DreadHaunt

I went into DreadHaunt expecting Digital Happiness to carry over the atmosphere that made the DreadOut series work on a shoestring budget. The studio has genuine horror DNA and a knack for leaning into Indonesian-Asian ghost mythology that most Western asymmetric horror titles simply cannot replicate. What I found is a game with three distinct modes, a card-based modifier system, and a social deduction core that draws an obvious line to both Dead by Daylight and Among Us but refuses to be a direct clone of either. That is both its selling point and its most frustrating problem. The structure goes like this: you and up to four other agents play Class E containment personnel dropped onto a forsaken island off Jakarta's northern coast to locate and secure cursed objects. One player, unknown to the group, has been possessed and will eventually transform into a ghost, armed with a unique skill set designed to hunt down the survivors. The Ghost Hunting mode runs as a first-person co-op PvE loop, while the Deception Mode shifts to third-person social deduction where reading your teammates is half the game. There is also an Assault Mode added post-launch that pushes things closer to a wave-survival format, and a single-player story campaign for anyone who wants lore context before jumping online. The card-based modifier system is a smart wrinkle, letting players tweak stats, weather conditions, and ghost spawn behaviour before a match, which at least gives sessions some variance round-to-round. Here is where I have to be straight with you. The moment-to-moment loop for the agent side is thin. You are largely hunting cursed items across a wide map and disposing of them at the right spots. Early feedback from the community called out the cooperative actions as underdeveloped, and that criticism still holds some weight after launch. The possessed player can mess with agents using their ghost abilities, but reviewers noted it often felt like a minor inconvenience rather than a genuine threat unless the geometry favoured the ghost. The tension spikes when a possession is revealed and the ghost corners someone, but the stretches between those moments can drag. Map size amplifies the problem: agents can spend long stretches wandering without meaningful interaction, which bleeds the horror atmosphere dry faster than it should. The tools themselves are a genuine bright spot. Retro ghost-hunting equipment mixed with amulet-infused local gear gives the loadout flavour you do not get from the competition. The movement feels competent and noticeably less janky than what you would find in comparable low-budget asymmetric titles. Cross-play with console is live, which matters a lot for a game at this player count. Steam review data sits at mixed, and the lobby-fill problem is real. You need a minimum of three players to start a Deception Mode match, which means without a pre-made group, you are at the mercy of whatever population is online at that hour. For a game whose entire tension model depends on not knowing who is possessed, a half-full lobby kills the premise immediately. DreadHaunt is an interesting project from a studio that clearly loves the genre and has a unique cultural angle worth supporting. If you have two or three friends who will commit to a regular session and enjoy the social deduction format, there is a functional and occasionally tense horror multiplayer game hiding in here. Solo queue into randoms right now is a roll of the dice on whether a lobby fills, whether the trust mechanics land, and whether anyone on your team knows what they are doing. The card modifiers and the expanding mode roster show a developer with a plan, but the current player base is not yet big enough to make that plan feel stable. Fred, Scout Team