When I was a teenager, I worked at a fast food restaurant, and I distinctly remember the stress and anxiety I felt when a customer came in with a severe allergy. We swept, sanitized, and cleaned every utensil and dishware, but I was also very aware that we were a bunch of minimum wage workers, some of whom didn’t come to work sober. If anyone makes even a little bit of a mistake, someone could die. I forgot about that tension until I started playing Home Safety Hotlinean analog horror game from Night Signal Entertainment.
In Home Safety Hotline, it’s 1996 and I’ve just started my new job as a telephone operator for the titular hotline. Since the 1990s, everyone has been able to afford a house, and chances are they’re going to have to deal with problems like mold, mice, or a strange makeover in their basement. Equivalent to Check‘s FBC or the SCP Foundation, the Home Safety Hotline is an organization dedicated to managing supernatural emergencies in the real world. At first I mainly deal with mundane pests, but as I continue to do well and gain more trust from my superiors, I start dealing with more serious cases involving creepy cryptids.
The game takes place on a 1996 PC where I can check my email, watch promotional videos and log into the customer service terminal. As soon as I clock in for the day, I receive short phone calls from concerned citizens. I listen, check my home hazard database, select the correct one based on the information shared, and then send the caller an information packet.
Image: Night Signal Entertainment
If all goes well, I won’t hear from them again. If I make an oopsie doodle and misdiagnose the problem, I receive a follow-up call that ranges from annoyed to active murder. I also get some crazy phone calls just to keep me on my toes. When I see a caller, I can guess if I’m getting a new request, if I’m being scolded for a mistake, or if I’m about to get a call from a bored teenager.
Home Safety Hotline is the kind of game that can be knocked out in a few hours. Even if you want to try every ending and explore every outcome, this is a relatively bite-sized game. Despite its length, it is memorable and refreshingly unique.
There’s a checklist of things you’re likely to encounter in short horror games: jump scares, the main character narrating his actions, crawling through dark hallways. Home Safety Hotline has none of these things. The horror comes from catching a glimpse of another world, a world where mirror nymphs lurk in the woods to steal your face or where a portal quietly opens in your basement. The more authorization you unlock, the weirder things get, and the descent into weirdness is punctuated by new desk videos and deranged emails from a former employee.
It’s highly effective analog horror, complete with mouse and keyboard sound effects. I was born in 1990, so I felt right at home with the Home Safety Hotline interface. The moments when the interface is slow, the sound distorts, or an image is poorly compressed convey a strong sense of wrongness and unease. This means that even mundane phone calls about black mold and carpenter ants help to ratchet up the tension and get the big fears out of the way.
Image: Night Signal Entertainment
Instead of scares and fiddle stabs, the horror comes from slow, creeping realizations. That customer I just helped consumed a deadly poison. I know it, and my supervisors know it, but He not. This woman who calls about her missing child has no idea that her son has fallen prey to a paranormal phenomenon. When I check the correct file, the documentation confirms that he is not coming back… but the mother is is is eligible for a memory wipe!
One phone call in particular really shocked me. I couldn’t diagnose a creeping plant-like growth on a man, and sure enough, he called the next day. But in the middle of our conversation, the plant swelled and burst through his skull. This is all conveyed through low-quality audio, but it’s so perfectly off-kilter and disturbing that it will stay with me for days.
There is something striking about dealing with people in immense danger from the safe distance of a workplace or home office. I was reminded of the worry I felt as I wiped down the grills and cleaned my utensils, hoping that I could trust our protocols but fearing that something would somehow go wrong. It’s a fear that feels much more personal and less threadbare than common horror tropes, and that’s part of why I found the experience so wonderfully unsettling.