Home Safety Hotline: Seasonal Worker – Game Review
It’s been a while since I’ve been bad at my day job. I’m by no means a rock star, but being 40 and doing some version of the work for almost half of that time, you acquire a basic level of competence and learn to avoid fucking up too badly. That said, when you do screw up at work, it tends to sit with you, especially if the job conditions aren’t great.
Years ago I worked at a small office as a sort-of social media/blogger/marketing catch-all for a website that absolutely did not need any of those things. I would write an email newsletter, blogs about that particular industry’s news, and social media posts about random events around the office like birthdays and holidays. The kind of content that would be shared and liked by everyone at the company and no one else.
Each of those items were scrutinized down to the very last detail by the company CEO, who had me come into his office with a printed version of every new blog, email, and tweet. He’d then meticulously scrawl all over the page, making changes that were almost all entirely subjective. We’d repeat this process over and over throughout the day. By the time I finally hit publish, I was so burned out that I would inevitably miss some obvious spelling error.
This amount of one-on-one interaction with the guy who held my paycheck in his hands, who seemingly hated everything I did, and whose edits seemed entirely arbitrary, made every day of work feel like a nerve-wracking, dread-inducing experience. I sucked at my job, and I had no idea how to fix it.
That was all a distant memory until I had it dredged up by a little video game called Home Safety Hotline: Seasonal Worker.
The original Home Safety Hotline was a novel concept where you took on the role of a call center specialist giving advice about increasingly-haunted domestic situations. The game armed you with a catalog of various creatures, ghosts, and other phenomena, and it was up to you to advise callers based on what they told you was happening. The challenge of the game was simply listening carefully to all the details, and matching them up with a corresponding entry in the catalog. Frankly, it wasn’t particularly challenging, but it was pretty unique, and it had a fantastic vibe.
The new expansion, Seasonal Worker, seems to have taken fan feedback to heart. Some said that because the original game was relatively easy, players wouldn’t get to hear some of the more interesting dialogue. And so, this new expansion ups the difficulty significantly.
That would be fine if it felt fair, but most of the calls are short and vague. Your catalog of oddities combines many entries from the main game with a slew of new entries. So it’s often just a wild guess between two or three similar options.The correct answers feel arbitrary, and the punishment for answering wrong is usually a person berating you the next day.
I knew I’d stopped enjoying Seasonal Worker when a woman called in screaming that I’d killed her dog. The performance was quite good, in that she sounded truly distraught, but that only made it worse because I’d spent so much time reading and re-reading that damn catalog trying to figure out the perfect answer.
Home Safety Hotline has vibes of the backrooms, Control, or The X-Files, but it also captures the mundanity of average call center work. It is essentially a job sim. Seasonal Worker feels more like a being-terrible-at-your-job-sim, and the awful feelings it conjured up brought me right back to those stressful days at my old job.
On one hand, I respect a game for being so willing to take a player through such a miserable experience. On the other hand, I don’t think many people would enjoy reliving the experience of having a bad job. Bad jobs are an almost universal reality for most people, and not one that many would knowingly subject themselves to.
And hey, maybe it won’t be that serious for you! There are ways around the fail states, and the game is friendly enough in its options that you can basically cheat your way to the ending if you want to. That said, I would have preferred an experience closer in challenge and fairness to the original game. I would have much preferred a game that didn’t kick up old trauma about a crappy job I’d rather forget.
By increasing the difficulty and making the answers feel arbitrary, Seasonal Worker sucked the enjoyment out of Home Safety Hotline. Maybe that makes it a more interesting piece of art, but I don’t get the sense that the creators wanted to push buttons here. I think ultimately Seasonal Worker is simply a miscalculation—a response to player feedback gone awry. The main game is absolutely worth playing, but I can’t recommend this DLC expansion.
Red Ring Circus 