Conceptually, Deck of Haunts is very cool — a roguelike deckbuilder where you play as a haunted house and terrorise teams of investigators and house flippers. But in practice, it’s rough around the edges and lacks an overall sense of progression.
Checking out the Steam page, I was shunted back to my days of Dungeon Keeper and Theme Hospital, hoping for a return to the days of silly, but well-built management and tactics. Even more recent deck-builders and haunted house tales like Knock on the Coffin Lid or The Horror at Highrook are strong contenders that come to mind.
Unfortunately, Deck of Haunts feels like a house built on shaky ground. The core premise is nice, but the rest feels thin and like it could come down at any minute.
Death Is In The Cards
The premise is simple; you’re a haunted house, every night, investigators come knocking, and you have to send them spiralling into madness… or violently murder them. You do so with a deck of cards that comprises rooms in the house, and abilities you can use against your rascally realtors.
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In roguelike fashion, you play through runs, trying to survive from days one through 28. The house has a heart, around which the haunted mansion is built. It takes damage whenever an investigator enters the room with it, and if you take eight points of damage — splat! You’re dead.
What struck me from the outset, if we are to carry on the comparison to classics like Dungeon Keeper, is that Deck of Haunts is entirely without heart (except the big one in the back room). Those classics lived and died on their style, the irreverent comedy of slapping your imps to make them work faster — or watching holier-than-thou adventurers being ground to a paste on traps.
Starting Deck of Haunts, you’re thrown straight into day one, no preamble, ancient demon or necromancer to set the stage as to why a haunted house is eating people. From there, it’s just one-line tooltips to give you the grand tour of the house, your cards and the overall progression.
It’s unfortunate there isn’t a bit more story or scene-setting to give some flavour.
Play The Cards You’re Dealt
There are a lot of points in Deck of Haunts that just feel loose around the edges. When the HP of your heart gets to zero, there isn’t a sound or a cutscene — or anything; a ‘game over’ message just splashes over the screen instantly. Similarly, investigators don’t have much in the way of animation or interactions with the house itself; they randomly walk around the house back and forth, sometimes entering and leaving the same room multiple times.
At the end of each run, you’ll gain experience and access to additional cards as part of your run. However, deck-building is restricted to the cards that randomly appear as you complete levels. There isn’t an overarching deck-building mechanic that would see you upgrading and customising your playthrough before diving back in. This means each time you start a new level, you’ll begin with pretty much the same cards and have the same progression as previous levels.
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As you survive through your 28-day run, you unlock more cards for your current deck, and you can slowly build a bit of a strategy. However, these are random as well, so you’re reliant on the luck of the draw as to what comes through and the available cards.
The cards themselves have solid artwork — hand-drawn depictions of ominous ravens, shattered mirrors and raking claws — if nothing else, these designs are worth a look.
Luck Of The Draw
On an ordinary day in any run, an increasing number of investigators enter the house — send them mad or kill them to progress. Either option has some nice feedback into the wider game; causing someone to go mad will give you more Essence to build and change rooms in the mansion between days.
Killing an investigator makes it so that others who enter a room with their corpse will run for the exit. I used this a few times strategically by killing one just outside the door to the Heart.
The design of these rooms is interesting, and a few of them have quite cool interactions. The Bell Tower can have the bell dropped on investigators, while the Thorns room includes a Little Shop of Horrors-style giant plant to chomp down on tasty humans.
There are also ghosts floating around, ominous breezes and glowing runes. I did, however, see a recurring glitch where the nice textures of my base rooms turned to coloured mud, see below.
There are also some cool character moments with investigators. When some enter the house, they have little speech bubbles about how “we could flip this” or commenting on the dilapidated state of the house itself.
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Play The Long Game
Further into each run, you start to see investigators with particular abilities. Police officers can shoot through locked doors, which means you can’t limit their movement through the house.
There are some enemies that are more resistant to mental attacks or less likely to run from a body. There are also investigators who will eschew the front door and come in through a side window to start later on in the house.
However, between the randomness of new cards between nights, the randomness of enemy spawn locations, and the inconsistencies in how they move through the house, I found most runs were won or lost purely by chance.
When The Chips Are Down
Deck of Haunts is a cool concept, but one that feels like a wispy bedsheet thrown over a mannequin — at first you think it’s something, but look closer and there isn’t much going on beneath.
My hope is that the developers of Deck of Haunts can take the time to expand the game, because there are pieces from the cards, to the rooms, to the core loop that feel like there’s something there.
Sometimes, you’re dealt a bad hand. Even though it isn’t your fault, it can still leave a sour taste.
Quest Daily Scores Deck of Haunts:
5/10
Deck of Haunts is available on PC via Steam for $29.50. There’s also a demo available to try before you buy.
Access to Deck of Haunts was provided by the publisher.
