The fall season is almost upon us, so we are getting a head start here at GiN on some of the fun and spooky October gaming this week by taking a look at a unique horror adventure title, Deck of Haunts.
As the name might imply, Deck of Haunts takes a fun spin on the turn-based card game genre. The premise is not unlike some of the classic titles like Dungeon Keeper where players take on the role of the dungeon itself, but in this case a haunted house, and the player has to defend it from everyone including both casual visitors and those who are coming in with the intent of trying to destroy you and end the haunting.
Players will use cards to defend themselves, so Deck of Haunts involves both deck building and strategic playing. However, like most card games, it’s hard to verbally describe how it all works. For example, I play the card game Rook with my family, and it’s only through playing a couple rounds and experiencing it firsthand that anyone will really understand how it works.
In terms of Deck of Haunts, it reminded me a lot of the animated 2006 movie Monster House. If you have not seen that one (put it on your list), it depicts a haunted house possessed by a vengeful spirit. The house consumes all who venture too close or who wander into its halls.
Deck of Haunts has you take on the role of a sentient haunted mansion that is filled with bloodlust. Once dusk falls, you must drive out, kill or drive insane any and all curious or unsuspecting guests who arrive at your doors. You must deal with all guests before they arrive at the final room because that is where your one weakness is exposed: your heart. If your haunted mansion’s heart takes too much damage from guests, you die and lose the game. To impede their progress, you must fend them off over the course of 28 nights using a turn-based card mechanic that invokes subtle strategy and acute adaptation as each night progresses.
To handle each guest as the sentient haunted mansion, you must play different cards with various effects. Some cards strictly attack, some drain sanity which drives guests to madness and some do both. Others are more supportive, providing additional effects such as tension, which is a multiplier to drain cards causing guests to go insane much quicker. Cards may also move guests to random rooms, or lock rooms entirely so guests cannot leave. Learning how each card works is key to being as quick and efficient as possible. This is important as you are against the clock because guests keep navigating deeper through your halls toward your heart unless you stop them.
Most of the time if guests stumble across a dead body, they may do the natural thing and run out of the house as quickly as possible. However, guests may hold a variety of different traits causing you to take a different course of action. These different traits include not being scared of said dead bodies upon discovery, not being hurt by attacks in the presence of other guests, spawning in random rooms or possessing a weapon to bypass cards that lock rooms. Some tricky or powerful guests even have the ability to lessen or counter the effects of whatever cards you play in various rooms. As such, it’s important to keep track of these traits and know how and when to attack each guest.
Now, if you are able to successfully defend against your unwelcome guests, you can expand your halls come daytime to make each trip longer and more arduous. This is not unlike a tower defense game, where longer and more labyrinthine paths equal more breathing room as you attack guests and work to defend your heart. During this intermediary section between nights, you must build new rooms and extend the existing rooms of your mansion if you want to live. Eventually, your palace might resemble something like the mansion I explored while reviewing Blue Prince.
However, both building new rooms and expanding existing ones costs a resource called essence, which is gained from killing or driving people mad. It should be noted that killing people gains more essence than driving people insane, but the latter may be needed for certain guests depending on their traits. I personally enjoyed how creative you can be in building your mansion. Trying different strategies for the layout of the house was really fun, as well as how you can approach each night and terrorize various guests.
After each night you can select whether to either upgrade or build a room, or to instead add an offensive card to your hand. Different room types can help you in your quest to drive out guests. For example, some inflict fear or hurt guests upon entering. Additionally, at the end of each week you are faced with a “boss night” which hosts more guests that have more health and sanity, which tests your skills and ability to adapt in a more intense and quick paced setting. After successfully completing these nights, you are rewarded with the option to either upgrade an offensive card, a room or regain a valuable health point for your heart.
While playing, one strategy I found that worked for most nights was to attack the person closest to the heart and kill them within two or three rooms away from their goal. This causes a majority of the people who find the body (as they close in on your heart) to immediately turn and run away, leaving you to pick them off. Or if someone shrugs off the body and keeps going, you can concentrate your efforts on taking them down.
Furthermore, I found making a long pathway to the heart worked best, stalling the guests long enough for me to either kill or drive them mad before reaching the haunted mansion’s heart. Another option is branching paths in different directions, as the guests choose random paths, so you can make them backtrack and split up until they stumble across the heart, giving you more time to plan.
Even so, to achieve a good defensive setup takes time and resources. It can get expensive expanding the mansion as the further out you go, the more costly it becomes to add new rooms. This means that you need to take care of as many guests per night and not let them escape as to gain maximum essence. With nights that can have up to 10 guests at a time, this can seem slightly stressful to achieve, but it can be done with minor difficulty if you are careful.
Overall, I found Deck of Haunts to be a fun take on card builder games. If you are looking for an introduction to card builder games, I’d recommend this as a start. However, to gain the full experience, you do need to have a solid understanding of the title in order to tackle the later nights and especially the final night. So, there is a steep learning curve.
If you are looking for a unique and kind of spooky experience, give Deck of Haunts a try. Happy early Halloween and happy haunting!
Developers: Mantis Games
Platforms: Steam