Review: Home Safety Hotline

Do you have room in that brain of yours for some temporarily useful information? Do you want to learn about the household threats that go unseen? If so, Home Safety Hotline has the job for you.

Originally released earlier this year, it’s now being released on consoles. Being an OS sim, it’s always a weird fit on a controller, but I needed the excuse to circle back to it for review, so I’ll take it.

Home Safety Hotline (PC, PS4, Xbox One, Switch [Reviewed])
Developer: Night Signal Entertainment
Publisher: Torture Star Video
Released: September 20, 2024
MSRP: $19.99

Home Safety Hotline has you logging in for the first time as an employee of the titular company. The company provides information and support for home owners, giving them assistance in times of need, whether that’s because they have cockroaches or their house is on fire.

You’re given a list of common problems and take calls from clients. They’ll give you a description of the issue they’re having, and you need to identify what’s going on and provide them with the correct information by simply selecting it. It progresses through the days of the week, and each day provides your list with additional problems. You need to be as accurate as possible, otherwise you’ll be fired.

While this starts off with mundane problems like black mold, supernatural encounters begin creeping in. Things get weirder and weirder as you go. You’ll still get the odd person calling in about something like termites just to throw you off, but often, they’ve been referred to you because you’re the experts in dealing with the supernatural. In this, Home Safety Hotline walks the line of horror and humor.

It’s a very simple, straightforward concept. You simply get a description and pick the answer. For Home Safety Hotline, it’s all in the presentation. It’s presented like a Windows 95 program, with the date reading 1996. It’s not exactly analog horror, but it’s the same idea.

The calls run the gamut. You get customers who had a bad experience previously and are now irate, ones who are confused that they were told to call you, and then there are some that are tragic. “How do you tell someone their dog is dead?” my husband asked me as he watched over my shoulder. “By email,” I replied.

But the clients can be misleading. While for some, the answer is obvious, others will deliberately contain information to throw you off. There are also moments where your database has technical difficulties, and you can’t double-check information in a possible answer. If you get one wrong, you aren’t immediately notified, even if that was your last chance. It comes a few calls later, where you’ll be reprimanded by your supervisor or contacted by a now-pissed, unsatisfied customer. It may just be a quiz in the end, but these are the small ways that Home Safety Hotline keeps things compelling.

The downside to this is that the calls are always the same, and always in the same order. As far as I know, there are no random elements to the main story mode. If you get fired, you just repeat that day over, so it’s just listening to the same calls and adjusting your answers to finally make the grade. There’s no replay value in that sense, but some of the things that get unlocked after completing it make up for this.

My main issue with Home Safety Hotline is that it just doesn’t feel optimal on console. With its OS interface and scroll bars, it was made with mouse controls in mind. Functions on the screen are mapped to buttons, so it works reasonably well, but it loses some of its authentic feel. Scrolling, in particular, kind of sucks. 

To get through a lot of menus, you just use the d-pad to scroll, but it moves one press at a time. If you want to get from the top to the bottom of the list, you can only get there by pressing down over and over again. There are also visible problems with scrolling through menus. The information pane jumps the first time it hits the bottom of the visible area, and once your email inbox fills up, it won’t scroll down to whatever’s off-screen. I spoke to Mr. Puppy Combo (head honcho of Torture Star Video, the publisher), and he let me know that a patch is on the way, but whether or not it will fix these issues, I can’t confirm.

It’s not the end of the world, but it did bother me. For anyone who only has the option of playing it on console or simply wants a Switch version they can play on the toilet, then it fits that need.

Aside from that, I enjoyed Home Safety Hotline. The main story runs at 2-3 hours, but it also includes its first DLC, Seasonal Worker, which adds 60-90 minutes of runtime. Alongside that, there are some neat bonuses once you finish. Truthfully, I’m not sure the concept could get much farther than that, so it’s good that it doesn’t overstay its welcome and instead just provides extra if you haven’t had your fill.

I’m sure I’ve said this multiple times, but it is a very simple premise that boils down to a quiz with associated research, but it presents it with love and pizzazz. It’s very much greater than the sum of its parts. With its mix of the weird and mundane, it has a winning personality. It probably won’t blow you away, and the console version is perhaps not the most optimal way to play it, but it’s an enjoyable day job.

_{[This review is based on a retail build of the game provided by the publisher.]}