Welcome back to Save State, where an indie game in the hand is worth, I don’t know, probably like $15 or something. Some people put them in bushes- can you believe that? So, to tell you a little about myself, I’m not big into jump scares. In the twelve years I’ve been writing for GiN, I’ve occasionally had horror titles to review, in which I have always referred to jump scares as the Dane Cook of horror. There’s a distinct difference between suspense and surprise, and a properly timed jump scare can actually make the viewer become more alert even during the calmest moments of a game or movie.
If used sparingly, jump scares can introduce suspense even into calm moments where you give other major moments time to breathe. If instead you saturate your title with those kinds of events, they become rote, cheap, and boring, which tires the audience with the practice. This is why in recent years I’ve really come to appreciate those titles and movies that don’t overwhelmingly rely on jump scares to do the scaring for them, which is why I’ve come to appreciate things like Home Safety Hotline that build up tension in more subtle ways.
Home Safety Hotline is a game where you’re a phone operator at a hotline people call when they’re having some kind of issues with their home or surroundings. At first, the problems will be things like infestations of rodents or frozen pipes, though the calls do start to become significantly stranger as you continue through the title. Actually, playing is very simple, you control a mouse cursor on screen, answer phone calls, and put people on hold so you can search through an ever-increasing database of pests, both magical and mundane. You’ll spend a significant amount of time reading in Home Safety Hotline because you’ll have to learn about the various haunting entities to properly help people through their problems.
When you find the possible cause behind the caller’s affliction, you submit that to them and then wait for another call. Eventually, you’ll hear back if you gave someone the wrong answer, and if you give enough wrong answers, a potentially terrible future awaits in Home Safety Hotline.
The callers will always give you the appropriate information to figure out their plight, whether the issue is that their house is on fire (which seems really funny that you have to put them on hold), or that their bed suddenly grew teeth. Home Safety Hotline subtly begins to change as you play, with more and more information available to you in your entries list, and if you keep giving wrong answers you may find out that somebody’s household furniture ate a child because you didn’t help them properly.
What really sells everything that happens in Home Safety Hotline is the Windows 95 style user interface, complete with perfectly replicated dialog boxes, and the filters put over the audio samples of the screams from the people you’ve damned by being terrible at your job. Home Safety Hotline is, effectively, a puzzle game where you match the problematic entity with the caller by the clues they give in their voice messages. After submitting information to the caller, you hopefully won’t hear back from that client soon because that typically means you gave them the wrong information, and now a memory wisp has guaranteed they’ll never remember anything ever again.
Each day, after a job well done, you’ll be able to check your emails and see a variety of strange circumstances occurring around you, and there’s not one single email from a Nigerian prince wanting to send you money. Home Safety Hotline absolutely needs players to delve into it completely blind, which is why I’m not extensively divulging a bunch of information about it as this is something that really needs to be experienced to be fully enjoyed. Home Safety Hotline plays out over the course of one week, with the final day being an especially supernatural and riddle-filled Sunday.
If you enjoy horror titles that don’t rely on jump scares to unsettle you as a player, Home Safety Hotline could be for you. Home Safety Hotline is relatively inexpensive, but it’s also on the shorter side with about two hours of gameplay. It’s an interesting experience for sure. Conversely, if you’re the type of person who enjoys jump scares… well, I don’t understand you, but you may still enjoy this if you like creepy puzzle solving and don’t shy away from reading.
In any event, I think it’s time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Do you think that all gothic castles keep chickens in their walls just waiting for someone to break the poultry out of there using a whip? I’m only asking because I’m no longer allowed to visit the Milan Cathedral, and I just wanted to crowdsource answers of whether or not that was justified, that’s all. See you in two weeks!