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Home Safety Hotline is a “supernatural tech support simulator” developed by Night Signal Entertainment, a company which only recently released their first game “Night Signal” back in late 2022. The game was developed by Nick Lives, who had the idea for this game ever since he was a child when his grandmother got him a Dungeons & Dragons manual. Fascinated with the idea of a “bestiary”, he attempted to create titles based on the idea a couple of times from an art based fantasy game where you attempt to test dead bodies to 1-800-BESTIARY. Comments on Youtube would lead Nick down a rabbit hole woth “Analog Horror”, an aesthetic that would throwback to 80s and 90s found footage and low resolution camera grain. How do I know all of this? Once you beat the game you’ll actually get an Art Book where Nick goes behind the scenes. Speaking of Nick, how did I get into this game? I’m unsure if I found it first due to my love of Analog Horror or old throwback graphic games or if my buddy Nick (not Lives but an actual friend of mine) found it first but he told me about it through watching Vinesauce I think? Eventually he just gave me 20 dollars and told me to buy this game so we could play it together.
The plot is rather simple: you play as an unnamed recruit at the Home Safety Hotline, a call center where you give information on a variety of threats to people who call in looking for advice. At first you only get a few normal ones (ex. termites, bees or house fires (which is hilarious because why would anyone call a safety hotline and not realize what a house fire is)) but over the course of the week you’ll get access to more entries and calls; some of these entries range from funny to downright scary. The gameplay section will be here too because the gameplay is simple, you read entries and give answers. What’s REALLY interesting about this game is it’s world; whether you’re reading emails from someone who seems to be crazy and is sending you emails from a hole in the wall, to random videos that pop up over the course of the week on your computer that show you a bit of an insight into the lore, it’s fascinating to take in. If you get 100 percent accuracy each day, you’ll also get fake discounts expensive and hilariously stupid s h i t that you can’t even buy. Luckily if you fail a bit, you can choose to reset your weekly progress from the Home Screen on your computer, and all the answers are scripted so if you need a guide there’s one down in the links. You’ll learn that Home Safety Hotline isn’t all that’s cracked up to be once the “Crazy Email Guy” and the Prank Caller eventually disappear by mysterious means. Eventually on the last day, you’ll be given a final trial by “the people from the soil” who ask you riddles. You’ll have to identity which creatures correspond with what and sometimes it can be a doozy when you think you know the answer to what the issue is, only to learn that it’s something more benign (funny tip, house fires only shows up on the last day as a bit of a Chekhov's Gun). Once you beat the game (and through hints like the Prank Caller’s last words), you’ll learn that Home Safety Hotline is run by a bunch of Faes. The guy who lived in a wall? A previous employee who got turned into a mouse. Prank Caller? Same thing. If you get a horrible accuracy rate, you fail and get turned into a mouse. If you succeed however, you’ll get an ending where Carol (who speaks in yee ol’ english) appears to you in a forest FMV style and gives you a crown, and from here you get a promotion. Then the credits roll while a bunch of strange looking people in goofy costumes dance and sing.
My thoughts on the plot are as follows: it’s really fun and makes me ask questions. The Fae that run Home Safety Hotline, why are they running it? What else lives in this world? What’s the morality of the Fae? Truth be told, while I got a lot of the background lore, while doing research for this game I didn’t realize the amount of foreshadowing this game truly had. Between the entries on mice being “useless” to the logo being a celtic knot (shoutout to TVTropes for this). What does a promotion entail? There are creatures from folklore like Trolls and Goblins but are there other creatures beyond this? The lore, while it can be funny sometimes, also gets kind of freaky and existential. Some of the entries are downright terrifying, with some of the solutions including “screw over someone else”, “abandon your house” or “make peace and accept your fate” (shoutout to the Dorcha for being the scariest entry). The gameplay aspect of the game I feel fits perfectly, and the only thing one could really wish for is a sort of randomizer though that would require A LOT of voice lines and more work, of which I’m not sure one could do with how small of a scale this game is.
The art direction isenjoyable, again a throwback to the 90s with a distinct parody of Windows 95 chosen for the game’s style. You can switch the colors around in the Options Menu, but for the most part you’ll be seeing a Lime Greenish color. Getting calls will show you a digital picture of their face, sometimes with distortions or glitches. Actually looking at the entries themselves will reveal the same thing (with the loading times being slow-ish which fits into the era), pictures that have obvious photoshopped creatures in it that look unrealistic but fits perfectly at the same time. This will be most of the game outside of the Ending Cutscene, which will be a slower styled FMV video but with more fluid movement. The sound design to the game is also immaculate as hell, between the voice acting and the lofi music by David Johnson that just gives me this image of old 90s cyberspace. Starting with the soundtrack, while there are only a handful of tracks (the most memorable being Safety First, the main menu track) that are displayed in game, each one again has this soothing lofi essence that really encapsulates to me in my mind what this older styled hold music would sound like. It’s easy listening and gets a big thumbs up for enhancing the atmosphere. The voice acting is spot on for the tongue-in-cheek tone it’s going for, with the actress playing Carol and the doofus playing the Prank Caller (I never will get tired of the name Buzz Goober lol) just knocking it out of the park with the goofy vibes. Everyone who does the customer voices are actually great, mixing in that old crunchy low poly sound effect that garbles their voice just feels perfect to me. Speaking of sound effects, everything from clicking on computer apps to listening to the sounds that certain cryptids make just, I have no words for how immersive it is. The only other note I have for this is that sometimes it’ll be obvious when a female voices a male’s role but honestly I find it hilarious and campy, feeling right at home with the game’s vibes that it enhances it.
Overall, my time with Home Safety Hotline was pretty damn good, a fun little romp that both had me thinking a lot by the time we hit the end. We ended up playing by basically reading through the entries before making guesses on what the answer was, looking it up after to see which one was right or if we were right to begin with. Most of the time, we were spot on and in all honesty this game has a party game vibe to it. It has heart while also sprinkling in bits of creep factor. One of these days, I’d love to give “Night Signal” a try just to see what that was like, but they’re also in the middle of developing a new project titled “Please Insert Disc” that gives PS2 throwbacks. Home Safety Hotline is 15 dollars; I sunk in about 4 hours of gameplay time and since my buddy Nick handed me a 20 I wasn’t really concerned about the main price? Otherwise wait for a sale.
Links:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/HomeSafetyHotline
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YT6cFzMQzTM&ab_channel=VHS
https://horrorgamenews.com/home-safety-hotline-answers/