You are not the one being chased through the mansion. You are the mansion. Deck of Haunts arrives on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 on October 8 at $19.99, seventeen months after it went up on Steam.
Mantis Games built a roguelike deckbuilder around a job horror games almost never hand the player. During the day you lay out rooms and traps to wall off your Heart, the chamber that keeps the house alive. At night you spend cards on screams, phantoms and shifting walls to push trespassers toward madness, then harvest the fear they leave behind. That essence buys better rooms, better rooms attract braver visitors, and braver visitors are harder to break. The difficulty curve is your own success.
The Console Version Ships With Seventeen Months of Updates
DANGEN Entertainment says the console build carries everything added since the game launched on Steam on May 7, 2025. That covers dozens of cards, new rooms and starter decks, custom deck building, a missions and meta-progression layer, room-size mechanics, and a Nightmare Mode with thirteen escalating difficulty tiers.
Six creatures joined the roster across that stretch: an Imp, a Gravetender, a Webweaver, a Drowner, a Bloodletter and a Krampus. Seasonal additions include a Pumpkin Patch and a Workshop. Controller support was rebuilt for the port, which matters more than it sounds for a game that asks you to reshuffle a floor plan and a hand of cards at the same time.
The Release Date Is the Smart Part
October 8 is three weeks and two days before Halloween, which puts a game about operating a haunted house on consoles at the exact moment the audience for one is largest. Nothing about that is accidental, and it is a better use of the season than most tie-in releases manage. October is getting crowded on the horror gaming side too, with the Five Nights at Freddy’s crossover landing in Fortnite on October 1.
The pitch also sits in a small, good tradition. Haunted-house management is a premise that shows up rarely and works nearly every time someone commits to it, going back to Bullfrog’s Dungeon Keeper in 1997. Playing the building rather than the victim reorganizes every instinct a horror player has, and Deck of Haunts is asking for that reorganization inside the deckbuilder, a genre where patience is already the point.
A run plays the same as it does on PC: the same house, the same Heart and the same thirteen tiers of Nightmare, now on a controller in the three weeks of the year when a haunted house is the only thing worth being.
