like Cyber Manhunt, Simulacra, and Greyhat. So I was pretty interested in HSH - especially with the kinda strange meta angle I sensed (like Pony Island, where things are a bit “off”).

The game is certainly original - you are basically responding to concerned citizens and handing out information for the issue you think they’re having. This ranges from bed bugs to mythical creatures.

I liked the premise but… it really doesn’t go anywhere. The gameplay never changes, you are literally just reading bestiary entries and diagnosing the issue. The whole creepy meta narrative doesn’t go anywhere either, the ending just kinda ends with not much revealed or crescendoed.

So… it just didn’t really have much payoff. Kudos for originality, but it just needed much more. It felt fine as a first act for a game, but not enough for a full game.

"Home Safety Hotline" really takes you back with its 1996 call center vibe, blending those indie horror elements with a dose of old-school Windows nostalgia. The folks at Night Signal Entertainment have crafted something pretty unique here, where you're juggling calls about everything from leaky pipes to creatures that definitely aren't covered in your standard homeowner's guide. It's a wild ride, especially if you've got a soft spot for that retro computer aesthetic.

Voice acting's a mixed bag - it does what it needs to, with Carol stealing the show. But I was left wanting more from the game's bestiary; it's vast and bizarre, yet only a few entries genuinely gave me the creeps or had me intrigued. The rest felt a bit too out there, even for a game that thrives on the weird.

And yeah, once you've run through a week in the game, you've pretty much seen all it has to offer, making replays feel a bit stale. Some randomness or surprises thrown in would've been a game-changer. Despite that, it's definitely worth a shot, especially if you're into the whole aesthetic of ye olde Windows era and enjoy a blend of the mundane with the mystical.