Being a homeowner can sometimes be its own little horror story. Just this week, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with a wet spot that showed up on my wall after it rained and how to handle finding a black widow in my backyard garden. In real life, I’ve got to either do it myself or figure out who to call to get it taken care of. In the world of Home Safety Hotline, a new game from the developers of Night Signal, all you have to do is call the titular service for any problems your having around the house. The game casts you as an operator helping callers figure out what’s wrong with their house, ranging from mundane problems, like bees or termites, to issues of a more supernatural nature, like bed teeth and attic gnomes.
The gameplay loop is a relatively simple one. Every day, you clock in and listen to phone calls from various people describing what’s happening in their home, then you explore the database to select the correct entry that will solve their problem. Trash can knocked over in the middle of the night? Sounds like raccoons. Can’t remember the face of your loved one? That’s a classic Memory Wisp. It’s a clever set up that plays out like one part interactive fiction, one part puzzle game, all with a unique style and tone. The game slowly unlocks the database day by day, so you aren’t overwhelmed with the wealth of choices that the game provides, making it manageable to sift through to assist your panicked customers.
While the gameplay concept is a clever one that I’ve never seen before, I do wish there were a bit more polish to it. In theory, having to sift through a database to track down the caller’s problem is great, but what it amounts to in practice is a lot of clicking on different entries and reading them in their entirety in order to see if you can catch one of the key words mentioned in the call. Eventually you start to recall information about specific creatures without having to look it up, which is useful for parts of the game where the database fails in order to present a bit more challenge, but it’s a lot of information to keep track of, even when it’s doled out at a reasonable pace. For example, it can be hard to remember which variants of Hobbs like cheese and which ones like milk, so I feel like a search bar where you could type in key terms would be very helpful. The puzzles might be rendered trivial if they add that mechanic, but Sam Barlow has found great success with designing mysteries around this mechanic in games like Her Story, so it can be done.
Another issue I’ve been having with the core gameplay loop is feedback on the success of my answer. Correct or not, you get the same little popup saying that you’ve successfully submitted the information to the customer. You do get some feedback eventually, but oftentimes it feels a bit disconnected from your action. Customers will call back to yell at you about your bad advice, but occasionally it can be hard to remember which one was which near the end of your shift. Disciplinary calls will also come in from your supervisor, warning you when your accuracy rating is low for the day, but again it can be hard to reflect and figure out which response was wrong. It helps make it feel like an immersive piece of interactive fiction, and some of the angry customer calls are really wonderful, but you can get a game over if you get too many wrong, which just forces you to replay the day and respond to the same calls you just went through.
Despite the friction with the gameplay, I enjoyed the stylistic flourishes of Home Safety Hotline immensely. The interface is set up to look like a mid-90s PC desktop, and all the images and videos included are appropriately pixelated and grainy. The writing in all of the entries is really well done, mixing folk tales with analog horror to expert effect, maintaining the illusion of a dry, technical database about surreal topics.
Between shifts, you’ll find bizarre videos or emails that show up on your desktop. These are well done as well, but unfortunately never really seem to build to any sort of compelling or cohesive narrative. During your shift, the calls themselves are fun little pieces of microfiction, especially when it clicks into place with what creature they’re experiencing, but they also don’t come together in any way. Between the actual puzzle calls, there are creepy distorted calls that don’t have any actual questions, only contributing to the creepy and mysterious vibes without doing much else. There’s a neat story beat on your final day that sheds some light on the strangeness within the Home Safety Hotline business itself, but I feel like I was expecting the calls to connect in some way that revealed something about the world at large.
Oddly enough, some of these elements were recently fixed with a patch, but it only unlocks features that I’m looking for after you beat the game. After completing the three or so hour story, you’re able to display your accuracy, as well as have immunity from termination, allowing you to hear the entertaining follow-up calls to your failures without fear of game over. I had already been forced to replay some days due to failing a level, so I wasn’t itching to jump back into it for another playthrough, but I did flip through the very well done making of artbook that was unlocked at the end. The artbook not only had higher resolution versions of the creature pictures, but also very candid details about the creation of the game, making it a joy to read.
I wish I wasn’t so mixed on this game. The concept itself is a slam dunk, and the presentation is analog horror at its finest. The short little creepypasta-esque tales told in the calls and the creature details are really fun, but it almost just works better as a database of well-written SCP-style entries than it does as a game. The former customer service worker in me gets a very real sense of a job well done when I find the correct way to help the caller, even if sometimes I feel like I’m just endlessly clicking on entries to figure it out.
For a piece of interactive fiction, I wish the stories contained within were more substance than style, but with style this great there’s definitely enough to the overall package to recommend giving it a go, even if it leaves me wanting something more polished and focused.
Review code provided by the publisher. Home Safety Hotline is now available on Steam.
