DECK OF HAUNTS
- Hubert Spala
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
In ancient times, when the internet was young, Furbies were a thing and the economic downfall of society wasn’t yet on the forefront of day-to-day living, there was a game. Its name? DUNGEON KEEPER. In that game, you were tasked with raising a devilish dungeon, spawning hellish creatures, and making sure that the intrepid adventurers and do-gooders fail in their quest. In short, you were playing the bad guy doing bad things to good folks, and it was a thrill! A great bit of strategy, placement, resource management, you name it. This kind of game kind of… died off with time, shelved into the archives, with very few attempts to recreate it. Especially after Electronic Arts greed made sure to tarnish the name legacy with their terrible mobile attempt at bringing it back.
DECK OF HAUNTS isn’t exactly a spiritual successor, but it certainly, at least for me, share some of those vibes. After all, you ARE the haunted mansion - ever growing, ever changing. Your dark heart sits in a dank room, beating evil life into the very walls. Phantoms stalk the room, traps aim to cut the visitors to shreds, and a mighty bell rings ominously to strike fear into the interlopers. It’s a clever concept, I’ll give it that, to make a deckbuilder out of a room-placement game. It all gels together very well at first. It’s fun to see the bumbling humans moving from room to room, trying to figure out what’s hurting them, what saps at their sanity.
The style sells it well, too. There is a certain sharpness and moodiness to things. You are a proper abandoned mansion, and that eerie mustiness and darkness of your interior are well visualized. The sounds and music help a lot too, everything has a very fitting accompaniment, actions matching the sound cue, making for a pretty immersive experience. There is a bit of a hitch here, not strictly on the style, but on the functionality. The UI could use a bit of love. Especially starting the game, there are buttons after buttons, and menuing isn’t exactly tedious, but it is also not clear or sharp. Not once nor twice, I was a little confused by the order of events, when turns end (and that can last forever as humans confusedly try to find their space), or what rewards I reap for completing stages. A minor hiccup, to be sure, but annoying nonetheless.
The problems emerge when you start rolling run after run. See, the gameplay loop is perfectly fine, fun even. Each stage, a set of random humans with various perks roll in, and you must deal with them before they discover your dark heart and start hurtin’ your presence. Some are more pesky than others, with holy men getting protected in a crowd, policemen being impossible to lock down in a chamber, or the cursed occult stonemasons beelining to your heart with grim determination. You have two major ways to deal with a threat - pure, brute damage and sapping the sanity of the silly mortals. Damage is straightforward - deal enough to go over their health pool, and they die. However, if other humans spot a mangled corpse, they will try to escape, and you'd better off them before they do, or the next wave is gonna be harder.
Sanity-sapping is slower, on paper. More demanding. Need to keep raising tension, work the humans with a nice set of stressful events before you tackle their feeble minds and rob them of their lucidity. The nice bit is that insane humans do not cause others to flee, so you can sap’em dry no matter how many witnesses are around. And with proper deck and setup you can make devilish engines on mental anguish, sucking the minds dry of whole mobs of humans in a single turn. It’s a fun, tactical bit, a work of good room placement, good card usage, and managing the unruly humans on their stroll through your haunted corridors.
The placement of rooms is also quite crucial. There are special chambers that offer additional effects. Making humans bleed, dealing extra damage, robbing them of a turn…
The selection isn’t vast, but it is more than enough to make the runs a bit more varied and add some actionable utility to your kit. The overall strategy, however, never changes here - always try to make the longer route possible to your heart chamber. Sure, some pesky vermin will try to sneak in from other rooms, so a healthy buffer around the crucial chambers is necessary. But the general rule is to make sure that interlopers will have to go through as many rooms as possible before reaching their end goal and your demise.
This is sort of when the game runs out of steam, and hard, too. There is no real variety to your builds, no experimentation, no cheerful discoveries. You have, available to you, two ways of dealing with the challenge - either lean hard into maximising your damage output. Or focus on your sanity-sapping. And that’s it. There’s no alternative, no clever, deceptive builds, your decks across many runs will nearly always look the same-ish. All the new cards you unlock also perform those two basic functions, just in a variety of how hard-hitting as they can be. I admit, I have no concept of how this could be fixed. Maybe with some relics that can alter some options. Maybe a third way of dealing with the humans? But what could it be? No clue. The cards and systems in play work well, don’t get me wrong. It is good fun to play a full run, and the sense of satisfaction is there…
But the meta-progression is lacking, and the variety is just not there to keep you playing run after run. After you clean up with damage and then with a sanity-oriented deck, you’ve seen 99% of what the game has to offer, and the variety moving forward will be minimal. In any other genre, it wouldn’t be a big deal, but in a roguelike deckbuilder? It is a bit of a death sentence when the incentive to keep playing isn’t there. You don’t feel like you're unlocking anything of worth, anything that wants you to keep going over and over again. Which is a big bummer.
Nonetheless… I’ll freely admit I had fun. Quite a bit of it! Despite what I just said about the repetitiveness of the experience, I still had over a dozen runs with the game, always trying to optimize the experience. Make the deadliest, most efficient haunted mansion imaginable. Score high, go deep into the endless mode, see how many humans I can instantly sap of their sanity in a single turn. Achievements do help the game's staying power, a bit, but I cannot deny that the title does have some special charm to it that kept me rolling through it despite every run being one or the other build, with minor changes in application of available tools.
And so, as for the conclusion, I’d say… if the horror vibe and unique setting of being a Haunted Mansion speaks to you, give it a go. It’s good fun, with cleverly made systems and great pacing of challenge versus available options. It only suffers a loss as a roguelike deckbuilder, due to a lack of variety in how you can tackle the proposed challenges. So if you don’t expect it to be your game for dozens upon dozens of hours, but want a nice, quick romp with a few runs? It should not disappoint. Just don’t expect a deep and rich roguelike experience that will keep you hooked for days.
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