Deck of Haunts

A deck-building roguelike where you build and control a haunted house is a really cool idea for a game. So, I hopped on this one quickly when given the chance and to be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of rogue likes. But my opinion on that, especially deck builders, changed after playing Balatro. With that said I had a lot of fun with Deck of Haunts—when the randomness worked in my favor that is. 

There really isn't any story or plot here, except that you are basically in control of a spooky house with a weird beating heart in its central chamber and it's your job to protect it. At the start the house will only have four rooms. Each turn, people will make their way in through the front door to investigate the house. The people inside the house will stay in a single room for the entire turn, and during that time you have cards selected at random for your deck which feature various ways to harm them. Each person has a certain amount of health and sanity points which you need to drain with your cards.

You also have cards that don't deal any hits to health or sanity but can raise the tension for those in the room, lock doors for a single turn, or teleport them to different parts of the house. Raising tension will give you a boost when you use cards that drain their sanity. Killing the investigators or draining their sanity will grant you "essence," which is the currency you use between rounds to build out the house.

You also have a decision to make as to how you want to dispatch the trespassers in your house. Lowering their sanity to 0 will cause them to just sit down where they are and not move for the rest of the round. While outright killing a person by draining their health may be easier and faster, you need to be careful because if someone else in the house sees a dead body they will instantly turn around and quickly head towards the exit. You'll get a notification saying this is happening with a message saying, "A person is escaping," with how many turns left until they escape. If they escape then you will lose essence, which is your currency. This however can work in your favor as you can kill someone right before the door to the heart room which will send them towards the exit in the opposite direction. Your heart starts with 8HP, and anytime someone enters the room it will lose 1HP. 

The most fun part comes in between rounds where you get to build and expand your haunted house. At the start you will only have three or so rooms before the heart chamber. But as you earn more essence you can spend it on expanding the house with new rooms.

There are base rooms you can put down like a kitchen, guest room, and living room. These rooms can connect together to create long hallway, or you can alternate between them to create new rooms that extend the number of rooms it takes for the investigators to reach the heart room.

People entering the house will usually only spend one turn in a room, no matter how big it is. But you'll want to try to make the rooms big because that opens up the opportunity to transform the room into various other rooms.

A mechanical room can give the heart additional health, thorn rooms will damage anyone that walks into it, and sacrificial rooms which let you sacrifice a card to gain boosts. This part of the game is honestly what I had the most fun with, as I loved coming up with ridiculous-looking ways to extend the house and make it harder for the investigators to reach the heart room.

You only get so many rooms you can place down each day, and you have to always have at least one path to the heart room to proceed. It's always exciting when you advance through the days and get new rooms you can put down. 

As the days go on, different kinds of people will start to enter the house, including cops that can shoot locks off doors and people with stats that make it so they can't lose more than four sanity when being attacked. This does add a lot of strategy on how you are going to pick off these people and what cards to use.

A really good card can lock down a specific room and prevent people from moving to the next room during the next turn. But if a cop is in the room, then the card is wasted, as they will just blow the lock off and allow everyone to proceed to the next room.

The real challenge, however, comes when the Priests start showing up. They have a special passive ability where if they are in the room with anyone else, they cannot be damaged nor can their sanity decrease, so this becomes a situation where you are just praying, no pun intended, to get cards that let you teleport people to different parts of the house so you can split them up.

Many of my runs ended because of this, where a group of people had a couple of exorcists with them and I just could not get a card that let me split them up. So, while I was able to take out the others in the room, the multiple Priests just went right to the heart room.

Then there are the Masons that show up late game and, if they make it into the heart room, then it's pretty much game over, because not only does the heart lose health for them finding the room, but they will also stay in the room continuing to deal damage each turn to the heart.

Another challenge is when people will start entering the house at random locations as they sneak in through the windows and back doors instead of just the front door. You will need to start building your house in all kinds of directions, trying to put as much space between the heart room and the entrances as possible. 

Now, seeing that this is a rogue like you can expect to start from scratch every time you start a new game, and I think this is where some of the frustrations comes into play. The first 10 or so days are quite easy. But after that is when the difficulty starts to ramp up. That also when the game starts to get fun. But you are also at the mercy of the RNG when it comes to what cards you get.

A lot of times I am just sitting there, hoping to get a specific card that never shows up, and multiple people have now made their way to the heart room. Cards can be upgraded at times. On some days, no one will show up to the house. On these days you get options like being automatically granted a damage or sanity card, the ability to upgrade cards, or you can spend essence to heal the heart.

You do, however, earn a stack of new cards to use every time your player level increases. There are four different decks you can choose to use at the start of the game. The basic deck is a mix of damage and sanity cards. Then there are decks which are only damage or sanity cards—however, the downside to this is that the investigators will have more health or sanity, and there are additional decks which can be unlocked via completing a run. 

The game is fun and doesn't take too long to make it through a run, either by failing to protect the heart, or making it the full 28 days. But I will say this game does rely a lot on luck and chance of whether or not you will succeed. There were a couple of runs where I was doing extremely well, getting great cards, being able to take out people quickly, building out the house with as many rooms as I could, and then people randomly spawned at the start of a round near the heart room—and there's nothing I can do about it, even with the upgraded cards that I have.

That said, I had a lot of fun with this, and the game has been getting multiple free updates that have upgraded the game by adding new decks, bug fixes, features and difficulty settings. It looks like this will be a game that will have fresh new content for months and years ahead of its release.