HOME SAFETY HOTLINE
It’s 1996 and you’ve been recently employed by Home Safety Hotline, a hotline for home owners to ask you questions about what might be going wrong in they’re respective homes! Could it be ants? Mice in the ceiling? Or perhaps something more nefarious is up.
To get to the gist what it is you do in this game, is that you take a variety of calls from homeowners having various problems within their house. It’s a point-and-click information deduction type game. You read through your catalog of entries about possible problems and try to figure out whats wrong based upon the callers descriptions and how they relate to your entries. It is somewhat similar to Papers, Please in that it follows the same fact checking and cross referencing methods that is at it’s core, the game play.
Of course, it can’t just be a bunch of mundane calls for common household problems, right? I mean if you take a gander at the Steam page, you’ll notice one of its categories is “Horror”…
On Day 2, that’s when things start to get weird. You are granted access to more entries with specific rules that you are NOT allowed to talk about these entries with anyone unless it pertains to the customer. And wouldn’t you know it, you start seeing all sorts of mythical creatures begin to pop up in your entry database.
I won’t delve too much more into what exactly you’ll see as you go along, but every new day the calls get increasingly weird and your database increasingly large. Additionally, some callers are unreliable in their information. Sometimes it’s quite vague, other times the information they give you points to one thing, but one key element of what they said means it’s actually another thing entirely.
It’s very much a game that wants you to sit down and read every single entry, but even in doing so you eventually have so many entries and the callers problems become more cryptic and vague that you really need to have some good reading comprehension skills to properly make your way through the day.
Even then, on your first couple of runs you’re likely to be fired for getting too many wrong answers. While the game is short, it’s life is extended by being a quasi trial and error game. The answers are in there somewhere, but the game does a good job of making it quite challenging to weed through the information and deduce the proper solution.
While this game is technically under the “horror” genre, I’d say it’s really not scary at all. More that it’s interesting and I found myself having a laugh at reading all the entries and how you solve their problems. The game is riddled with aesthetically pleasing 90’s computer vibes as well. From the sounds to clicks and even how the information on the page has that weird little delayed response to it as it loads in.
If you were a fan of Papers, Please or point-and-click games this is one to definitely pick up. It has tons of charm and I had a blast just reading through the lore of all the strange mythical creatures. It’s a challenge for sure, but really what adult-themed point-and-click game isn’t a challenge? It’s kinda like the whole point of the genre, no?
You can pickup this gem of a game here on their Steam page for $14.99 at the time of this article being written.