Home Safety Hotline

Home Safety Hotline
Steam header art
Developer(s)	Night Signal Entertainment
Designer(s)	Nick Lives
Composer(s)	David Johnsen
Platform(s)	Windows
Release	16 January 2024
Mode(s)	Single-player

Home Safety Hotline is a 2024 video game developed by Night Signal Entertainment for Windows. The game is a horror-themed puzzle title in which players provide customer service for the Home Safety Hotline, locating and providing callers with the correct information on ordinary and supernatural household hazards. Creation of the game was led by independent developer Nick Lives, who created the game as an inspiration of the bestiaries from Dungeons and Dragons and the mythology of legendary creatures. Upon release, the game received generally positive reviews, with praise directed to the uniqueness of the game's concept, visual presentation and narrative, and critiques to the game's length and challenge.

Gameplay

Home Safety Hotline takes place on a simulation of a fictitious operating system. On the desktop, players can read emails, watch videos, and begin a shift operating the titular Home Safety Hotline. Players clock into shifts using the Hotline menu, where they take calls from the Hotline and hear audio clips from callers describing a household problem, and provide the appropriate response from a list of hazards from the menu. The percentage of correct guesses is provided to the player at the end of a shift, although if players fall short of a number of correct guesses they will be terminated and the game will end. Players unlock more listed hazards over time. As the game progresses, the Hotline will begin to encounter network errors, which disrupt the players access to information about the various hazards. Upon completion of the game, players are able to access an art book created by the developer, featuring concept art and background information on the game's creation.

Plot

Set in 1996, players are recruited to be a responder on the Home Safety Hotline, a service that responds to callers enquiring about household hazards by providing safety instructions. They are onboarded by Carol, their manager. At first, callers report ordinary household annoyances, including household pests such as cockroaches and mice. The Hotline also receives prank calls and unrelated enquiries. Over the player's shifts, more supernatural hazards begin to be reported by callers including household Hobbs, boggarts and nymphs. After a number of days, the Hotline corporate invites the player character to undertake a trial as part of a process named the "descension", in which riddles are presented to the player. If the player is successful, Carol contacts the player and informs them they have received a promotion, transporting them to a forest, revealing herself to be a fae and crowning them as the new Junior Supervisor of the Home Safety Hotline.

Development

Home Safety Hotline was created by Night Signal Entertainment, the studio of independent developer Nick Lives. Lives stated that the game aimed to recapture the experience of reading through the fictional bestiaries of the Monster Manual of the Dungeons and Dragons series of role-playing games. Following a series of abandoned prototypes, Lives revisited the concept upon discovering the analog horror subgenre, and decided to create a game under the working title The Lunar Archives inspired by the aesthetic of "90s media formats" including the user interface of the Windows 95 operating system. The monsters included in the game were a mixture of Lives' own creation and existing mythological entities, with additional inspiration from the SCP Foundation series of fiction and the horror artwork of Trevor Henderson Eduardo Valdés-Hevia. Lives created imagery for the game by importing source photography into Photoshop and transforming them into digital paintings, exporting the imagery at a reduced level of quality to meet the 90s aesthetic for the game. Home Safety Hotline was announced alongside the release of a demo in June 2023 at the Steam Next Fest, and showcased in late 2023 at the DreadXP Indie Horror Showcase and the Double Fine Day of the Devs. The game was released on Steam on 17 January 2024.

Reception

Reception

Aggregate score

Aggregator	Score
Metacritic	76%

Review scores

Publication	Score
Edge	7/10
Bloody Disgusting

Home Safety Hotline was received with "generally favorable" reviews upon release, according to review aggregator Metacritic. Critics generally praised the game's visual presentation. Edge stated the game's interface, citing its "grainy" videos, "green-tinged images" and "crackly sounds" were a "potent setting for horror" and evocative of a "haunted quality". Describing the title as "analog horor at its finest, Aaron Boehm of Bloody Disgusting enjoyed the game's "stylistic flourishes" and "well-done" videos. Kyle Leclair commended the presentation and interface to have a "perfectly-captured old-school PC feel", praising its "low-tech" simplicity as allowing the focus of the game to be on its narrative. Cass Marshall of Polygon found the subtle distortions of the interface and sound effectively conveyed a "strong sense of wrongness and unease" and helped "ratchet up the tension.

Reviewers generally praised the game's horror concept and narrative. Cass Marshall of Polygon highlighted the game's "deliciously unsettling" and "very effective" premise, citing the reliance on "slow, creeping realizations" about the "perfectly off and disturbing" experiences of individual callers. Kyle Leclair of Hardcore Gamer commended the game's "black comedy" and "stellar writing", finding it to feature "cleverly-designed supernatural phenomena" and strike "a perfect balance between comedy and horror". Joshua Wolens of PC Gamer enjoyed the game's tone, stating that its "off-kilter banality" was "well-done". Whilst Aaron Boehm of Bloody Disgusting highlighted the game's "clever" concept and "unique style and tone", he also considered some of the narrative elements to be short of "compelling or cohesive" and did not "connect in some way that revealed something about the world at large". Similarly, Alice Bell of Rock Paper Shotgun praised the "brilliant framing" and "excellent" writing style of the game's index entries, but found various plot threads to end unresolved.

Several reviewers noted the gameplay's scope and difficulty were limited. Edge commented that the game had "modest parameters" and may have benefited from more "mechanical variety". Kyle Leclair of Hardcore Gamer noted that the game lacked challenge and was "relatively short in length", finding the difficulty to decrease over time due to the unique qualities of the supernatural entities. Aaron Boehm of Bloody Disgusting found the gameplay loop to be "relatively simple" and wished it had "more polish", stating that the game lacked features such as searchable terms or direct feedback on whether the player provided a successful answer.

External links

• Official website