Deck of Haunts Review — A Monster House Missing Some Monsters

Deck of Haunts is a turn-based card puzzle game with some building elements that tasks you with running a deceptively twisted manor. As a living haunted house, your drive is to lure unsuspecting humans into your halls and feed on their essence, either by driving them insane or outright killing them. As far as deckbuilding puzzle games go, Deck of Haunts is certainly unique, built upon an incredibly strong premise that no doubt is the reason you decided to check it out in the first place. However, this incredible premise kind of works against it, as I felt throughout the experience that Deck of Haunts failed to capitalize upon its own creativity, leaving much to be desired.

Deck of Haunts plays like a deckbuilding, house-building puzzle game where your goal is to survive 28 nights of increasingly difficult human invasions. Each night, humans wander into your… well, you, since you’re a living house, and go from room to room in a turn-based system, exploring your haunted decor as if they were on an unguided tour of the Winchester Mystery House. If they find the room that contains your heart, you take a bit of damage, so to stop them, you must either kill humans or drive them insane.

This is done with a series of cards drawn from a deck you build one card at a time at the end of each night. These cards deal damage directly to one of two health bars humans have—life or sanity—and otherwise build combos off one of those two effects, or both, challenging you to make the most of the cards you draw and the specific weaknesses of the people who wander your halls. Some humans have one bar that is significantly higher than the other, and there are strengths and weaknesses to both sanity-draining and straightforward killing. Murder provides more essence at the end of the night, but leaves behind a corpse that can trigger stronger invasions if a person spots it and escapes your halls. Sanity drain generally has more straightforward boost cards without the need for late-game combos.

At the end of each night, you also use the essence gained from defeating all of the guests to upgrade your house, creating more of a maze to deter humans from your heart while also upgrading certain rooms to have special effects. This gameplay loop is pretty good, if not a little repetitive, losing a lot of the mystique when you realize there isn’t a whole lot going on with the card diversity. This would be fine if not for my main gripe with the game.

I could have sworn I did an early access review of Deck of Haunts. Chalk it up to a case of the Mandela effect, but I certainly played the game’s demo and had a pretty strong opinion about what the game needed to change before it launched. Specifically, I remember feeling as though Deck of Haunts had an incredibly strong premise that it failed to capitalize on.

A game that essentially has you play as the Monster House from Monster House is an incredibly cool concept, one that can really capitalize on what must now be a hundred years of haunted house films and even longer of the concept in media as a whole. As you might imagine, a game that capitalizes on this aesthetic would be full of creepy visuals, awesome scares, and little animations that bring the concept of a haunted house together.

Deck of Haunts does not. While the rooms have a pretty neat design and there’s some animation within, the game is just about you playing cards that either put a quick blood slash effect on someone or a blue brain chill until their models topple over. There are no thematic kills, there are no jump scares, and there’s no cinematography to sell you on a game about being a haunted house. At most, you will see a creeping living plant or a ghost that wanders the halls, but there’s very little detail to them, and they don’t interact with the guests in any way.

Deck of Haunts was built upon an incredible premise, but with that idea, the developers kind of just delivered a very bare-bones, blanket aesthetic of “creepy” without really diving into it. It is almost as if the game was created by someone who thought a haunted house game would do well without really understanding what it is about the medium that would appeal to the people who would get into it. Either that, or the developers were incredibly limited in either imagination or resources and could not deliver something that would capitalize on its theme.

What Deck of Haunts needs is flavor. It needs a bit of soul. The rooms look cool, but they need to be more than a static backdrop while you play the same boring card combos over and over again. Killing someone in the kitchen should play an animation where the knives are thrown at them. Someone going insane in the living room should see an Evil Dead-style moose head laughing at them. The wandering phantom should actually interact with guests, and the giant plant should get to chow down on the corpses I leave for it.

All in all, Deck of Haunts feels like an idea, a great idea, with a lot of solid bones to build into a really cool game. In reality, however, it is a game that is launching into what I personally feel is a disappointing state, failing to capitalize on the full potential of what the developers could have made. The gameplay is fine, if repetitive, and the visuals are nice but static and lacking in flavor or excitement to make use of its premise. Deck of Haunts was a disappointment for me, but maybe others might feel differently. Just let me know if the game gets a sudden update that lets me strangle guests with a sausage rope like some twisted Scooby-Doo spinoff.

Try Hard Guides was provided a PC code for Deck of Haunts. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Deck of Haunts is available on Steam.