Home Safety Hotline, the wonderful analogue call centre horror from developer Night Signal Entertainment, is getting the movie adaptation treatment from Love and Monsters director Michael Matthews.
Released in the early days of 2024, Home Safety Hotline flings players back to 90s for their first day on the job at the titular company. It’s a game that revolves entirely around your Windows 95-inspired desktop, where you’ll field incoming calls from members of the public, all requesting assistance for niggling little issues blighting their homes.
Once you’ve answered their call and listened to their (excellently voiced) woes, you’ll pop them on hold. Then it’s time to consult your slowly expanding reference manual to identify the most likely cause of their troubles – their gurgling drains, their itchy skin, the sudden appearance of passageways to other dimensions – before relaying the (hopefully accurate) information back to them. At first, it’s nothing more exotic than cockroaches and bed bugs, but soon enough things take a wonderfully sinister turn and stuff gets weird.
It’s a treat, brilliantly capturing its retro aesthetic and conjuring an expansive world of oddball lore that’s fertile ground for a movie adaptation. And according to The Hollywood Reporter, that adaptation is coming in a partnership between Spooky Pictures, Image Nation, and Longevity Pictures. Michael Matthews is helming the movie based on a screenplay by Nick Tassoni.
As per its synopsis, Home Safety Hotline’s film adaptation follows an “unemployed loner” who takes a job as a phone operator at a mysterious home security company, “only to realise they specialise in protecting customers from horrific monsters that come out at night”. The project is described as a “fun horror thriller” blending the “tonal influences of Severance and Stranger Things”. Fingers crossed Home Safety Hotline gets the adaptation it deserves!
If your interest is piqued, Home Safety Hotline – which is available for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, Switch, and Steam – also has a festive standalone expansion, titled Seasonal Worker. And developer Night Signal Entertainment is teaming up with Grey Alien Games for its next project: the sublime-looking “card-slashing horror game” Forbidden Solitaire, which sees players exploring a cryptic 1995 CD-ROM “that should have never existed”.
