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My first caller is John. John’s wife thinks there’s some kind of infestation in their kitchen; he thinks it’s just spilled coffee grounds. I place him on hold as I try to work out what’s going on.
It’s 1996 and I’ve taken on the job of telephone troubleshooter for Home Safety Hotline. In this analogue-horror (think VHS aesthetics and grainy, found footage) simulation game from Night Signal Entertainment, US homeowners who would today get to enjoy the anonymity of a Google search must instead call me with their household problems. And I, in turn, must advise them of the best course of action. The interface for all this is a suitably CRT-tinted lo-fi operating system, through which you access the responder software with its list of potential problems, symptoms and solutions. There’s also an inbox to keep you in touch with your corporate overlords.
Back to John, who has been suffering the faux-cheery hold music long enough. The software’s entry for cockroaches describes their droppings as resembling coffee grounds, and kitchens as being their usual stamping ground. I submit this as the potential cause and a Windows 95-ish sound effect informs me of the message’s delivery.
So far, so good. But behind what seems a rather banal occupation lies the creeping sense that all is not quite normal. A marketing video on your desktop hints at the hotline’s remit: fires, flooding, mould . . . metamorphosis? Among the hazard entries are cryptic messages: “Warning: never kill a mole” advises one without explaining further. Other entries cannot be accessed at all. Meanwhile, mysterious missives start to arrive in your inbox just as the hold music gets moodier.
Soon, the calls themselves follow suit. Curiously named customers report all manner of arcane happenings, and none of the entries in your encyclopedia seem to correspond. You begin to feel like the hitmen in Harold Pinter’s The Dumb Waiter, inundated with orders from above that they can’t possibly hope to fulfil.
At the end of each day you are presented with an accuracy rating, determined by how many cases you have successfully diagnosed. And while your employers will fire you if you’re not doing a good enough job, you’re never explicitly told which problems you have correctly resolved. The genius of Home Safety Hotline is in persuading you to become just as paranoid as your callers, diagnosing fantasy pests for problems that could just as easily be regular old mice. More mundanely, you recognise in your interactions — slow, impersonal, inexpert — everything you hate most about call centres.
It’s a little rough around the edges: some callers’ dialogue sounds less disquieting and more like one of the interdimensional cable advertisements in the animated sci-fi series Rick and Morty. And don’t expect the ending to blow wide open the history of your shadowy corporate overlords. But as pieces of short, interactive horror go, Home Safety Hotline is pleasingly unsettling — a story that slowly takes root in every corner of your house until nowhere feels safe.
★★★☆☆
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