The Haunted Hoard: Deck of Haunts (Switch 2)

In Deck of Haunts you play as a haunted house that aims to do a lot more than spook its uninvited guests. For anyone who dares enter your halls, your goal is to make them either lose their life or their mind, fueling yourself with their essence so you may grow into a larger and larger malicious estate.

 

To protect yourself and deal out death, Deck of Haunts has you controlling your attacks by way of rogue-like deck building mechanics. Starting off with a simple deck of attacks primarily focused on doing harm, you need to make sure that none of your unwanted visitors reach your heart, each one who does reach the room containing it at least dealing one damage. Should your heart be destroyed, the whole house will go down with it, and for the main game’s 28 nights, a death would potentially lead to a lot of lost progress. As a result, you’ll need to properly grow your deck across the nights, build your house to be a more dangerous maze, and properly manage card use as more and more people with more and more tricks up their sleeves arrive. One immediate bright side though is, as long as you go to the main menu before perishing, you can reset a bad night, but on its normal difficulty, Deck of Haunts ends up being more manageable than you might expect so long as you keep the various systems in mind as you grow.

 

Each night a few people will arrive through your doors, sometimes all at once and sometimes gradually over the course of it. There are three ways a human can be dealt with. You can target their health with direct attacks, but killing them will leave a corpse. If a person spots a body, they’ll get terrified and start to flee the house, but this is not a good thing as they’ll come back another night stronger. A person also flees the house if they reach the heart and damage it, but if you want to better manage the crowds, you’ll also have to target people’s minds. Drive a person insane and they’ll sit on the ground, mostly invalidated and no longer a threat while also not frightening anyone. Here is where you start with the simplest layer of strategy, trying to make sure that you space out the killings so you don’t make people run away but also while running into the limits of your cards. It is not always easy to well time a kill or drive a person insane when you are at the whims of card draw, even with the relatively small decks you deal with.

Things get more complicated because the humans show up start having more and more traits that influence how you can deal with them. Some people will only take so much damage from a card attacking their health or mind, meaning overspecializing your deck expansions will make taking these visitors down a slow process. Some might gradually heal others in the same room as them or even restore their sanity, meaning the insane people babbling on the floor can be brought back if you let these invaders roam, but there are negative traits as well. Some people take more damage from attacks or might even cause others around them to experience more Tension, Tension essentially a system where you terrify people so your mental attacks will be more powerful. Special humans start to show up eventually though that can really throw a wrench into simpler plans. Priests are completely immune to damage so long as they are in the same room as someone else, hunters are able to kill the creatures your house can summon, and Stone Masons will know the exact path to your heart, not dawdling with confusing layouts or spending time investigating rooms to determine an exit. Occultists though are an interesting complication, humans on your side who will heal you if they reach your heart… but should they fail their pilgrimage, you’re hurt instead, meaning you have to be more careful with traps or attacks that target an entire room if you don’t want accidental blowback.

 

Your attack cards need to be a flexible set to survive each night as a result of these varied visitors, and after each night you’ll usually get a chance to expand your deck in some way with the chance to pick a new card or upgrade an existing one. Besides special cards that can do multiple things or have a unique purpose like helping you draw extra cards or forcing people to move around the manor as you like, there are essentially five main card types. There are cards that deal damage to health, cards that drain someone’s sanity, trap cards that add special effects to the rooms of the house, hex cards that can alter your visitors, and creature cards that deploy automatically acting agents that can sometimes come with cards that influence their behavior. While you can pick a starting deck that might lean more towards a specific card type or just go with the generalist default, trying to select useful cards from the random ones offered will be key to making more interesting strategies. For example there are cards that have nightlong effects such as Manifest Fears that allows Tension to increase damage to health as well and Ominous Chants that prevents Tension from decaying over time, but this deadly combo not only requires good luck when getting new cards but also having the luck of the draw and the points to use them during a night.

 

Each turn at night humans first will move through the rooms, the player then able to play whatever cards they’ve drawn for that turn. You have 3 Action Points by default per turn, most cards costing 1 unless they are particularly powerful. A lot of the best cards come with drawbacks like high costs, forced discards of other cards in your hand, or conditions like only being usable once that night. Upgrading cards is where this can be circumvented a little, a card like the Webweaver spider great to play since the creature not only deals consistent damage but you can build up its strength with other cards to make it a potent wandering warrior. Reducing its cost from 2 to 1 can make it easy to get an army of spiders going, but there are some cards that will almost always be hampered by conditions you can’t upgrade away. Some cards can only hit solo humans as their drawback for their power, but you aren’t only using cards to attack during the night. Each day, before the nightly visitors arrive, you’re allowed to expand your haunted house.

There are only two required rooms in Deck of Haunts, that being the heart room you need to protect and an entrance hall that you can’t alter. However, you are free to build the path from the entrance to the heart room however you like, provided you have the resources. Killing people or driving them insane generates Essence, and the rooms you build all cost a certain amount of it. Rooms closer to the heart cost less, discouraging making too large a winding maze, but the room size is important, people more easily passing through small spaces quickly. The guest rooms, kitchens, and living rooms are all generic rooms with no special function beyond being a place people can pass through, but across the nights you’ll be able to pick up room cards that have special effects. Some are pre-built like the bell tower with its wandering witch soul that raises tension or the well where a drowned monster will move around increasing the potency of trapped rooms, but others are upgrades to existing rooms. Some have simple added effects like making damage or mind drain cards more powerful when used on people in that room, but others can have unique functions. A crematorium burns bodies, the hall of mirrors will let you treat anyone inside as a solo human for your cards no matter how many people are present, and rooms like the pumpkin patch let you fill up a jack-o-lantern with cards so that it will explode and hit whoever enters with a massive blast of effects. Making rooms the proper size, figuring out how to lay them out, and managing your essence is thankfully easily done since you don’t have to lock in any choices until you’re done fiddling with everything, although they are one area where Deck of Haunts experiences some technical issues.

