Home Safety Hotline

When eerie sounds and unexplained phenomena plague the sanctuary of your home, there's only one number to call – the Home Safety Hotline. Developed by the twisted minds at Night Signal Entertainment, this innovative horror game casts you as a telephone operator tasked with identifying the sinister forces threatening your callers.

Analog Dread Comes Calling

At its core, Home Safety Hotline challenges you to navigate a vast, nightmarish catalog of household pests and hazards using clunky 90s computer technology. Every time the line rings, you'll need to grill the caller about the bizarre goings-on, cross-reference their descriptions against the dizzying databases, and provide them with the answers they so desperately need – or suffer the consequences.

Every artificial keyboard click, computer buzz, and crackling voice line over the phone amplifies that unsettling sense that you're receiving transmissions from a time and place you were never meant to peek into. If the dated tech doesn't get under your skin, the sights lurking in those databases surely will.

The Stuff of Nightmares

Speaking of those databases, ho-ly crap, do they ever take you on a haunting journey into the abyss. What starts as basic pest control calls quickly spirals into a dizzying descent into the realms of spine-chilling obscurity and cosmic horror. The further you plumb these archaic knowledge banks, the more you'll uncover a whole pantheon of unholy abominations, from gore-spattered cryptids to incomprehensible occult entities.

Just when you think you've resigned yourself to a new level of depravity, the game whips out some fresh new terror to subvert your expectations and prevent you from ever feeling safe again. Good luck trying to sleep at night after getting an eyeful of some of these...things from the void.

In a smartly considerate move, Home Safety Hotline gives you "phobia toggle" options to disable any potentially triggering imagery related to common fears like arachnophobia or claustrophobic spaces. I can only imagine the brain-melting monstrosities they had to censor for the especially squeamish.

Review: 8/10

Look, this game is squarely aimed at a niche audience of hardcore horror fanatics and lovers of all things wonderfully weird and unsettling. If you fall into that venn diagram, then Home Safety Hotline needs to be a top priority. And it’s great to see that the creators of Night Signal are able to create a completely new horror experience and still make it great!

Pros:

• Frighteningly immersive analog horror experience
• Eerie 90s tech aesthetic and haunting soundtrack
• Encyclopedic catalog of profoundly disturbing hazards/entities
• Palpable psychological tension from weighty decision-making
• Accessibility options to disable gory/phobic imagery

Cons:

• Central gameplay loop can feel repetitive over long stretches
• Limited motivations to replay once you've seen it all

Home Safety Hotline is a horror simulator that will scare you with the scariest of scrimmages - responsibility for someone else's life. As a 911 hotline worker, you have to constantly commiserate with people and their worldly problems. Take calls and choose the best solution for the customer. Whether it's a broken pipe, a blackout, or an unknown person in the house, stay calm, keep in touch with the caller, and find the right solutions. What will you do when you have the choice between two human lives in your hands? Take the burden of responsibility in the psychological horror game Home Safety Hotline.

Pros of the game:

• Make all the decisions during the call
• Gradually the atmosphere gets darker and darker