Tell me, have you ever wanted to be a house? No? Strange... How about a haunted house? Perhaps one with a mean streak a mile wide? If the answer is still no, I think I have a game that can make a pretty good attempt to convince you otherwise. Greetings and welcome friend, I'm Ash and today I'd like to introduce you to Deck of Haunts - a roguelite deckbuilder that's all about expanding your house of horrors by tormenting and consuming scores of hapless investigators and exorcists.
Building the house of your nightmares
It all starts off very innocently during the daytime. This is where you get to purchase various room fragments and upgrades in order to construct the house of your dreams... or, well, nightmares! The goal is to create as many distractions as possible between your house's entrance and the very vulnerable heart that is the source of your power.
However, this is not as simple as building one long corridor and calling it a day. The further away from the heart you build the more essence it'll cost you each day to keep those rooms under your grasp. To succeed you'll need to compromise and utilize the entire length of your house to create something that is as maze-like as possible, while still sticking to a somewhat humble budget in order to be able to afford future enhancements. As it turns out, even eldritch abominates are not except from the horrors of the housing market!
Video version of this recommendation (~11 minutes)
The rooms you can build come in three distinct flavors: basic rooms that mostly just serve as a distraction for the pesky humans; special rooms like the haunted bell tower that come with unique effects; and upgrade rooms that can transform basic rooms of a certain size into something far more powerful. For example, a basic room that contains at least six tiles can be transformed into the weapons room which doubles the amount of damage done inside of it.
That's an obviously nasty effect that can easily wipe out scores of intruders, but don't get too cocky if things are going well because the investigators have the ability to temporarily disable your traps. If you let them finish their turn in a special room they will utilize that time to completely disable any buff, trap or special effect you might've had there for the duration of the night.
This is where a lot of the strategy with Deck of Haunts comes into play. Do you funnel your enemies into important rooms and work to dispose of them before they can sabotage your plans and potentially ruin everything, or do you try to separate them as much as possible and utilize trap rooms as an extra bonus rather than something you rely on? Personally, I prefer the first option as I like to imagine my house has a penchant for showmanship and so a magnificent chain-explosion is far more appealing than the slow, drawn out kill. Did this make me lose a bunch of games because I put all my eggs in the same easily disarmable-trap-basket? Oh yeah, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make in order to cause an explosion so large it makes the game stutter.
That said, I am slightly worried that the best building strategy will be to create a series of zig-zagging rooms that branch off to the sides in order to create as many possible ways for the investigators to get lost as possible. The special variants that go directly for you will still bypass all of that, but if they're the only ones beelining for you they'll be a lot easier to deal with than if they are a part of a massive crowd. Now mind you I've only played the demo so it's entirely possible the full version will have a way to counter this, but it's still something worth noting.
Loads of side passages with one chokepoint leading to the heart seems optimal
Torment the pesky investigators
Once the construction is complete and the night starts to creep in, it'll finally be time to pounce! Well, you'll have to wait for people to slowly filter inside, but then you'll pounce! Depending on the cards you draw each turn, as well as your overall strategy, you will be able to either kill any invaders by attacking them directly or by exposing them to enough horrifying things that they go stark raving mad.
Killing them is better as you get yourself a nice little snack for later, but it does also come with a higher degree of risk. If any human walks into a room and sees it freshly redecorated with their friend's bits and pieces, they're going to start running away. And if they do get away you'll not only be denied their delicious essence, but they'll also raise an alarm and make it so future incursions will be much stronger. If you play your cards right, both figuratively and literally, this can also be a benefit since a well-timed kill can spook any investigator that was just about to reach your heart and start doing damage to you.
Driving someone insane is comparatively harder, especially in the demo build I tried out. The problematic enemies like the exorcist monks generally have more sanity than they do health, so trying to deal with them covertly is quite a tricky task. In order to drive these types of enemies insane you'll first need to prime them by increasing the tension, usually by either showing them horrific imagery, having them haunted by ghosts, or just by doing the ol' classic and sharply dropping the room temperature. Once they're on edge any metal attack against them will be a lot more effective, sometimes even up to five times!
Nom!
A deckbuilding roguelite
You are somewhat limited in what you can do, however, as you only have three action points by default. Or in other words, you can only play three basic cards before you have to pass the turn and give the lil' humans a chance to mess up your plans. As you would expect from any card-based roguelite with this kind of system, there are obviously more expensive cards with more powerful effects you can find down the line, as well as ways of gaining more AP so you can sling chairs at people all night.
Overall it's a fairly simple system, and one that you've likely interacted with before if you're a fan of the deckbuilder genre, but it works and it works well. Outside of the very beginning there are rarely easy solutions to your problems, and so I frequently found myself needing to stop and think things through. Yet despite this I also found myself losing a fair few runs, often because I failed to stop early investigators from escaping which would then slowly snowball against me. That is by no means a complaint as a roguelite needs to have a healthy degree of challenge in order to remain interesting run after run, and so far Deck of Haunt has managed that rather well.
Speaking of which, Deck of Haunt also tries to spice each run up by letting you add one of four random cards to your deck every single night. These cards are all generally more powerful than the basic batch you start with, though they often come with restrictions you'll need to build around. For example, there's a series of cards that heavily punish isolated enemies, which is something that doesn't really happen all that much past the early game. So if you're running these types of effects you'll also need to redesign your house and ideally grab a few extra displacement abilities to ensure there's always someone that thinks splitting up the party to cover more ground is a brilliant idea.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, you could also grab cards that explode rooms and deal damage to everyone in them. If you're going down this road then your house design has to, once again, be entirely different, mostly focused on a few chokepoints. Same thing with your deck, if you're going for a wombo-combo you're going to need a healthy amount of card draw or card selection so you can make sure that once you corral all of the enemies into a trap you actually have something to spring on them.
My personal favorite build, although I've only managed to get it to work once, revolves almost entirely around sanity... or rather the lack of there of! The deck's goal is to use two specific cards that finish off low health enemies in order to build up power. This makes the early game incredibly risky as the supposed powerhouse cards hit like a wet noodle, but as soon as the sanity-draining engine gets started it's going to steamroll over everything!
That second card has some insane synergies!
Potential issues
It's worth mentioning that you aren't the only one that gains power each night. As the run progresses the invading investigators will be getting new abilities, both positive and negative. Some will be tougher or help keep others mentally stable, while a few will waltz in already on edge and mostly just freak out their fellow teammates.
While these abilities do make a difference, especially in terms of how tanky each investigator can be, I'm not particularly enthused with the system. After a couple of nights there's a ton of abilities in play, so much so that even simply trying to parse all of them gets a bit draining. I think I would've preferred if there were a couple of super-powerful leaders that you needed to deal with in order to weaken everyone else over the current barrage of random stuff. At least that way the abilities would be allowed to more interesting than simple stat-changes since you would always know who's the threat and who you need to focus on.
Aside from that, my only real complaint is that the balance between health/sanity damage is a little bit shaky since the enemies are able to brave scary situations far easier than a chair lobbed directly at the temple, but that's very likely to change once the full version goes out and we get more specialized cards.
Closing thoughts
And speaking of release, Deck of Haunts will be launching onto Steam on May 7th, 2025. It's worth noting that this will not be an Early Access beta or anything like that, but rather a full, proper release. So if everything I've shown you looks like it's right up your alley, I'd heartily recommend you check out the demo on Steam. I had a lot of fun with it and I can only hope you will too!