What doth maketh a horror game? Most people would say you need action or frightening imagery to scare players. Many horror games use jump-scares to jolt players into a horrible visceral reaction. Sometimes horror games rely on psychological trickery to lure players into a bleak state of mind to unsettle and draw them into despair.
What if a horror game only had a menu, text, and some voice acting? How far can game design be whittled down to its essentials to establish a mood and unsettle the player? As it turns out, simulating the experience of customer service with the foggy veneer of low-fi Windows 95 can be a harrowing experience. Do you know what’s lurking in your home? Find out in our Home Safety Hotline review!
Home Safety Hotline
Developer: Night Signal Entertainment
Publisher: Puppet Combo, Night Signal Entertainment
Platforms: Windows PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Nintendo Switch (reviewed)
Release Date: September 20, 2024
Price: $14.99
Home Safety Hotline has a simple premise: assume the role of a home safety call center employee, take calls and diagnose what problem callers have. If you make it through the week, you get an ending depending on your performance. Players who fail to meet their quotas are “terminated”.
The gameplay amounts to listening to a call and identifying the malady affecting the caller by selecting it from a list. That is all. There is always one answer and the order of the answers is always the same.
You get a database of possible answers with detailed entries that you can refer to at any time for as long as you need. The callers don’t mind waiting minutes. It reminded me of taking reading comprehension quizzes on a computer in school.
Home Safety Hotline doesn’t even look like a video game, let alone a horror game. The developer slavishly recreated a retro-style Windows 95-inspired interface. While you can choose different colored themes to adjust the look of the menus, these phosphorus screens are the entire game.
The art used for the database ranges from edited shots with creepy illustrations to arty stock photos. The best pictures look like they might have been taken candidly. The creature will usually be barely seen, like a rare glimpse of Bigfoot.
With every passing day, more entries are added and the calls get weirder. Each caller has a story that can end badly or the player can help them have a slightly less bad end. While helping the callers with a correct diagnosis, it is more interesting and amusing to get return phone calls from callers who live out a horror movie.
The maladies begin with common household issues like a house fire, bees, or mice infestation, but one entry might stand out from the others.
The new entries become increasingly mythological and observant gamers may notice a trend or theme. Home Safety Hotline becomes immersive thanks to the quality writing and attention to detail in the database.
By the time you get to the last day, players will have been expected to commit the database to memory. It is the ultimate test of Fae knowledge and the reward is a hilarious end-credits live-action sequence with a song that sounds like something out of the movie, Troll.
The gameplay might be incredibly basic and is no more complex than selecting entries on a menu, but regretfully, it does not work as intended. Home Safety Hotline was a game designed for PCs and using a controller to scroll through the entries is not as smooth as it could be.
Unfortunately, every time a caller interrupts players while scrolling, they are shunted back to the top of the list. Changing windows to read the detailed data logs or to listen to the audio file will also shunt players back to the top of the list when resuming to scroll.
Why it had to be built this way is frustrating since there are a lot of entries to scroll through and it becomes tedious to always start back at the top.
Other questionable design choices are in the voice casting for some of the callers. Most of them are very good and sound convincing, however, there are several instances of male callers who are obviously voiced by women putting on an oafish-sounding dudebro accent. It is enough to be taken out of the moment and be confused by the casting.
For some reason, the developer chose to include an option for players to censor out some of the imagery.
Why anyone would want to cut out the scary parts of a horror game does not make sense to me. It comes off as infantilizing and insulting to disable still images in an incredibly spartan video game.
Home Safety Hotline is unique and will draw gamers into its sardonic world thanks to its smart design. It is a bit steeply priced for something that could be played on a browser, but it does include the festive bonus four-day DLC. It won’t take more than two hours to complete, but if Home Safety Hotline were any longer it would have overstayed its welcome.
The novel premise is executed as well as it possibly could have been. The imagery is haunting, the flavor text is creepy and Home Safety Hotline will make you chuckle when you least expect it.
Home Safety Hotline was reviewed on a Nintendo Switch using a code provided by Puppet Combo. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Home Safety Hotline is now available for PC (via Steam), Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch.
