In the game, the player works for the titular Home Safety Hotline, providing callers with correct information on how to deal with ordinary and supernatural household hazards.

[2][3] If players fall short of a number of correct guesses, they will receive a disciplinary call, and if they continue to answer incorrectly, their employment with the Hotline will be terminated and the game will end.

[7] The monsters included in the game were a mixture of Lives' own creation and existing mythological entities, with additional inspiration from the SCP Foundation series of fiction and the horror artwork of Trevor Henderson and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia.

Edge described the game's interface as a "potent setting for horror", with its grainy imagery and green-tinged hue viewed as evocative of a "haunted quality".

[2] Kyle Leclair commended the presentation and interface to have a "perfectly-captured old-school PC feel", praising its "low-tech" simplicity for allowing the focus of the game to be on its narrative.

[5] Cass Marshall of Polygon found the subtle distortions of the interface and sound effectively conveyed a "strong sense of wrongness and unease" and helped "ratchet up the tension".

Marshall highlighted the game's "deliciously unsettling" and "very effective" premise, citing the reliance on "slow, creeping realizations" about the "perfectly off and disturbing" experiences of individual callers.

[4] While Boehm highlighted the game's "clever" concept and "unique style and tone", he considered some of the narrative elements to be short of "compelling or cohesive" and did not "connect in some way that revealed something about the world at large".

[2] Similarly, Alice Bell of Rock Paper Shotgun praised the "brilliant framing" and "excellent" writing style of the game's index entries but found various plot threads to end unresolved.

[16] Leclair noted that the game lacked challenge and was "relatively short in length", finding the difficulty to decrease over time due to the unique qualities of the supernatural entities.

[5] Boehm found the gameplay loop to be "relatively simple" and wished it had "more polish", stating that the game lacked features such as searchable terms or direct feedback on whether the player provided a successful answer.