Whilst it’s not a revolutionary deck building roguelike, Deck of Haunts’ theme certainly makes it more interesting.
I’m pretty sure there are more deck building roguelike games than there are other games in the universe at this point. I generally enjoy the genre and have played a lot of them, with the likes of Monster Train 2 and Balatro being obvious standouts for me. Deck of Haunts follows a very familiar path to a lot of these games, but has a couple of interesting twists that stops it from being lost in the shuffle.
In Deck of Haunts, you control a haunted house which you are trying to grow in size, stature, and power over the course of a month all whilst silly little humans come to explore the interior. Obviously this cannot stand as the house’s horrifying secrets must remain hidden, so you ensure none who enter survive with their minds intact. In terms of the overall plot, that’s about as much as you’re getting, but there are more elements to it as well as additional stories that you can learn about if you complete tasks during your various runs. These range from killing certain types of people or unleashing specific creatures at specific times. With that said though, this is once again a gameplay-forward deckbuilder, which is absolutely fine by me.
Each day, people will venture into your house either because they’re exploring or they are actively trying to destroy it and your job is to get rid of them. You’ll do this by playing cards to either damage their health or drain their sanity. Should either reach zero they’ll be incapacitated and you’ll gain essence to expand your house. If you don’t eliminate people by the end of your turn — the usual “spend three energy to play cards” rule is at play here — then they’ll explore deeper by moving into random adjoined rooms. If they reach the heart they’ll either flee to tell the community of the threat or they’ll try to destroy it themselves.
Your cards tend to do direct damage to health or sanity, or buff future damage, but there are some neat curveball ones that teleport people around the house, or block their escape if they flee upon seeing a dead body. There are a few fun systems at play, with different people having traits such as one that causes them to enter the house via a random room, or perhaps that they can resist sanity damage more easily. You’ll need to target the right people at the right time, and try not to let anyone escape as they’ll return another night with back up and stronger stats.
Survive a night and you get to add cards to your deck as you’d expect for this genre, but some of those cards are rooms rather than attacks. This leads me to my favourite part which happens between nights: building your house. Killing people earns you Essence which you can spend on adding, expanding, and moving rooms within your house. Doing this creates longer routes to the heart as the number of rooms increases, or makes rooms more dangerous as they grow in size. There are even a few specialist ones like the Workshop that release monsters into your house that will assist you in future nights. I really enjoyed this tactical level which gave me Dungeon Keeper (remember that, kids?) vibes as you find ways to make heroes have to work so much harder to get to you.
What lets Deck of Haunts down a bit though are the card gameplay being a bit samey from night to night. Yes, you get new cards to play with, different starting decks, and the occasional “boss” you need to deal with, but really it comes down to playing debuff and attack cards each turn. It’s pretty much how any deckbuilder plays, but when so many already do that then this isn’t really adding much. Thankfully the horror theme and housebuilding gives this an interesting enough twist to keep my attention. What’s more of a pain are the near complete lack of onboarding that leaves you to figure out pretty much everything yourself, and the poor console controls. This is clearly designed with keyboard and mouse in mind, so I think this would be less of an issue on PC, but I found navigation a real pain early on.
This is somewhat compounded by the rather muddy visuals which make it harder than it needs to be to find the person you want to attack. I ended up using the display at the top of the screen which meant all the interesting stuff in the house became somewhat pointless for me. There are some nice visual flairs though. I really like the lighting as the game transitions between day and night, and if you zoom right in you can see what some of the cards do to the people in the house which is neat. The sounds are a bit anaemic and don’t seem to have had a huge amount of attention paid to them. You get the occasional impressive scream or whispering voices when playing some cards though which I approved of.
Deck of Haunts is a solid deckbuilding roguelike with a neat theme and twist in the building of a haunted house. Whilst the moment to moment gameplay isn’t going to set the world alight, fans of the genre looking for something a little different could do far worse than having a go with the classic systems alongside added haunts.
Deck of Haunts is available now on PC, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch.
