Home Safety Hotline

I so wanted to enjoy this but none of the calls go anywhere, there is no overall narrative and the callers, besides the initial impression and the anomalies, don't have much to offer at all since they're either angry, scared, confused or annoyed and that's it and it is disappointing because I think horror stories can offer more emotions than those isolated. The different creatures, while interesting at first, just become 8 different variations of Wisps (Soap Wisp, Rain wisp, Lamp Wisp, etc.) or 8 different variations of gnomes/hopps (Attic Gnome, Trash Gnome, Travel Gnome) You don't have a conversation with any of the callers either, so you only get the initial description and that's it. The overall scale of how things go feel very disconnected with itself because a lot of them go "Please send help! The police won't do anything!" and all you can do is "yeah you got an infestation :steam_happy: hope it helps" like bro they're not asking for a diagnosis. It's also really weird that you hear them, you tell them "please hold" then "send them info" on a computer loading....... how exactly are we sending the info? they're calling from home phones or at least that is what the quality of their voices is trying to hint at. Do they say stuff, you say please hold, music then hang up and a package arrives at their door? how does this company work? also a lot of the correct answers are so dumb like there's this entry where the caller says "hey ♥♥♥♥ smells bad and neither me or my dog can stand it" and pretty much all entries have bad smell. The answer? well, you choose the one entry that affects dogs... despite the entry saying it latches on dead dogs without any reference on their behavior and even then, why the ♥♥♥♥ are they bothered by their own smell? It gets explained why if you get it wrong, but said explanation contradicts her initial story and just adds even more questions. Also there's no way to replay days or jump chapters so if you are working for that 0 mistakes achievement, you're ♥♥♥♥♥♥. I also don't think the creatures entries are very well done either cuz they're like "Oh they just steal ♥♥♥♥, don't worry" or "LEAVE IMMEDIATELY" with no details or anything despite your supervisor telling you all the info you see is confidential so like, why is it worded like this is for the public? The beet is an example of a good entry that could be better, since it says the only way to remove it is to kill the host, but it doesn't really mention how it latches on the host nor why it cannot be separated from the host or just anything about the creature, just symptoms on how the host feels with it living inside of them. By the start of Saturday you already seen all entries and all I could feel was a sense of disappointment and fatigue. Not because I hated my time here but because I just kept feeling like it could of have been so much better. The voice direction, while fine, are either angry, annoyed, scared or all of them combined which is very disappointing for a game whose entire content is just that. Since they're all one time callers and one time stories, there's never any kind of development or deterioration in the caller either. I do find it weird that sometimes the text doesn't match the audio, either with words or just direction like changing "Shut up!! I know your teeth hurt, but daddy is on the phone right now!" to "Quiet, please.. I know your teeth hurt, but daddy is busy" EDIT: After reading through the artbook and the developer saying "playing the game poorly would net you more interesting content in the form of the consequence calls" I gave them a go and some of them are very good indeed but most are cheap "oh it's coming for me! wait oh noo gawwdd nooo", but it's still weird to lock all of that to the bad end content, as if they would only face them if you ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up which if so, what's the point of the instructions if not something they can do? why am I only getting a continuation on their story if things go badly? And it's not like you can go wrong in all of them cuz you get fired and you gotta restart, so it's just a very weird decision. As you go through the week, you get some videos sometimes being interrupted with missing persons cases and whatnot but 1) None of the descriptions of the events match any of the things in the entries 2) none of the victims match any name from any caller In all honesty, the only thing that ended up making this game worth it was the Art Book showing the game's development. I fw human creativity and the desire to create so badly and I love hearing stories about how we people connect with things and keep going forward despite the struggles of life, I just wish the game itself had some of that too. The artbook mentions how inspired it was about Analogue Horror but it just fails to comprehend *why* analog horror connects with people. The reward for beating the game with max accuracy is a set of options and QoL but since you beat the game and saw everything, there's not really a point for using any of them and that's just really sad. Overall, I want the developer to keep creating but I would be lying to everyone and myself if I marked this as "Recommended".