Black Jacket

When I first read about the upcoming roguelike deckbuilder from Mi’pu’mi Games, I knew it was something I’d be all-in on. I have a history of enjoying collectible card games; from the supply and demand mechanics of something like Frost, to the elaborate spiralling interactions of Cultist Simulator, I love learning how the cards impact one another, and how to tailor my deck to best overcome the obstacle (or opponent) at hand. 

Before I even understood the mechanics of the game, it was the basic premise that dragged me in. You play a character who has been sent to hell, condemned to spend an eternity there unless you can gather enough coin to pay the ferryman to offer you passage to somewhere better. The idea of playing blackjack for your eternal soul has so many potential hooks that I grinned from ear to ear upon hearing about it. So, armed with naught but a few coins and desire to escape damnation, I set off to gamble my way out of hell.

Your introduction to the game comes from Reed, a familiar spirit with a kindly voice and the generosity to offer you a few coins to start you on your journey. On the face of it, blackjack is just blackjack – the idea is to draw cards to get as close to a score of 21 as you can without going over (or ‘bust’, as it’s known), and Aces can be high or low, depending what helps you the most. However, it only takes a couple of minutes to realise that there are some other very meaningful effects that alter your play.

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Each player only has five spaces on the board upon which they can play cards – once all five slots are filled, you must end your turn (or ‘pass’), regardless of your current score. Most spaces are free to use, but others demand that you add a raise to your bet – in exchange the designated zone bestows an added effect that will help impact the outcome of the game. For example, some additional zones offer ‘Insight’, an effect that allows you to look at a few cards on the top of your deck and move them around. Knowing if you should pay for these additional effects (and when) is a key factor in learning how to win in Black Jacket.

Furthermore, individual cards can be ‘Awakened’, granting them optional effects that trigger when they’re played. The effects of Awakened cards are thematic and differ from suit to suit, with each one encouraging a different play style. As an example, Awakened Diamond cards often become ‘Hollow’, which means that you can play another card on top of them, with both scores counting against your total. This is particularly handy when overcoming your opponent’s Awakened cards, which might lower your score or even place negative cards on your side of the board!

Like any deck builder, effective customisation is the key to success, and Black Jacket has this in spades. On top of the usual four suits (Spades, Clubs, Diamonds and Hearts), there are four more suits to unlock -Teeth, Flames, Cups and Tumors- each with their own play style. The face cards (traditionally Jack, Queen, King) are selected separately to your standard cards, and have mysterious effects when played in specific (and hidden) ways. And these reactions don’t only unlock new mechanics and abilities, but also have tasty little plot hooks entwined within them as well. Round all this out with the ability to fine tune your deck by burning unwanted cards and adding randomised cards (from any suit), and you’re left with an experience that changes every time, whilst also allowing you the chance to discover your own play style. 

Each journey starts with a warm up game against Reed, before you pick your way across the map of hell, choosing from branching paths that offer opportunities at different upgrades and opponents. After defeating a few desperate souls and taking their coin, you’ll eventually face off with a boss character, and it’s here that you get into the meat of the storyline.

You quickly realise that the boss characters each have a connection to your past life, and by repeatedly defeating them, you’ll eke out snippets of information about your relationships and your history. In time, your own story starts to become clearer and I found the steady drip of lore to be addicting. No sooner was one journey over, I was riffling my cards to go again, eager to overcome the bosses and find out more about the characters and about myself. It’s a morally grey affair, and it’s great fun to piece together what’s happening from tidbits of dialogue offered across the table.

The difficulty curve feels very well managed early on, but suffers from a wobble as it begins to transition between the intermediate and expert phases. To start with, the game seems very difficult. You’re introduced to a lot of new mechanics quickly, and since you’re missing a few key abilities, trying to get to 21 without going bust genuinely feels like luck of the draw. This means that you’ll routinely lose and are forced to restart, unlocking some of the smaller roguelike bonuses and getting you hooked on mastering the mechanics. By the middle portion of the game, you’ve begun to understand the tricks of the trade, have unlocked a few handy improvements, and can go toe-to-toe with most players in what feels like very fair competition. But in the third stage, when you’ve unlocked a bunch of powerful upgrades, understand your deck choices very well and know exactly how to game the system, the difficulty falls off. In time, you will unlock optional difficulty modes scaling from 1-10, but the rules changes are so incremental that you don’t tend to feel them on a game by game basis. 

From a sensory perspective, Black Jacket does pretty much everything right. The gameplay visuals are clear and nicely stylised, with scratchy shapes and inky shadows that nicely allude to a grisly afterlife. The story scenes are depicted with beautifully bleak oil paintings, daubed in heavy blacks and deep reds, and contrasted with vibrant, blazing golds. These storyboards have a wonderful abstract painterly style, where you can see the heavy brushstrokes that build the painting, but not necessarily all the details of the subjects – drawing a tidy artistic parallel with the way that the story is told. I thoroughly enjoyed the voice-acting too – characters each have very distinctive voices that leave lasting impressions, though Harry Myers’ portrayal as the gruff and bitter Ivel probably takes the crown for me.

One of the few setbacks in Black Jacket were the multiple crashes I encountered during my experience. When playing the game in a good-sized session, I’d get 1-2 an hour, making them a very real hazard to progress. Sometimes they’d come on menus, other times on the map screen, and sadly, sometimes in the midst of a game which would then need to be started over. While hotfixes came out quickly early on, they seem to have slowed to a crawl now, making critical errors a very real threat every time you turn the game on. I seriously hope these wrinkles are ironed out, because this game is too good to be let down like that.

Another (much smaller) issue that’s worth mentioning is that it can be difficult to read the rules text on a few of the cards. The effects of a card are written only on the small image of the card itself, and on a handful of cards this can be next to impossible to discern. While the developer has taken the worthwhile step of adding tooltip text to describe the various rules, the words on the card itself are not reiterated in plain text, which can hinder you using it correctly. I would encourage Mi’pu’mi Games to revisit this decision, as adding fully typed card text would make Black Jacket much more accessible for players with visual difficulties.

Overall, Black Jacket takes a well known game and interweaves a collection of interesting mechanics that add considerable depth, turning a simple game of chance into a complex game of strategy, risk and reward. Hidden up its sleeve is a wonderfully told story of betrayal and redemption that Mi’pu’mi Games have expertly stashed behind the games roguelike progression, making it almost impossible to put down – that is, until a hard crash forces you to. Brimming with moody hand drawn artwork and showcasing excellent vocal performances, Black Jacket is steeped in mystery from start to finish, and an absolute must-play for card game fans – I just hope that all the kinks get worked out soon.

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