It’s probably fair to say that gambling isn’t cool. That doesn’t mean that a lot of the games people play to gamble aren’t fun though, and can’t be enjoyed in a fun way that doesn’t cause you to develop an addiction and lose all your money. This is where those lovely video games come in, providing digital versions of fun card games and slots machines with no risk of life ruining (unless you play too much Balatro on the clock). Black Jacket is the latest gambling themed Roguelike that wants to take over your life, and despite being based on a simpler card game it’s got a whole lot of depth.
In Black Jacket you find yourself in hell, doomed to play cards for all eternity. Well okay that’s not entirely true, because perhaps if you do well enough at Blackjack you’ll be able to escape this nightmare by bribing the ferryman with your winnings. That’s the plan anyway, as long as you can beat the other doomed souls inhabiting the afterlife. I came into the game expecting very little in the way of story, but as you progress you start to learn a lot about the various Blackjack opponents you face and their issues.
Before you get ahead of yourself though, you’ll need to play some cards. In the unlikely event you haven’t played Blackjack before, it’s pretty simple in theory. The aim is to have a score as close to twenty one as possible without going over, by adding cards to your hand one at a time. Whoever has the best score at the end wins all the money, and it’s the same whether you pay it in Vegas or on your Auntie’s sofa. It’s one of the most basic card games you can really play outside of Snap, but that’s not quite the case in Black Jacket.
Whereas the goal is the same here, this Roguelike has a whole host of different twists on the Blackjack formula. You and your opponents have your own decks to play from instead of a shared pile of fifty two, and you’ll add and upgrade different cards to it. While these are all numbered like in real world Blackjack, many of them have some pretty game changing effects alongside a score. Some force your opponent to bet extra coins, some allow you to check your next card and place it on the top or bottom of the deck, others lower the score of cards to shift the game in your favour. There are dozens and dozens of different effects you can build into your deck to become the ultimate Blackjack machine, and mastering them is a real good time.
The sheer amount of effects though is also what makes the start of Black Jacket overwhelming, because you aren’t eased into this world in the slightest. My first few runs went catastrophically badly, because I really hadn’t adjusted to the different ways I could play the cards in my favour. I found myself struggling to find the motivation to keep going, as the very first boss repeatedly took all my cash and sent me back to the start. With a bit of perseverance though I started to improve, and the enjoyment came along with this.
One of the most important tools at your disposal that I overlooked was the ability to hide a couple of cards in your sleeve. This cheating is encouraged in hell, with only an increased bet required to set a powerful card aside for a rainy day. I also hadn’t really been tracking the cards in my deck, and didn’t realise that the backs of my cards were patterned to match their suit. This means if the only Diamond cards in your deck are face cards, if you see the Diamond pattern at the top of your deck you know how many points are coming. It’s all very clever, I just wish I understood it all a bit sooner.
All the best Roguelike deck builders have plenty of different builds to experiment with, and Black Jacket is no different. At the start of each run you can choose a starting suit (with four to pick from at the start and four more to unlock) and each of these features its own unique strategy. I didn’t really gel with the more basic early options, but fell in love with the thorns suit that focuses on lowering the value of your opponent’s cards. Rounds would end with foes scoring minus twenty, which wasn’t particularly hard to beat.
Of all the cards in Black Jacket, the coolest are the face cards. This is because when played they interact with each other, telling a story and activating hidden effects. The starting King and Queen can be played together to boost the King’s score, because of the power of love. If the Jack is played with either though he’ll slice their head off to try and seize power himself, leaving the other card cut in half and given a ghost effect. Another sets of face cards depict totally different characters, and when I played one of these against a boss he muttered “I never forgave her for what she did to you”. The bleeding together of the stories of the cards and characters is very clever, and as you succeed in more runs you’ll start to piece some stuff together.
Outside of the cards themselves, Black Jacket features all the Roguelike bells and whistles you know and love. You get to pick your path between Blackjack battles to choose if you want to check out a shop or upgrade a card. There are artifacts that provide passive buffs like cheaper sleeving or more space on the table too, and of course there’s the power to burn up less useful cards to streamline your deck and make it unbeatable. If you want to master the game there’s a ridiculous amount to get stuck into, and that’s before you look at all the different permanent unlocks and the twenty one difficulty levels.
Black Jacket is another ridiculously compelling gambling Roguelike, which only really suffers due to its ropey onboarding. It does have a few other small issues, like some less exciting card effects and tougher mechanics that unlock later in the game. Almost all of the issues just go back to that lack of assistance from the game itself, which often meant I just sort of avoided cards because I didn’t understand their worth (and lost out on some powerful additions in the process).
Black Jacket is a game that asks a lot of the player, especially for the first few hours. When you put that time in and begin to understand its systems though it’s absolutely magic, and will steal away your life with absolute glee. Everything from the clever build options to the hidden story moments piece together to create a very special Roguelike, and as long as you don’t fold under pressure you’ll have a hell of a time with it.
