Home Safety Hotline Xbox Series X Review 9.5/10 “The best horror game of 2024” ☎️🖥️ @SlickNickLives #IndieGame #GameDev

I’m going to start this review off by saying - whenever you get a phone call in this game, wherever you are in the directory, it puts you back right at the start. So, if you’re at the letter ‘P’, a phone call will come in and it puts you back to the start…which is the letter ‘A’ just in case you somehow know how to read but don’t know the alphabet… which is probably one person out there, and speaking of one, that's how many criticisms I have of this game. One. the one I’ve just said, That's it, the rest of this review will be just gushing praise - I adore this title.

So, with my vast negativity about this game now out of the way, let’s get into why it’s utterly amazing.

You start Home Safety Hotline by playing a Home Safety Operator, a service whereby people can ring up, describe a problem that they are currently experiencing, such as - “I can see funny mould on my walls”, or “I think my rose bush has moved location”, or “please help me, oh my god I hear noises down in the basement! They are getting louder and louder! Please, god help me! Oh no, what's that? please don’t eat my soul!”, just typical things that happen in everyday life. 

Well actually these aren't things that happen in everyday life - I don’t have a rose bush for a start - but you get calls that can range from something simple but very quickly you then find out that it is probably something supernatural and you are then tasked with looking up a list of possibilities and doling out the advice that you feel is suitable. It’s as simple as that, and that is exactly what makes it brilliant. You’re tasked with something so simple but is also wonderfully engaging, the entries you read through are a delight, and though often you are interrupted whilst reading them, they are definitely worth reading through and taking in the wonderfully crafted narrative that is being built.

What makes it better is that Home Safety Hotline is set in 1996, the age of dial-up modem and great computer systems that aren’t exactly the swiftest, or most technically competent. Now, I’m just young enough – or old enough, depending on which side of it you want to look at it - to remember this age and it brought me great joy seeing it brought back to life, even without the nostalgia it is a fantastic way to set up the game and the systems that it uses. 

My first play-through was an absolute mess, getting everything wrong, which I’m guessing is meant to happen by design (or maybe I just suck) but even the experience of failing is great, you get to experience harrowing phone calls of people that you have screwed, shouting, and screaming about how you have made the problem worse and were completely unhelpful to them. For the first time in my gaming experience, I felt genuine guilt as they rang up regaling me about how I had failed them and how bad things had gotten for them, A lot of those phone calls ended with screams, let me tell you. Even when failing, it felt engaging.

Some people might not find this experience as unsettling and disturbing as I did, but Home Safety Hotline has an element of humour to it - which is good – although it is an absolute, primal fear of mine - mixing horror and humour. There is a certain mock advert with a killer in a sitcom setting which has cost me three full nights of sleep...probably four now that I’ve thought about it again, so I found myself getting rather spooked, but others may find it less disturbing than me.

SUMMARY
I loved every moment that I shared with Home Safety Hotline; it is amazing throughout. I’m going to add massively to global warming with just how much of a light I want to shine on developers Night Signal Entertainment. 

If you are a fan of horror - or just amazing things in general - you should play this, and even if you’re not you should still play it anyway.

9.5/10

🧊🆒 ICE COOL 🧊🆒