Home Safety Hotline Review | As Unsettling as Real Customer Service

Home Safety Hotline is a horrifying game where you’re in customer service taking calls. Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn’t do well, and if it’s worth your time and money.

Home Safety Hotline Review Overview

Home Safety Hotline Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
Simple and Straight to the Point Inclusion of Phobia-Filters	Low Replayability Value

Home Safety Hotline Overall - 76/100

Home Safety Hotline is a brief but great analog horror experience where you take calls to accurately determine the supernatural. The overall narrative serves its purpose, the gameplay is basic but intriguing, and the aesthetics and the audio all serve to further immerse the players. However, it falls short of being more replayable, given that there is so much more potential “game” that can be had. Nevertheless, it chose to be short and sweet and does well to captivate through and through.

Home Safety Hotline Story - 7/10

Home Safety Hotline’s story is straightforward and gets the job done. It properly builds up through the mundanity of clocking in every day at work and picks up when strange things start appearing, with more customers calling in with more far-fetched and disturbing scenarios. Though the overall narrative wasn’t at all anything mindblowing, the execution, worldbuilding, and progression are succinct and effective.

Home Safety Hotline Gameplay - 8/10

Home Safe Hotline’s gameplay is very basic, being a point-and-click analog horror game. You merely have a list of information you can learn, and then must correctly diagnose incoming callers’ situations with the corresponding information at your disposal. It’s very much a matching type game with extra steps but said extra steps are uniquely carried out with puzzling caller situations where you really need to read carefully and infer as many details as you accurately can.

Home Safety Hotline Visuals - 8/10

Home Safety Hotline is an analog horror game that simulates an old desktop PC aesthetic from the 90s, and it does so to great effect. The look of the old User Interfaces(UI) with the CRT filter manages to bring about that classic nostalgic feel that adds to the atmosphere. All the images in the database are also well-made, with dozens of normal-looking photographs mixed in with very eerie artwork of supernatural creatures.

Home Safety Hotline Audio - 9/10

The game does its best in the audio department, having great atmospheric music and excellent catchy phone-hold tunes. Its peak is undoubtedly the multitudes of diverse voice acting, where all calling customers are uniquely and appropriately voice-acted in very convincing performances. The subtle voice filters also sell the quality of phone calls back in the 90s, and overall add to the immersion to the experience.

Home Safety Hotline Value for Money - 6/10

Home Safety Hotline is a wonderful one-shot psychological horror game to play, but for its short length and low replayability, the asking price of $14.99 is a bit steep. No doubt love and passion were poured into the game with the great quality it brings, but with the potential lying on the cutting room floor for more replayability, it sadly doesn’t reach for it and opts to keep it short-lived.

Home Safety Hotline Review: As Unsettling as Real Customer Service

This game instantly captured me at first sight, and it’s all thanks to its unique premise and notable execution. I’ve always been a big fan of unique analog horror games that make use of the creativity and limitations their developers have, as it always brings about a certain kind of ingenuity. Home Safety Hotline might appear to be basic, but it itself as a whole is brilliant.

Utilizing the mundanity of a scheduled, everyday routine as a means to gradually devolve into more harrowing situations isn’t unique in the horror genre, but this game offers a unique twist with its inclusion of cryptids, or supernatural beings that exist among the environment. The amount of lore research and artwork production that went into creating every single data entry is staggering, and with each entry getting unlocked the more days pass, the more disturbing callers report in.

The callers, each with their amazing voice acting performances, try their best to describe details of what’s happening to their homes. Sometimes they give information out directly, but sometimes they’re in manic states, as the unnatural creatures have already taken hold of them, and more often than not, it’s too late to save them. All you can do is listen to their pleas and deliver back the information you have at hand. It adds that layer of helplessness and powerlessness as you’re seated in front of your 90’s retro computer, waiting for the next call, hoping it won’t be as disturbing as the last.

Home Safety Hotline knocks it out of the park with its unique gameplay loop, fascinating lore with so much attention to detail, and exceptionally convincing voice acting that further immerses the players into the role of the hotline operator.

