‘Home Safety Hotline’ Review
Developer: Night Signal Entertainment | Platform: PS5 | Playtime: 2:45 | Platinum: 3:40
A safe home is a happy home, and if you notice any peculiar smells, items gone amiss or creatures that shouldn’t be there – you’ll need to get in touch with the Home Safety Hotline. That’s the premise behind this fun but ultimately simple horror adjacent experience.
The entire game takes place at a classically dated computer monitor with you primarily surveying a database of various fauna, flora and phenomenon that could be infesting a person’s home. Each of these entries comes with a picture, sound byte, things to look out for, consequences of its presence and consequences of leaving them unattended. This list grows more expansive over the course of the 7 shifts, eventually having a long list of options to choose from. This is where the game falls apart a little however.
Each shift is composed of a number of phone calls, increasing in total the further through the week you get. As far as I can tell there’s no time limit per call (unless there’s a very generous timer) so there’s no rush to pick the correct option. Choosing the correct option comes down to listening to the key words in the phone call, but these clues only ever refer to the things to look out for section. The rest is fluff. Its interesting world building fluff sure but once you very quickly work out that you only need a tiny section of each page and no rush to find it, the game kind of loses its coolness. Not all is lost, there are calls that will fake you out – claiming they rang last week and feed faulty information back to you as well as occasionally the database will go offline and you will have to rely on memory for your answers. There is a failure state too, get too many answers wrong in a shift and you’ll get sacked – leading to a humorous live action cutscene. However all that does is reset you to the start of the night, with the calls and answers being the same as they were the first time around so you can get back to where you were no problem.
There’s somewhat of a meta narrative at play here much like most indie horror games these days. It’s fine? It doesn’t really add or takeaway from the game at all, it’s just kind of there.
It sounds like I’m ragging on the game a fair bit and I suppose I am a little but I did enjoy the game. It was fun while I played it and I enjoyed my time with it. It’s just peaking behind the curtains for any kind of analysis or review shows a whole lot of smoke and mirrors. Like a magic trick, it’s good for as long as you don’t know how it works.
