The allure of the deckbuilder that finds a new way to innovate and make the card-drawing experience addicting always sits at the edge of my vision. Whether you’re still trying to climb that tower, harvest vegetables or simply crawl through dungeons, it’s a mechanic that I never seem to tire of. Years ago, I really thought Cultist Simulator would be the end game for me, but to no avail: it simply got too murky and lost me after a certain point.

But the idea of being a Lovecraftian house with ever expanding rooms, inflicting pain and madness on hapless visitors and becoming a labyrinth to rival the fabled House of Leaves? I couldn’t resist, and Deck of Haunts does its best to craft an intelligent, devious and truly unique way to engage players in a horrifying, incredibly complex work of darkness and delights.

Oh, the whole “beating of his hideous heart” thing? Not a hallucination, it’s right here.

28 nights. That’s how long you have to survive in Deck of Haunts, where you play the dark heart of an ever evolving house somewhere in the lonely world. Each night, use cards drawn to punish the invaders, either robbing them of life or sanity and reaping the essence. By day, gain new cards and use the essence to expand, crafting new rooms and new types of surprises for those who would seek to learn your secrets. The curious humans will gradually become bolder and stronger, as different archetypes – pathfinders, police officers, occultists – infiltrate further to do you harm. There is no peace awaiting them, and you cannot rest while the threat exists. But, even if they do destroy your heart and “win,” you will be reborn. Evil never truly dies. It just reshuffles and deals again.

The core gameplay elements of Deck of Haunts are fairly straight forward. Each turn, you’ll get a certain number of points to use on cards, cards cost different amounts and do different things, etc. If you’ve played literally any deckbuilding game before, you get the gist. Find new cards, level up cards, have random events to improve or change cards, yadda yadda yadda, Amityville.

It’s a good system that works, with the “use it or lose it” approach to each drawn hand, with discarded cards being shuffled back in for another go in the future, and Banished cards leaving until the end of the night. There’s also Nightlong cards, which create effects that last the duration of the night, Trap cards that activate when the room is entered, and Hexes, which can affect the traits of the humans that invade the house. And there are a lot of different humans.

Congrats, pathfinder, you found your way to me murdering your ass.

This is something that really makes Deck of Haunts sing. You’ve got all kinds of people wandering into the house, acting on different instincts based on their build, the AI and the cards affecting them. Those traits they have will change how they react when the game throws them a curveball, like cops shooting open locked doors, or regular people freaking the hell out when someone in their proximity goes completely insane. The humans and their roles become more complex and detailed the further you go into the Nights, and you’re never quite sure when things will happen next. You need to try and plan ahead of time for what the people who might come and invade your halls will do, because you can only account for so much. Thankfully, there is a fantastic number of cards available to build both offensively and defensively.

The development aspect of Deck of Haunts is really fun. I adored being able to grow the house with new rooms, expanding and mutating to more intricate and clever additions. For example, you quickly gain access to a Bell Tower, which creates a phantasm that wanders the house, along with unlocking the possibility of specialty Trap cards that can only be placed in the Tower. But you quickly gain access to other specifically creepy rooms (like The Well where a ghost girl will spawn) to just generally scary ideas, like a Nursery that immediately creates more Tension when a human wanders in. If you can picture an unsettling room in a haunted house, it is or will be available eventually to add on.

Oh, I get to build a pumpkin patch for my house? Only good things will happen!

Oh yeah, Tension. As in “this whole thing is setting my nerves on end and now I suffer more damage to my body/sanity the longer this goes on.” It’s a brilliant mechanic that is subtle but can completely shift the balance of the game, stacking invisible debuffs on a human till a single bit of damage can tear apart their body or psyche. You can see how much Tension the humans are suffering on an individual basis, letting cards and room effects gradually erode their fortitude and opening them up for obliteration. Easily my favorite way to play was to collect and focus on cards that upped the Tension both actively and passively so I could become lethal with even my starter cards.

The good news about Deck of Haunts is that it’s been out for a while now, just over a year, and Mantis has put in an extraordinary amount of work to flush it out further and further. Multiple updates and fine tuning has resulted in the Steam release to be a full bodied title with a massive number of cards, NPCs and room settings. Throughout it all, Mantis has made the call to only have development supporter DLC that acts purely cosmetically: all of the additional updates have been free and part of the main package. Difficulty has been balanced, animations have been fine tuned, and bugs have been squashed. The game is a delight and a streamlined run machine for those who delight in deckbuilding, roguelike scares that demand “just one more time.” 

If I can, I honestly prefer to turn them insane, it sets a better precidence.

However, this is the Switch release, and I’m afraid to say that Deck of Haunts comes onto the Switch with a trip and a bump right out the gate. First and foremost, there’s no touchscreen support. While I understand the desire to try and get the game working properly on all consoles (and to give plenty of support for the PlayStation and Xbox crowd), this is a game that involves taking cards and activating them in specific spots. If you’re playing Switch in handheld mode, the screen is a bit cramped as it is (though you’re able to zoom in and out to scale appropriately) and trying to get the selected rooms to land just right is a little testy. It would have been more convenient to interact with the game in a tactile fashion, but porting the game was more important than a particular interface design that I enjoy.

So it’s really irksome that the game is buggy. There’s definitely a lag when it comes to selecting cards, particularly when you activate a card that generates another, random card. There were a couple times where the game outright crashed, particularly when I tried to undo the removal of a room. Once, it just hopped, skipped and stumbled into a fail state, where I activated an event that I thought was optional and it wasn’t. I had spent all my Essence upgrading my house, and then I accidentally chose to enter into a shop to buy cards that I couldn’t afford and couldn’t leave. Oh yeah, I think there are supposed to be choices during the random mid-day events, but I can never choose what to do. I can either skip it entirely (sometimes) or just choose the only option that selection defaults to.

You can’t leave till you buy something. You also can’t afford anything. Can I interest you in our store’s credit card?

When it comes to situations like this, I understand that many reviewers take a certain degree of acceptance with how games might play out. Not every game is going to be perfect and smooth, and a wider interest in the Switch 2 means more and more devs trying out publishing here.

And sometimes the bugs are completely unforeseen, like my embarrassingly poor software setup that led to my initially negative review of Guardians of Slumberland. But that’s the thing with console releases: they should be as ready for consumer usage as possible. Steam users have a degree of flexibility, and modern console players do as well. We can patch things. We can edit on the fly. So it’s ultimately whether the content of the game can counterbalance technical missteps. And I do adore this concept and the theoretical execution.

But, regardless, the delight of the world and the gameplay itself is wildly hampered by an inability to play it. Deck of Haunts is unwieldy if you plan to use any strategy beyond brute forcing your non-augmented house through all 28 nights. Maybe it works, but I wanted to try and actually play the game, and I couldn’t. It was like giving a deep tissue massage while wearing oven mitts. Maybe I was making progress, but it was more work than it had to be and now my hands are all cramped up. 

Deck of Haunts is available now on Steam, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and Nintendo Switch/2.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch 2.

A copy of Deck of Haunts was provided by the publisher.