Deck of Haunts

It’s always a little extra exciting to be reviewing a game made in my own home country of Belgium. Does it help that Deck of Haunts is also a roguelike deckbuilder of sorts? You bet it does! I had played a demo for this before during a previous edition of Steam Next Fest and had immediately fallen in love with its premise: this is a haunted house game where you play as the tragic building. People will come to explore your chambers, and it’s up to you to protect the core at your centre.

To me, the game feels like a single-player variation of something like Betrayal at House on the Hill, this really fun board game where you create a haunted house tile by tile before one person in the group has to hunt down the others before they can accomplish their goal. Deck of Haunts keeps things a little simpler – well, at the start anyway – with it playing more like the staples of the roguelike deckbuilder genre. You get three action points, you play cards that cost that much, and you choose who to target. The ultimate goal is to have your mansion survive for 28 days. Every night, people will come in to explore your ruins, and if they enter the central chamber, your core will lose health. So it’s up to you to stop them from reaching that room! You do this not only by using your cards wisely in combat but also by increasing the size of your mansion and the number of rooms within. This is something you do during the daytime: you can expand rooms, create new ones, or upgrade existing ones. The upgrading especially is very nice, as what is just a room becomes something more grotesque and dangerous.

After you’ve finished the building phase, you go back to nighttime and fighting off the intruders. When you start the game, this is pretty simple. Each person who enters has two bars: one for health and one for sanity. With your cards, you need to get either of those bars down to zero, and that person will be out of the game. Defeat every one of the intruders, and you will have survived another night. The pressure isn’t just on not letting people reach your central room, though: when people panic, through seeing that central room or seeing someone else’s corpse or another terrifying sight, they will actively try to flee your building. If they make it out, they can come back on a different night, with the added bonus of already having knowledge about how you function. You clearly don’t want this to happen, as it would significantly reduce your chances of survival.

And things get tough enough as is. Each night, the number of people coming through the front door (or later on: through side doors) increases, as do their health and sanity bars. And then there are the unique features that everyone has. For example, during a particular night after your first week, the police will show up to investigate just why people keep disappearing or going crazy in this part of town. But they bring weapons, which can be used to unlock locked doors, and flashlights, which reduce the stress levels of everyone in the same room.

I found surviving just the first week pretty tricky when I started the game. Your central room only has 8 health points, and with every person that enters that room dealing 1 point of damage, it gets real stressful when on day 6 there are about 8 people walking around the house. Luckily, during every run you can earn better cards or upgrade existing ones to try and make it further. And progression does come naturally: there hasn’t been a single playthrough where I didn’t make it at least one day further down the calendar, so that did give me a lot of hope when I got frustrated.

And I did get frustrated, a lot. Maybe it’s just me getting overwhelmed too easily, but I found myself losing track of all of the separate parts during later stages. There are just so many people in so many different rooms entering through so many different doors, and then they all have their own buffs, but with each turn, they switch rooms, making things more confusing. It doesn’t help that most of the people who enter your building don’t look all that different from the others. If you zoom in enough, you’ll see that they’re not just copy/pasted, but when your building is full of different people, it can become a little hard to keep track.

It’s a shame that I have to critique that, because otherwise the presentation is phenomenal. The music is understated, just creating that sinister atmosphere in the background, while the mansion itself looks like it had a rich history but has fallen into a much darker place since. The added touch of the Art Deco on the cards you play just feeds into that: this was a place of wealth, where shady things have happened, and you wouldn’t want to spend the night in that place on your own.

It’s the setting that made me fall in love with the game, but it’s the gameplay that will keep me coming back for more throughout the year. The loop is just really addictive, with each night passing by quickly enough that you’ll want to play another, but entire runs taking quite some time and really demanding that you stay invested. It’s hard not to keep your attention, though, as playing a haunted mansion has never been this much fun before.