Home / Features /Home Safety Hotline’s Seasonal Worker DLC is Christmas come early ByChris McMullen 6 October 20246 October 2024
Home Safety Hotline’s Seasonal Worker paid DLC is Christmas come early, a real treat for fans of this uncanny, folklore-laden call-centre sim. Admittedly, I’m not entirely on board with the name, not when Ho-Ho-Home Safety Hotline is right there. But the base game (read my review) left me craving more weirdness, and Seasonal Worker delivers.
It casts you as a new character who, as in the original game, is tasked with diagnosing supernatural safety issues. That might sound like a cue for wall-to-wall Krampus variants, but Seasonal Worker is anything but lazy.
With the aid of some amazing artists, including Trevor Henderson, creator of Siren Head, developer Night Signal Entertainment has whipped up a whole new batch of supernatural pests and plagues. Saint Nick is in there, but he’s catalogued alongside ‘False Carolers’ and the child-stealing ‘The Locomotive’, which, I assume, is a wicked jab at The Polar Express.
Seasonal Worker does get a little sneaky, too. It doesn’t force you to pore through the main game’s beasties, but a handful do figure into your Christmas catalogue. On a couple of occasions, Seasonal Cheer (the game’s success metric) took a hit because I was overthinking things. If I’d listened carefully, I’d have twigged the caller’s problem was mice rather than monsters.
It seems a little odd, releasing Christmas DLC before Halloween has rolled around. But if stores can get away with it, why not games developers? I’d sooner have this than Dead Rising 4’s awful DLC, though that’s a different rant entirely. My one gripe with Seasonal Worker is that while the main game rewards you with a video ending, here you just get images with the credits.
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That’s far from a deal breaker, however. If you got a kick out of Home Safety Hotline, Seasonal Worker will chill and delight you, whenever you choose to play. Here’s hoping Night Signal is cooking something up for next year – I hear that Easter Bunny can be mean.
Home Safety Hotline’s Seasonal Worker DLC is available for £6.69/£7.79 on PC. It’s also included with the PS4, Xbox and Nintendo Switch versions of Home Safety Hotline.