 

Sometimes selecting cards causes them to become misaligned with your hand and float off in space, although this is usually fixed by selecting other cards in the hand or simply de-selecting and selecting it again. A bit more impactful is that Deck of Haunts seems to have some control issues when playing in the Switch 2 dock, sometimes trying to activate a cursor mode when you press L or R to go through options. This is seemingly because Deck of Haunts has a mouse control mode, although it can be hard to see information in general on a television screen. Handheld mode is certainly more useful and controls just fine save for some design choices like targeting humans often being a matter of scrolling left and right through all the options rather than easily choosing who you want to hit. The control quirks can be adjusted to, but one thing that ends up rather surprising is how easy it will be to clear the 28 night main mode on its standard difficulty. While a run of Deck of Haunts will take well over 2 hours so it can’t be called paltry, if you focus and choose your cards right, you can likely clear it on your first attempt. There are some attempts to make it tougher like Pathfinder visitors who can enter from any room to upset cheesy strategies, but you don’t need to plumb the depths of powerful synergies to clear the standard mode, and the rewards for attempting it again aren’t that strong. You can unlock story bits by completing optional objectives, this sometimes making you play suboptimally to get a little lore, but the plot isn’t an overly present part of the experience and most writing is a nice touch rather than a strong motivator. Your performance each night does give experience towards leveling up your overall profile and you unlock new cards that can appear per level gained, but you won’t feel you need such a huge range of options really and many of the unlocked cards might be a bit too specific or costly to be worth using anyway.

 

That first run through Deck of Haunts is at least an interesting one as you come to grips with new systems and do need to be strategic each turn if not overly so, and while playing on Hard does crank up the challenge (and oddly had what seemed like a glitch where it skipped me ahead a few nights that certainly made it harder), 28 nights feels like it might be too long a time period that makes ramping up a little slow and simple even with difficulty increased. However, the unlockable Nightmare mode, despite its intimidating name, might actually be where Deck of Haunts finds its replayability. Reduced down to 13 challenging nights which often feature distinct themes like every visitor that night being a Pathfinder or sharing some other trait, you need to work harder to handle the invaders well even before you factor in the Nightmare mode’s totem system. Totems add a new effect for each Nightmare run you finish, starting off with the simple punishment of you taking damage should anyone flee the house, ramping up to ideas like preventing you from healing the heart or having a damaging card added to your hand you must play to get rid of or suffer the consequences, and eventually reaching an unforgiving 1 health challenge, Nightmare feels like the more compelling way to play, especially since it also means you won’t have quite as much time to snowball with building a huge house or getting the kind of upgrades that can make some cards far too potent. It still feels like more could have been done so the player’s deck more consistently leans towards wildly different ways to play, but having something besides the 2 hour methodical main mode to test your house building and card slinging skills against helps Deck of Haunts have something more worthwhile to return to.

THE VERDICT: Deck of Haunts does well with its dark and atmospheric presentation for a house that aims to eliminate all of its unwanted guests, and while on Switch 2 it can hit little snags, the strategic elements present in playing your cards right each turn and building your house out do keep you engaged in a run. Its long term goals don’t really drive you to come back to it since individual runs of the main mode don’t shake things up enough despite solid core systems, but Nightmare mode’s more condensed and challenging format does provide some needed variety to make for a quicker and more challenging way to play that makes up for the 28 night standard play being a bit too easy to clear on your first attempt.

 

And so, I give Deck of Haunts for Nintendo Switch 2…

An OKAY rating. Deck of Haunts almost ended up that kind of rogue-like where the systems feel more like a complication to one good run rather than a motivator to keep coming back. In fact, permadeath for failure being a threat in the main mode might have held back the game’s willingness to really push you to get strategic, but perhaps some restraint also meant that randomness wouldn’t feel like an overwhelming piece of the experience either. You are always left making decisions that aren’t too straightforward and there can be tense moments when visitors like the Pathfinders or priests push against typically useful tactics, but the 28 night mode might have been better as an optional long term effort rather than the core experience. Nightmare mode shows a promising start for what could help change the game up and make you want to come back, it still having random elements to diversify things but also having nights with clearer concepts that necessitate a new approach for the night for more than one or two guests. The cards themselves might be what needs stronger improvement though, the additive approach giving you a bigger deck but also making it too easy to build up a deck that works too well. Perhaps better cards or upgrades would necessitate getting rid of other cards, or maybe you’d be forced to pick a more clear direction for your deck to cater upgrades better and set apart runs more clearly. Deck of Haunts does come with a host of changes and upgrades from the original PC release in May of 2025 and they do seem to mostly be for the better, preventing even easier strategies from thriving, but it feels like there’s still room to tighten things up to better near the occasional thrills found in Nightmare mode without having to layer on so many special conditions to get there.

 

While not as replayable as many rogue-likes because of the scope of a standard run and the similarities between how you’re likely to approach each attempt, Deck of Haunts does work well as an initial challenge to overcome and some options like Nightmare mode or a deck built of random cards can give you a little more to do than a likely successful first run. You do need to be careful, plan, and grow your deck right to do well, but this living haunted house might be a little too good at eliminating invaders. Perhaps more updates might come that better manage the pressure the player feels, but as it is, at least you can find some enjoyment in being a monstrous manner slowly whittling down the home invaders with tricks, traps, and creatures of the night.