Review - Deck of Haunts

Developer: Mantis

Publisher: DANGEN Entertainment, Game Source Entertainment

Available on: PC (Steam)

I personally love games like Evil Genius and Dungeon Keeper from back in the day. Really, anything that takes the usual expectations and flips the script a bit gets me excited. For these titles, it was about being the bad guy and building a base around keeping out goodie-two-shoes interlopers and heroes. So when I got the press release from Deck of Haunts, about you playing as a haunted house using a deck-building rogue-like mechanic to deal with unwanted guests, I immediately reached out and asked for a code. I then promptly forgot about it for six months until, voila, an email showed up in my inbox with a code, and that they had already been out for a week.

So I was stoked to get hands-on with what I thought was going to be a modern-day take on the Dungeon Keeper concept, but was wildly disappointed. You would think, after decades of refinement on the genre of both rogue-likes as well as deck-builders that have now permeated gaming so deeply, that a game would be able to at least keep a baseline of mechanics and then add to it. However, Deck of Haunts is a paper-thin experience that got old after one full run, which, for a game you’re supposed to play time and time again, is instant death.

When you load up the Deck of Haunts, you start off with an isometric view of the layout of a house. You have the ability to add rooms to your layout in 1x1 chunks of rooms, like kitchens, guest rooms, and living rooms. What do each of these rooms do? I have no idea, except that kitchens are yellow, guest rooms are colored red, while living rooms are blue. They give no abilities, no reason to make the rooms larger or more expansive. You eventually unlock cards between days of the week that allow you to add on to these individual rooms, like making one room have a giant man-eating venus fly trap that damages intruders when they walk in, or a giant bell tower that you can drop the bell on an intruder for a one-shot kill. However, as you “level up” these rooms, all you’re doing is moving the rooms around in a way to make sure the heart of the mansion is as far away and as convoluted a route to your front door, where most of your guests come in. Eventually, stronger guests will just come in through random windows and doors on the map, which, while making for a more interesting challenge, is still a nuisance on par with Evil Genius 2. I would spend hours building these elaborate mazes to keep people out, and then just have a super agent pop into the middle of the base with no real way to deal with them.

Your goal in Deck of Haunts is to last an entire calendar month, with each day being one round of the game. You start with your initial layout of your small mansion and dealing with small-time thieves and investigators. You can simply murder them outright, gaining their souls, which you can use to level up your house and cards. However, leaving dead bodies around causes most humans to try and run for the hills, and if they escape after seeing a corpse, they will raise the alert level and make future days harder. The easier and sneakier of the two ways to deal with intruders is quietly driving them insane, but it nets you fewer souls. Most of your cards in your starter deck of cards are “deal X damage to human” or “cause X points of insanity to intruder”, or some mix of that. Unfortunately, there are no cool effects or anything when you’re doing this: you don’t get “guillotine blade,” and it causes a giant guillotine blade to fly out of the wall and cut someone in two. You click the card, you click the target on the map, there’s a flash of red, and the target takes damage. It’s somewhat…anticlimactic for a horror game.

Each turn, the intruders move closer to your mansion’s heart, which is your health bar, and if they get there, they start damaging it. Too much damage and you lose your run and have to start back over again at the beginning of your run and the month. However, in my first playthrough, I got all the way to the end of the calendar month with barely a scratch and barely having cards unlocked.

When you finish dealing with all your intruders for the day, you get to spend your hard-earned souls to level up your deck, draw some more cards, build new rooms to your mansion, the choice is yours based on how many souls you got from your previous day. You also gain account experience, which unlocks more cards for future runs as well. You’re not going to see or use all of them every run, but new cards get inserted into your choices as you level, bringing in new mechanics.

Make your choices, the next day starts, and a new wave of survivors comes walking through the front door to Scooby Doo their way through things. As the days move on, survivors with more skills, like police officers and occultists, start making their way into your lair, bringing a new mix of skills that take away from your ability to hurt them or others. But again, the baseline deck of cards I started with, and running the absolute minimum of add-ons and I almost beat the game my first run.

One of the primary concerns is that I got to the end of the month, got beat by the house’s big bad guys (the Stonemasons, apparently a group of hardened ghost hunters who are immune to a lot of your tricks) and started my run over again…and immediately started over with the basic cards. There are no different types of house hearts, like alien, or werewolf, or something, to give you some basic skills or perks in one capacity. Hey, here’s one type of house where you are good at doing psychic damage, here’s another class of house that excels in dealing direct damage, something. Nope. Just here’s your deck of cards, start over.

And while you’re starting over with new cards, it’s the same starter deck that you started with at the beginning of the previous round. So the second I started up a new run, I immediately quit and walked away. I hadn’t unlocked enough cool new combos to make me want to play halfway through another round to start building out a new deck. You don’t get to pick your starting cards, you just have cards unlocked that you can choose from when you level up. You can’t go in and play around with your decks, build nasty combos that you like or want to test out.

So, no building of deck types, no choosing of “classes” of houses to play with, as I said, I did a single multi-hour run, got done, and immediately walked away. It’s a shame, the idea is sound, but the execution is extremely lacking.

DECK OF HAUNTS IS NOT RECOMMENDED