REVIEW - Home Safety Hotline

Operator, operator! I threw my baby into the river!

I love games that look like computer. Give me a Hypnospace Outlaw, a Her Story, or that one portion of Stories Untold any day of the week and I will ravish it. Something about exploring a fake operating system just intrigues me; or the feeling of rummaging through one of these fake computers, and having that gut feeling that maybe the owner of that fake computer is watching you. I don’t know; I always snooped around for my Christmas presents early, so maybe it’s just in me to go through other people’s shit. When I was younger I found out weeks before Christmas that I was getting and Original Xbox and a copy of Austin Powers in Goldmember on VHS. That Christmas ruled.

Home Safety Hotline is one of those games though - you are on a fake computer, running a fake operating system, and you are an agent for a fake home security/home repair company. I barely knew anything about the game, all I needed to see was a single screenshot on the Steam store, and I knew that I needed this game. And let me tell you, I learned a lot about how to get rid of mice, bed teeth, and false beets.

But do you know what I learned most from Home Safety Hotline? I would do terrible at a call centre, and I would do exceptionally horrible as an emergency services operator. The game takes place during your first week working at the Home Safety Hotline, where people call in, describe the issues they are having in their home, and then you give them the answer to fix said issue. You are hearing scratching sounds in your walls and noticing droppings around the house? Maybe you got mice! Your pipes aren’t working? Maybe your pipes are frozen! You hear a horrific sound coming from your basement and you only see something the size of a large dog at the bottom of the stairs? Probably a stair slug!

Home Safety Hotline starts you off with the less paranormal issues that home owners might have - leaking pipes, bed bugs etc. - and as the in-game week goes on, they task you with more other-worldly issues. People are phoning because they don’t recognize their dead wife’s face; maybe someone is starting to feel a slight possession come over them; or maybe some thing keeps breaking into their home and cleaning their house! The list of ghouls goes on!

It’s a very simple setup, and the gameplay mechanics are just as easy to wrap your head around. You are given a log of any possible home issue or cryptic dondoler that might appear in someone’s home. Within that cryptid log you are given a photo, potentially some audio, the general symptoms, and how to either remedy this home repair or exorcise this demon from the customer’s home. As you read through your log, customers will phone, tell you their issue, and you must give them the correct issue they have and how to solve it. There are some gameplay twists as you go: sometimes you will get prank calls from people, sometimes the network will go down and you can’t pull up your log and you have to go purely off memory; but for the majority of the game you are listening to a customer’s issue, and giving them the correct advice.

Turns out, I really suck at doing this! I didn’t even get to the end of my third day working at the Home Safety Hotline until they fired my ass! That’s not all, either: I got fired again closer to the end of the week! But I kept crawling back to them, crying for another chance at the job, begging for work so I can feed my wife and 12 kids. And you know what? They kept hiring me again. That’s the work of the saints that work at the Home Safety Hotline right there!

I learned a lot about myself from playing Home Safety Hotline. That’s more than I can say about something like Metroid Dread. I had no moments of introspection while playing Metroid Dread.

Home Safety Hotline does a pretty good job at gamifying a call centre job, however it doesn’t do enough to really make it interesting. The first few days are fun: going through and reading all the entries for each little critter is enjoyable, and solving the puzzles of “what pipe fiend is ruining this mans’ pipes?” is fun at the beginning. But it’s the only thing the game does, and by the final in-game day, it does become a little boring.

Sure Home Safety Hotline adds network outages, where you are unable to read the data entries and you have to go purely off vibes, but other than that there’s just no variety in what you’re doing. Thankfully, the game is rather short at just under three hours, so it’s not like it overstays it’s welcome, I was just hoping for a little more than network outages to try and spice up the game.

What Home Safety Hotline might lack in it’s gameplay, it completely makes up for in it’s aesthetics. The game does a wonderful job at emulating an old Windows 95-esque operating system, and like I stated early, I adore when games do this. You’re even able to change the colour of the OS to look much more like Windows 95 which I absolutely loved.

And it’s not just the visuals that Home Safety Hotline nails with its aesthetics - the sound design is lavish. Hearing the slight hum of the CRT monitor that you are viewing the game on, hearing the clicks of your mouse, hearing the error sounds come from the OS when you click on the wrong thing; everything sounds great, and completely draws you into the game. There were moments where - even though I was playing on a Steam Deck - I felt transported back to the early 2000s, using the family computer to post on internet forums that I was definitely too young to be posting on.

Along with the general sound design, the audio form the calls in Home Safety Hotline is just as great. Voice acting amongst all of the characters is great, the slight distortion to the phone calls is a nice touch, and some of the sounds you hear in the background of these calls are wonderfully unsettling. Sounds of scratching, howling, strange singing can be heard in these calls, as home owners are having panic attacks over the phone about what’s going on. On top of the actual phone calls, you will also get prank calls from people like Beepus Borp or Corn Toddler or other stupid names, and the audio distortion and over-the-top voice acting in these calls help add a sense of humour to an otherwise unsettling game.

Also, I just want to say: whenever you put a caller on hold in the game to figure out their proper exorcism, the hold music they got going is pretty great. They got a couple different songs, and all of them make scrolling through your list of possible cryptids a pleasure.

What this all culminates into is just wonderful vibe that Home Safety Hotline gives off. You just get this uneasiness as you’re playing through the game - the eerie quiet before a phone call, the glow of the fake CRT, the strange photos in each log entry. If you’re looking for a game to play in your basement, in the dark, and smoke through in an afternoon - then this is the game for you.

Home Safety Hotline has somewhat of a story, but it’s not at the forefront. You play as a fella who has just started working at the hotline, and you are guided through the week by your supervisor Carol. There’s not really a “plot,” but rather a setup for the gameplay. Sure the game sends you strange emails from forever employees saying how you need to “get out now,” and there are hints of strangeness as you’re watching video clips found on your desktop, but don’t go into this game expecting a true narrative. The game does start to have a little more “story” by the end of the in-game week, but by the time the game starts introducing some interesting story beats, it’s already over.

Maybe it has something to do with the sub-genre of horror that Home Safety Hotline finds itself in. Horror poindexters would say that the game falls into the “analog horror” genre, which is usually characterized by 90s/early 2000s aesthetics, cryptic stories, very little jump scares, etc. Maybe things that fall in this sub-genre also are known for having more loose stories? The only analog horror movie I have seen was Skinamarink, which is excellent, but is also very light on its story telling. Maybe I just need to explore the genre more and I will have a better understanding? The game doesn’t have any cheap jump scares though, so that was a major plus for me since I’m a big ole’ baby.

Home Safety Hotline is a fun way to spend an afternoon this spook season. The gameplay is good enough, the vibes are spooky enough, and the game is over right as it’s about to overstay it’s welcome. It’s a game that is completely living off of it’s lavish aesthetics, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If Home Safety Hotline managed to do a little more with it’s gameplay, have a little more interesting story, then it would be a ringing endorsement. But unless you really love the aesthetics - like I do - than there’s just too many more interesting horror games that have released this year that deserve your time over Home Safety Hotline.

OPTIONAL.

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