Being a homeowner is a special kind of nightmare: silverfish creeping along the baseboards, stinkbugs buzzing around the windows, the slow and terrible process of descaling an ancient shower head. Real-life house problems are gross, frustrating and endless, but at least none of mine ever left me possessed. Home Safety Hotline, the newest retro-horror puzzle game from Night Signal Entertainment, takes ordinary homeowner fears and twists them into something stranger, darker and more unsettling. The game looks like an old Windows 95 desktop and feels like a cursed employee training CD, setting the stage for an experience that’s equal parts call center drudgery and analog horror dread.
The premise is simple and brilliant: You play as an operator at the titular homeowner hotline, fielding calls from panicked denizens. Sometimes they’re dealing with mundane nuisances like raccoons in the trash or termites in the walls. Other times, they’re plagued by pests more fantastical than mice or moles: attic gnomes, bed teeth or Memory Wisps that erase your loved one’s face. Each shift you clock in, listen to callers describe their problems then search through a massive database of creatures and conditions to diagnose what’s haunting their home. The database expands day by day, and the game doles out its creepy world-building slowly, ensuring you’re never overwhelmed but always a little unsettled.
As your workweek progresses, you learn that the accuracy scores you’ve been receiving each day do indeed matter. Endings vary based on your performance and your ability to answer your fae manager’s series of riddles when transported to the middle of the woods. But you’ll only reach those riddles if you have a stellar performance all week; otherwise, your fae manager will transform you into a mouse. However, if you perform well and answer some riddles correctly, you’ll be promoted! Junior supervisor, here you come.
So, does the game work? Absolutely. Home Safety Hotline is clever, funny and creepily immersive. The interface looks like a perfectly preserved late-’90s PC, rife with pixelated images, grainy video clips and sterile corporate design hiding surreal horrors. The calls themselves read like bite-sized creepypastas, and the writing in the database is both dryly technical and deeply uncanny. It nails the idea that horror hits hardest when it seeps into the ordinary — into the walls, the attic, the phone lines. The only real caveat is that the game is very text-heavy. You’ll be clicking, reading and cross-referencing constantly. Personally, I’m a reader, so I found this satisfying, but players who want more action may find it slow.
The trade-off is worth it, though, because the game does something rare in horror: It makes you think. Though many horror games have recently been tapping into the dread of minimum wage (The Closing Shift, The Convenience Store, etc.), few of them have been puzzles, and even fewer have been properly challenging. It scratches the same itch as flipping through Secure, Contain, Protect Foundation entries or unraveling analog horror Alternate Reality Games, but packaged neatly as a job simulator. It’s witty, self-aware and playful, turning the tedium of customer service into a genuinely tense experience. Even the flaws — the repetitive clicking, the sometimes unclear feedback — reinforce the uncanny realism of working a call center, where you’re always one bad answer away from disaster. Although, hopefully, the threat of mousey metamorphosis will be a new stake for all players.
At its best, Home Safety Hotline reminds me that horror doesn’t have to be about running or fighting; it can be about listening, parsing and making careful choices. It’s a horror game that rewards paying attention, reading closely and noticing the small, weird details. That feels new, even though the game’s entire aesthetic is late ’90s nostalgia.
In the end, Home Safety Hotline is a weird little gem: comfortably unsettling, smartly designed and memorable long after you clock out. It turns homeowner stress into supernatural dread and customer service into survival horror. Depending on the player, the amount of text might feel like a drag, but this game is markedly unique and memory-making, despite the Memory Wisps. For fans of analog horror, SCP-style worldbuilding or just the dark comedy of turning ordinary life into nightmare fuel, this hotline is worth calling.
Daily Arts Writer Estlin Salah can be reached at essalah@umich.edu.
