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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<\/a>, 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\u2019s equal parts call center drudgery and analog horror dread.<\/p>\n The premise is simple and brilliant: You play as an operator at the titular homeowner hotline, fielding calls from panicked denizens. Sometimes they\u2019re dealing with mundane nuisances like raccoons in the trash or termites in the walls. Other times, they\u2019re plagued by pests more fantastical than mice or moles: attic gnomes<\/a>, bed teeth<\/a> or Memory Wisps<\/a> that erase your loved one\u2019s 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\u2019s haunting their home. The database expands day by day, and the game doles out its creepy world-building slowly, ensuring you\u2019re never overwhelmed but always a little unsettled.\u00a0<\/p>\n As your workweek progresses, you learn that the accuracy scores you\u2019ve been receiving each day do indeed matter. Endings vary based on your performance and your ability to answer your fae manager\u2019s series of riddles when transported to the middle of the woods. But you\u2019ll 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\u2019ll be promoted! Junior supervisor, here you come.\u00a0<\/p>\n So, does the game work? Absolutely. Home Safety Hotline is clever, funny and creepily immersive. The interface looks like a perfectly preserved late-\u201990s 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 \u2014 into the walls, the attic, the phone lines. The only real caveat is that the game is very text-heavy. You\u2019ll be clicking, reading and cross-referencing constantly. Personally, I\u2019m a reader, so I found this satisfying, but players who want more action may find it slow.<\/p>\n