Genre: Horror, Point and Click
Original Release: January 16, 2024
Developer: Night Signal Entertainment
Publisher: Night Signal Entertainment
Played on: Steam
I remember finding a Calvin & Hobbes collection belonging to my older sister titled “Revenge of the Babysat” and reading through it time and again. For the most part it was a great time, but one specific set of comics always left me feeling uncomfortable and more than a little scared: Calvin and his parents come home from a few days out of town for a wedding to discover that someone broke into their home and stole some of their belongings. Calvin is relieved once he finds Hobbes, but it was that fear his parents expressed that stuck with me. The idea that your home is not as safe a place as we tend to think it is keeps me up at night sometimes. What if that scratching noise is more than just the mouse I saw crawling around through the hole in my ceiling? What if someone just comes into my home and hurts my dog while I’m at work?
Home Safety Hotline taps into some of these way-too-specific personal fears of mine and it works. You play as a newly hired employee of the titular Home Safety Hotline, fielding calls and providing info packages related to the problems as they’re described. Some callers are more descriptive than others, making it easier to suss out their problem and point them in the right direction. The more cryptic ones…well, you do your best to help them. All of your clients will describe their situations at least partially, and by comparing that to entries available to you the answer can usually be puzzled out with a bit of thinking and reading comprehension.
From the screenshot above, you can see that most of the entries are locked at the start. You’ll gain access to more and more of them as you play and you’re rewarded for doing well. Manage an accuracy rating of 90% or higher and you’ll receive a coupon in your mail the next day for things like bug spray or a silver medallion. Not anything that I would personally use except for maybe the bug spray (I like silver, but jewelry isn’t really my thing and I don’t have many places to put it), but it’s neat that the game incentivizes you to do well beyond “do too badly and you’ll be fired.”
Things start to get weird after a bit though. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here because – say it with me now – I find that part of the magic of games is experiencing it for yourself. You’ll unlock more entries that sound reasonable enough, but some of them invoke that familiar sense of unease that I got from reading those old Calvin & Hobbes comics. If you play it, read through the entries as you go and keep that in mind. Pay special attention to the solutions in particular.
The game itself is only about two to three hours long. That’s not a bad thing, most of us (myself included) are very busy working one or more jobs trying to keep our heads above water. We don’t always have the time to really sit down and get pulled into 100+ hour adventures. Something like this scratches that itch I have for getting spooked while keeping things brief. It’s great! You also get some extra content after finishing the game, like an endless mode dubbed “Call Training” where you have to resolve caller problems with a limited amount of time to identify their problems and you can only get it wrong three times. Some of these are more than a little cryptic. I received one call a few times where all they said was “I can’t see! I’m blind!” and I never got it right in the moment, but thinking on it now I think I know what the answer was. Might have to retry Call Training to see if I’m right.
While we’re here, I should also mention the accessibility options found in Home Safety Hotline. It’s really nice to see options for text size as well as a specific checkbox for “use dyslexia font.” That’s super considerate and while I didn’t adjust any of it myself I’m glad it’s there for folks who might need it. There’s also a set of phobia-related toggles so you can turn them off as you need.
All told I’m glad I spent the time to play Home Safety Hotline. It was exactly what I wanted after watching Second Wind’s video on it.
So you know what? I’m more than happy to recommend Home Safety Hotline. Short, sweet, spooky, but I enjoyed that bit of tension and the fact that most of the fear for me came from the idea that my safe space may not be as safe as I think it is.
One other thing of note is that the developer, Nick Lives, used to work at a park called Evermore. That name might sound familiar to some of you, particularly if you watch any of Jenny Nicholson’s videos. I’m not going to embed the video here because it’s almost four hours long and I don’t want you feeling like you’re stuck on my site, but I’ll link it because I think the video is really good and Jenny deserves the foot traffic. So if you want to give it a watch on your own time, go nuts.
Getting to read through some of the background stuff after unlocking the art book is awesome. The accessibility is awesome. Home Safety Hotline is inspiring as heck in its own way. Man I’ve got to get working on some of my game ideas. Thanks Nick and company for lighting that fire under me again!
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