Night Signal Entertainment are the developers of Home Safety Hotline and the titular Night Signal. If you haven’t played their games, they handle the universal elements — writing and performance — extremely well, and marry that to a unique, hand-made style. How often can you say that your video game is made with practical effects? (Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess is the only other game I can think of.)

The developers focus on horror games. Few genres depend on their writing as thoroughly. It is easy to have a man in a mask (or spooky 3D model) jump out and yell “Boo!” It is much more difficult to sustain that, keeping the audience caught in the web, from beginning to end. The best way to do it is via character and mood, two things the developer excels at: the mood is sustained, as you are either immersed in a claymation 1960s or entirely confined to your mid-1990s work computer.

The special effects are practical. Often made from clay, the creatures are photographed or animated and take on a life of their own. As you study the bestiary in Home Safety Hotline, or flip through the uncanny channels of late-night television, you are confronted with one inescapable fact. They’re real. They’re inescapably real. This cuts past the knowledge that, whatever you are looking at, it’s only so many polygons or pixels and can be temporarily defeated by turning your monitor off. The monsters are really there.

Night Signal Entertainment’s games feature memorable performances from a troupe of actors. Sometimes they are funny and have brought this fate on themselves. Sometimes their performances are searingly real. The actors make the characters unforgettable.

You can find Home Safety Hotline (as well as its new DLC) and Night Signal on Steam. Their upcoming game Please Insert Disc, a horror game about navigating a 2000s-era gaming console’s menus, is coming soon.

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Featured Image: Night Signal Entertainment

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