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Home Safety Hotline review: thoughtful weirdness that left me wanting moreThe call is coming from inside the tree
The call is coming from inside the tree
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Night Signal Entertainment
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Night Signal Entertainment
I worked on the phones when I was in pension admin, years ago, and I fielded some weird ones, but nothing quite as weird as the calls inHome Safety Hotline. It’s, technically, I suppose, ahorrorgame about manning a call line through a 90s CRT-screen PC, where people will be like “my kitchen is full of droppings that look like coffee grounds, what do?”. You look through your list of potential household hazards and select the right one, so your caller gets sent the info on dealing with cockroaches. Except as your week at HSH goes on, your calls start to be less roaches, more “my house smells like death and my dog is acting strangely” or “I can see someone looking through my window at night and hear them breathing heavily.”
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Much of the joy of HSH is in the index entries. If you get things wrong, sometimes people call back screaming at you (RIP to the kid who vanished into the wardrobe). The collision of magical beasts, creepy images, and dry, corporate textbook in the writing style describing said beasts is pretty excellent - especially when the advice is basically “you can’t do anything” - and one can’t help but appreciate the ones that have audio samples. Sometimes, especially early on, the danger is in assuming someone’s house is infested with a type of little monster when they actually have something more mundane like termites. It also very effectively captures having to interpret what a member of the public phoning a service is actuallysaying, sifting through it for personal information. It’s easy to make a mistake, but spotting that the heating not working is not as important a detail as a child haivng braces gives one the satisfaction of a job well done.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Night Signal Entertainment
Shout out to the desktop interface, though, it’s great. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Night Signal Entertainment
Remembering all your index info becomes an acute challenge on some calls where the system goes down. Normally you can listen to a call, put them on hold and then browse at your leisure, but when the network breaks you have to make your best guess based on what you remember. It’s a neat trick to make you actually read the index and pay attention, so you can’t go full call centre drone mode. This memory test is also part of the end-game challenge for promotion, which made me jealous of my player character to be honest, and I won’t spoil it, but it does sort of tie in with my main disappointment. Early on Home Safety Hotline shows signs that it’ll get properly creepy, with unlogged calls from distored voices, desperate warning emails from a former employee, and some creepy infomercial videos turning up on your desktop. But these things, while cool, all seem to just… go away.
But the unresolved threads feel less like other unexplained mysteries in the world and more like, well, unresolved threads. Home Safety Hotline is definitely in theDaniel Mullinsvein of game ideas, where a game starts as something and becomes something else, and while Home Safety Hotline is very thoughtful and has a brilliant framing, it never fully transformed. Which is perhaps ironic, given the ending.