Pros of Home Safety Hotline

Things Home Safety Hotline Got Right
Simple and Straight to the Point Inclusion of Phobia-Filters

Simple and Straight to the Point

Home Safety Hotline knows what it is and sticks to its identity of being a basic analog horror game where you’re a call center agent answering calls, going through data, and sending information back. That’s all there is to it, and it thrives in simplicity. Too many games in the horror genre overcomplicate themes or gameplay to try and be artistic or revolutionary only to end up failing. This game manages to build a compelling gameplay loop from the start and gradually expands the difficulty with more challenging callers. It also offers only one gameplay obstacle, which is to disable the information database you have and rely on prior research, knowledge, and intuition to send back the correct answer.

Several simple things implemented in the game all add up to such engrossing gameplay, which is a feat that Home Safety Hotline should be proud of.

Inclusion of Phobia-Filters

As horror games usually utilize human fears to produce unnerving atmospheres or scary situations, they usually forego any concern with actual phobias some people might have. These phobias aren’t just uncomplicated “Oh you’re just afraid, you can get over it,” but are deeply psychologically rooted in some minds. They could be a result of unresolved or unknown trauma that can’t always be absolved through exposure therapy, specially through activities that purposely use them to scare participants.

Home Safety Hotline, though a small indie game, goes through the time and effort to accommodate as many accessibility options for these as possible. Entirely optional, they can be utilized by those who have actual phobias allowing them to play the game. This should be the standard for all games, horror or not, and needs to be celebrated so others can follow suit.

Cons of Home Safety Hotline

Things Home Safety Hotline Can Improve
Low Replayability Value

Low Replayability Value

As fantastic as Home Safety Hotline is in its execution, it can’t be helped that a feeling of wasted potential lies on the table. The gameplay loop itself, though very basic, is very intriguing due to the amount of possible answers there could be. On top of that, the brilliant writing for the callers subtly gives or confuses the player as to which anomaly they’re actually referring to. And I won’t dare forget to mention the stellar voice acting.

With all these tools at hand, it’s a bit of a shame that the game ends so quickly and that repeated playthroughs will merely repeat the same questions and scenarios. There were much more interesting creatures that weren’t chosen, more conflicting conclusions to be had between similar symptoms, and more prank calls that could have been.

Or perhaps the game is only as good as it is BECAUSE it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and the quality is high due to more time being spent on assuring the existing, predetermined situations are puzzling and thought-provoking enough. That’s totally understandable, as surely it will be difficult to fully voice-act dozens more calls for every single supernatural creature. It then falls onto the fault of the game’s budget, or lack of more thereof.

I can only hope that the developers receive more ample funding and perhaps expand this already great game to a spectacular one.

Is Home Safety Hotline Worth It?

Never Thought I’d Ever Tell Someone To Work in a Customer Service Hotline

Yes, Home Safety Hotline is definitely worth your time, no matter how briefly it takes. The story is a mysterious slow-burn with a definite ending, the gameplay is genuinely interesting where you’ll be enthralled in your investigations, the immersion through the old aesthetics and the audio filters, as well as the brilliant voice acting – the game is chock-full of passion and quality.

The only downside is that it ends, and that it does so rather soon with so much potential still left on the table. We can only hope an update, an expansion, or DLC can be made after the game sees success – success that it absolutely should get for being unique and fascinating.

Digital Storefront
Steam
$14.99

Home Safety Hotline Overview & Premise

Home Safety Hotline has you perform a standard call center job taking calls from customers every day to help them with their home safety needs. However, as the days go on, you start noticing… weirder problems callers have been experiencing. At the same time, you’re being given more… supernatural information to sift through, learn, and offer to the customers as guidelines. All the while, each day you clock in, you’re getting these mysterious emails, prank calls, and random videos popping up on your computer. Just what IS this job?!

Home Safety Hotline FAQ

What are the Home Safety Hotline Game Answers?

These answers were sourced via naguide and fact-checked by playing through the game.

SPOILERS AHEAD FOR ALL ANSWERS.

Home Safety Hotline Product Information

Title	HOME SAFETY HOTLINE
Release Date	January 17, 2024
Developer	Night Signal Entertainment
Publisher	Night Signal Entertainment
Supported Platforms	PC(Steam)
Genre	Horror, Simulation
Number of Players	Single-Player(1)
ESRB Rating	N/A
Official Website	Night Signal Entertainment Patreon

Clark Jason Kong

Growing up playing all sorts of games, they love playing a little bit of everything, all of the time. Favorites include Counter-Strike, Life is Strange, Final Fantasy, Spiritfarer, and Devil May Cry.