It’s not every day when you find a game that lets you play as the villain instead of the hero. Deck of Haunts has you play as an evil entity building a haunted mansion, while haunting and killing visitors that were unlucky enough to stumble upon your mansion. It is a simple game with minimal story, but with a direction rarely taken, combined with deck-building and roguelite mechanics.
The game is divided into two sections, haunting and construction. Haunting happens during the night, when unsuspecting visitors lured by your mansion’s mysteries explore the corridors of your evil lair. It is here that you draw cards and play them with limited energy to either haunt or kill your visitors, both of which provide you with currency.
Some visitors have higher health, which requires you to haunt; while others have higher sanity, thus making it easier to kill them. As a result, you have to carefully plan and choose which cards to use before the visitors stumble upon the literal “heart” of the mansion.
The second part of the game happens after successful haunts, which is the construction of the mansion. You are able to build rooms based on the currency you have earned, and upgrade those rooms into quarters of dread and murder, each with their own advantages that can help in your hauntings.
With each haunting and construction phase, your mansion will grow, drawing more visitors who will come to search for the malevolent heart of your mansion. You will need to juggle the construction and placing of your rooms to further distance the “heart” of the mansion from the entrance, while haunting your guests over the course of an in-game month.
What I Like About The Game
The game pushes the limits of what deckbuilding and roguelite games can be. Along with being able to play as an evil entity, the game offers a breath of fresh air over the run-of-the-mill AAA games being dished out every year. We have seen a lot of games that try to copy the success of popular titles by offering essentially the same game with slight tweaks (like what Curse of the Dead Gods is to Hades, or what Death must Die is to Vampire Survivors). Therefore, a game that uses an established mechanic, but pushes things into a completely different realm, is a step in the right direction in my opinion.
The theme of being an evil entity growing a dreadful mansion while haunting or killing humans really lands in this game. The aesthetics of each room brings out the evocative fear and terror as you try to determine which is the best course of action to play on your unsuspecting visitors. Although the animation of each card being played is a little lacking, each card is beautifully drawn, which does make up for it.
There is a strategic element on where to place rooms, what cards to choose and how to haunt or kill the visitors, which gives a tactical edge that reminds me of other deckbuilding games like Slay the Spire. Use the wrong cards, and you might be unable to stop a visitor from stumbling on the “heart” of the mansion; or make the rooms spaced too near to each other, and the visitors might spread out to different rooms, making haunting or killing harder. These deliberate decisions make the game feel fresh with each new run, as you try to hold out till the end of the one-month period.
What I Don’t Like About The Game
The first thing I noticed was the steep difficulty of its learning curve – expect to fail a lot of runs before grasping how to place rooms and which cards to pick. After the initial tutorial and a few new things that come in between, the game does not hand-hold you at all, as you are suddenly placed in a mansion with a lot of visitors, forcing you to scramble to haunt or kill them. A misplaced room or playing the wrong card can end the run prematurely, which can be frustrating. There is also no log or history of the last run, making it difficult to trace what you did wrong or find a better layout, as you have to rely on your memories instead.
Another thing that I find lacking, as I have mentioned, is the animation of the cards being played, as they look the same from one card to another, with the exception of some unique cards. The rooms have better animations for each horror they contain, which is surprising since most of your time spent in the game involves playing cards during the haunting portion. Even the visitor animations are a little limited, with only subtle differences between the classes of visitors, and their character art tends to repeat even in the same haunting period, which is a little jarring. I would love to see more animations from the cards being played to show the kind of horrors I was inflicting on my visitors, and not just them suddenly being hurt or abruptly dropping dead.
Although not entirely a demerit, I would have loved to see more variety to the “evil entity” than the only one we have in the game. For instance, changing it to a vampire or setting it in the Five Nights at Freddy’s world, which would change up the rooms you can build and the cards that you can get. Maybe (and hopefully) the game developers would be able to expand the game more with this input in mind, which would add more interesting ways to play the game. For now, once the game is beaten, there is not much incentive to return, other than trying to optimize playing the game, or finding every achievement.
In Conclusion
There is nothing more fitting than the saying “it is good to be evil”, since that is what you will be doing in this game, and it certainly gives you a very innovative way to be evil. I hope to see more of this type of game and mechanic in the future. All in all, I give it a 7 out 10 pies.
Wishlist or buy Deck of Haunts on Steam, and top up your Steam Wallet on Codashop for bonus rewards.
