Deck of Haunts Review

I feel I should start this whole thing out by making it clear that I’m not someone who usually feels drawn to villains and their storylines or motivations. Everyone loves a well-developed villain as the foil to an interesting, complex hero, of course. But I’ve never been one who felt like the anti-hero vibes really resonated with me. All that said, who would have thought I would have the absolute time of my life playing the role of a murderous haunted house?

Deck of Haunts, developed by Mantis Games and published by DANGEN Entertainment, is a roguelike deckbuilder that puts you in the shoes (foundation?) of a haunted house that’s been imbued with big main character energy. Each night, groups of humans enter the house to investigate its dark mysteries. Your task is to use your arsenal of terrors to defend your heart room, that guards your health points. 

The eponymous “Deck of Haunts” provides you with actions to either attack and damage the investigators within your walls, or to drain them of their sanity. In order to end the night, you must either kill or drain the sanity of every human who enters the house, for 28 nights in a row. Some may escape your treacherous halls, but that will cause subsequent groups to come even more prepared to take you down. Most important of all, if a human breaches your heart room, you lose one of your eight health points. Lose them all and the game is over.

Deck of Haunts in Action

In between nights of hauntings, you’ll encounter a build phase, where you spend essence points (derived from the souls you consumed within your walls) to add rooms to your ever-expanding footprint. More rooms means more opportunities for humans to get lost and succumb to your dark powers before finding the Heart Room. Occasionally, you’ll also receive the opportunity to convert basic rooms into special rooms that provide bonuses to your damaging or sanity-draining abilities.

As a big fan of deckbuilding roguelikes, I have very few gripes with the genre as a whole. But if I have one complaint to lodge, it’s that very few of these games ever manage to convey the experience of doing anything other than playing a deckbuilder. Whether they’ve been reskinned to have a fantasy vibe, or exist in a sci-fi world, or have some deep lore to be discovered beneath the surface, the vast majority of the time, you still just feel like you’re playing a card game at the end of the day.

Immersive house-based roleplay

Deck of Haunts stands out as a distinctly immersive deckbuilding experience. The 3D top-down view of the house (also, our playable character) provides a very tangible view of the game’s state, at a glance. Watching the intruders’ every move, as they decide which doors to open, when to split up and when to regroup, truly gave me the sense that I was watching a macro view of a horror movie in motion. Seeing my moves and their counter moves play out visually within the walls of the mansion also deemphasized the turn-based nature of the gameplay even though it’s just as turn-based as any other deckbuilder. I was in it. And I wasn’t about to let these fools leave my walls without a fight.

Another aspect of the game design that pulled me in and immersed me in the world of the game were the card-based abilities themselves that make up your deck. Each one very succinctly and palpably represents an identifiable horror movie trope, but also fit snugly within the internal logic of the game. My favorite example of this is the card “Guttural Pain”, which you can only use on a “solo” human, who finds themselves alone in a room. The ability does physical damage to that person, but their cries also affect adjacent rooms, draining the sanity of anyone close enough to hear them.

Whether you’re a die hard horror fan and want to get a little taste of being the evil entity that would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids, or if you’re a roguelike deckbuilder fan who’s tired of the same old same old, there’s plenty for everyone to enjoy in Deck of Haunts.

Balancing challenge, approachability and fairness

The learning curve of the game is quite manageable, due to the that fact that your card-based abilities will make sense both to anyone who’s seen a horror movie or read a scary story, and also follow the physical logic of the haunted house. This can be another pitfall that roguelikes and deckbuilders both often fall into, where unique mechanics get fun, flavorful names, but wind up losing their intuitiveness as a result. Because Deck of Haunts draws from recognizable tropes and the gameplay exists within this physical world you see as your “board,” fewer concepts need to be explained in order for the player to know what they’re doing and what the result might be.

In terms of its level of challenge, Deck of Haunts lived up to my expectations for this genre. You’ll need to play plenty of runs before you get a win, and every player will need to figure out which strategies and builds fit best with their play style. The game does reward you for playing more, as you’ll gain experience and level up at a meta level across runs. Leveling up unlocks new cards that you can draft to your deck each round, and higher level cards provide significantly more powerful abilities.

There are four decks to choose from at the start of a run: one that focuses on damage, one that focuses on sanity drain, a balanced deck (your default to start with) and a chaos deck that chooses randomly from the cards you’ve unlocked so far. I found that focusing in on either damage or sanity drain really helped in my progression overall.

Deck of Haunts Trailer

Lastly, as with any roguelike, there are plenty of integrated moments of randomization, from the cards you get to draft each round, to the decisions that the humans make while inside your walls. I frequently feel plagued by the RNG gods in games like this, but in this case I actually felt like the randomization helped me just as often as it hurt me in a run. All in all, I felt the game’s systems were well balanced and fair, but also provided plenty of challenge.

Whether you’re a die hard horror fan and want to get a little taste of being the evil entity that would have gotten away with it, if it weren’t for those meddling kids, or if you’re a roguelike deckbuilder fan who’s tired of the same old same old, there’s plenty for everyone to enjoy in Deck of Haunts. I don’t often say this, but I would love to see Mantis Games release some expansions or DLC’s, as there’s plenty more fodder in the horror genre to play with here, and I don’t foresee myself getting tired of this game anytime soon.

Emily was provided with a review key of Deck of Haunts by DANGEN Entertainment

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No Small Games is an indie game recap and review podcast brought to you by hosts Kate and Emily! They became friends while streaming on Twitch and bonded over their love of indie video games. In each episode of No Small Games, the two will discuss an indie game they both played independently. They’ll compare their experiences: the good, the bad, their most memorable moments of their playthroughs.

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