Deck of Haunts – Razočaravajući deckbuilder

• DEVELOPER: Mantis Games
• IZDAVAČ: DANGEN Entertainment
• PLATFORME: PC
• ŽANR: Deck-building / Rougelike
• DATUM IZLASKA: 7. svibnja 2025.
• POČETNA CIJENA: 19,50€
• RECENZIRANA VERZIJA: PC

Deck of Haunts is a solid game, flawed but surprisingly polished for a full release. Blending deck-building with roguelike progression and strategic depth, it shines in a 1970s American setting. You play as a sentient, malevolent 1920s art deco mansion, in other words, a haunted house with a pulsating stone Heart. Over 28 nights, you will have to lure humans, exploit their fears, and drain their essence to grow your power. During the day you construct new buildings for the mansion, and get news cards, while at night you haunt.

Starts strong, but falls flat as it progresses

My biggest problem with Deck of Haunts is that while it starts strong and hooks you, it grows frustrating and repetitive the longer you play. By day 15, it feels like you’ve seen 70% of the game. Every playthrough begins with the same house layout, cards, and fixed calendar of events. You can unlock or upgrade cards and rooms during a run, but these are too sparse to feel impactful or counter the steep difficulty spikes. When a run ends, you lose all progress, no upgrades, no new modes, just back to the same cards, layout, and calendar. Worse, every run forces you to replay the same stage-setting tutorial cards, which gets old fast.

In Deck of Haunts, the tile-based building system lets you create maze-like layouts with 10 room types: basic (guest, living, kitchen), special (Phobia, Mechanical, Sacrifice), and one unique. You can expand rooms by matching cards, like merging guest rooms, or use special ones like the Phobia Room to drain sanity or the Bell Tower to summon a Witch spirit.

The interface is user-friendly, with mouse-scroll rotation and a “show layout” button, but it lacks an undo option or merge warnings. Building does feel fun, but the small starting grid and fixed Heart room limit creativity. Upgrading rooms for bonuses, like a Mechanical Room boosting action points, adds strategy, but it’s underused, and larger rooms don’t always pay off. The biggest letdown is the lack of randomization and this basic system feels too simplistic.

Each night 2-5 humans (sometimes more) invade your mansion, with health, sanity, and traits like Pathfinder (faster movement) or Bleeder (more damage taken). You play 34 sinister cards to attack, drain sanity, or add Tension (enhancing insanity effects), using 3 action points (AP) per turn, which can grow through combos or rooms. Some cards hit lone humans, others affect rooms, and can also teleporting victims. Your mission is to block humans from reaching your heart.

“Tile-based building system lets you create maze-like layouts.”

Deck of Haunts struggles with weak mid and late-game progression

Humans include civilians, door-smashing police, priests (untouchable unless alone), and occult investigators wielding items like Pistols or Holy Books that shift their actions. Killing a human in front of others causes panic, making them flee but draining your essence. On paper, everything sounds great, but it lacks meta-progression beyond minor card unlocks. You can only swap cards at fixed points, and most upgrades are underwhelming, like a slight damage boost or a single cost reduction. Humans start with low health and sanity (8-9) but scale to the twenties, while your damage barely grows, making it feel underpowered.

The balance is all over the place too. The damage types are seriously unequal, the sanity damage is extremely fiddly and relies on you building ‘Tension’, but building tension fades after a single use except in rare circumstances, so you’re really better off just throwing lots of cards at the problem. On the flipside, physical damage offers a lot of control due to synergies with unique mansion rooms, making more strategic, easier to use, and outright better.

Beyond the issues mentioned, Deck of Haunts also struggles with weak mid and late-game progression. Building special rooms adds fun and combos, but there’s little room to experiment. When enemies grow stronger, the real challenge kicks in, forcing you to construct more rooms under tight action point limits, which can feel harsh. The game doesn’t hold your hand, but it also restricts your freedom too much.

The most frustrating part is the Pathfinder trait some humans have, letting them start in a random room instead of the entrance hall. Sometimes, that room is right next to your Heart Room, the one you’re desperately trying to protect by building a maze. If you get a few humans spawning nearby and lack cards to redirect them, you take damage through no fault of your own, making your choices feel pointless.

“The game doesn’t hold your hand, but it also restricts your freedom too much.”

The full game feels stagnant

Deck of Haunts has almost no narrative. no deep lore, campaign, hidden letters, or story elements to uncover. You just survive and move on. While you meet new humans from time to time, the experience feels bare-bones. The spooky atmosphere is decent, with passable graphics and generic horror vibes. The game leans on psychological horror through card effects, but without thematic depth, like possession or monster summons, it feels overly simplistic.

In the end, it’s a creative roguelike deckbuilder with a unique premise, but it doesn’t fully grab you. The demo impressed, but the full game feels stagnant. Its intuitive mansion-building and strategic card combos create a fun loop for deckbuilding fans, yet repetitive gameplay and generic horror vibes hold it back. Without a gripping narrative or chilling scares, it feels more like a passing title than a standout horror hit.

“Creative roguelike deckbuilder, but gets boring quite quickly.”

Recenzentski primjerak ustupio izdavač

3.2