Home Safety Hotline

Neat retro art direction and setting. I love the gameplay loop and actually played this game in one sitting. The story is a good slow burn, analogue horror style too, which is very cool. The artbook at the end and the ng+ settings are awesome bonuses for finishing too. I'd recommend this game for sure.

The game is very aesthetically pleasing with a great atmosphere, great voice acting definitely adds to it as well. This game is best to play without much prior knowledge, as most of the horror comes from your failure and often severe consequences of it in calls of unsatisfied callers. (Those calls also often give you hints, or outright answers making it easier to get right if you were to replay it to get 100% accuracy.) It’s not where all horror comes from, but the majority of the rest are implications which some might skip over or not think so much of. You need to get pretty involved due to that, the game has a definitely more subtle approach to horror, which is a type of horror that I prefer. So if you’re more into more explicit horror it might not be for you. The game is also rather quick, but it’s also advertised as such, so not much surprise there. Small-ish rant, but I also really appreciate setting that allow you for example to censor pictures that might trigger some common phobias (like arachnophobia or scopophobia ), some might see it as counterproductive, but phobias don’t really create the sense of fear that most horror is going for, but more of panic, at milder cases it might be high anxiety at stronger ones full on panic attacks and can be very dangerous. And exposing people to their phobias (especially in horror) might worsen them. It’s more likely to make someone quit the game and never play again than to invest them in horror and a lot of horror, like this game, requires investment. As someone who has quit games due to realistic spiders before, I really appreciate that I didn’t have to ever worry about seeing one. For now I’m giving myself time to forget all (or at least most of) the answers and hopefully pick up the title again soon, sadly my first time playing was after watching a playthought so I kinda knew the answers, but I definitely enjoyed the game regardless (probably less than if i played it before watching anything) and I definitely recommend this if you enjoy this kind of game ^_^