Home Safety Hotline is the cryptic helpline horror game we need

When I was a teenager, I worked at a fast food joint, and I still remember the stress and anxiety I felt when a customer came in with a severe allergy. We wiped down, disinfected, and cleaned every piece of equipment and service, but I was also very aware that we were a group of minimum wage workers, some of whom did not come to work sober. If someone made even the slightest mistake, a person could die. I had forgotten about this tension until I played Home safety hotlinean analog horror game from Night Signal Entertainment.

In Home safety hotlineThe year is 1996 and I have just started my new job as a telephone operator for the hotline of the title. Since the 90s, everyone can afford a house, and it is likely that they will face problems such as mold, mice or a strange metamorphosis in their basement. Similar to controlis FBC or the SCP FoundationThe Home Safety Hotline is an organization dedicated to dealing with supernatural emergencies in the real world. At first I mainly deal with everyday pests, but as I get better at it and gain more trust from my superiors, I find it harder to deal with creepy cryptids.

The game runs on a 1996 PC, where I can check my email, watch promotional videos, and log in to the customer service terminal. As soon as I clock in for the day, I receive short calls from concerned citizens. I listen, review my database of home hazards, select the appropriate one based on the information shared, and then send the caller an information packet.

Image: Night Signal Entertainment

If everything goes well, I won’t hear from them again. If I do an oopsie doodle and misdiagnose the problem, I get a follow-up call that ranges from irritated to actively murdering. I also get a few crazy calls just to keep me busy. When I see a caller, I can guess whether I’m getting a new request, being yelled at for a gaffe, or about to get a crazy phone call from a bored teenager.

Home safety hotline is the type of game that can be completed within a few hours. Even if you want to try all the endings and explore every outcome, this is a relatively small game. Despite its length, it’s memorable and refreshingly unique.

There’s a checklist of things you’re likely to encounter in short horror games: jump scares, the protagonist narrating his actions, sneaking through dark hallways. Home safety hotline has none of it. The horror comes when you catch a glimpse of another world, one where mirror nymphs lurk in the forest to steal your face, or a portal quietly opens in your basement. The more permissions you unlock, the weirder things get, and the slide into weird is punctuated by new agency videos and crazy emails from a former employee.

It’s a very effective analog horror, complete with mouse and keyboard sound effects. Since I was born in 1990, I immediately felt at home with the Home Safety Hotline interface. The moments when the interface is slow, the sound is distorted, or an image is poorly compressed convey a strong sense of wrongness and unease. This means that even banal shouts about black mold and carpenter ants help heighten the tension and make the big fears more resonant.

Image: Night Signal Entertainment

Instead of jump scares and violin stings, the horror comes from slow, creeping realizations. The customer I just helped ingested a deadly poison. I know it and my superiors know it, but He not. This woman calling about her missing child has no idea that her son has fallen victim to a paranormal phenomenon. When I check the relevant file, the documents confirm that it is not him who is coming back… but the mother Is Right to memory deletion!

One phone call particularly shocked me. I failed to diagnose a man with a creeping, plant-like growth, and in fact he called the next day. But in the middle of our conversation, the plant swelled and burst through his skull. It’s all conveyed through substandard sound quality, but it’s so completely off base and disturbing that it stayed with me for days afterward.

There is something striking about dealing with people in grave danger from the safe distance of a cubicle or home office. I remembered the anxiety I felt as I wiped down the grill and cleaned my utensils, hoping to trust our protocols but also fearful that something would somehow go wrong. It’s a fear that feels much more personal and less worn than many common horror tropes, and that’s one of the reasons I found the experience so deliciously unsettling.

Home safety hotline is available on Itch.io And steam.