Black Jacket provides a fast-paced roguelike experience with an added twist to the usual blackjack formula. It takes some time to learn how your cards truly work and it can feel unfair at times. But once you start putting combinations together, the fun begins and it's hard to tear yourself away from the game.

Black Jacket is a roguelite that manages to find its own voice within a saturated landscape, thanks to a brilliant core concept and a surprisingly deep gameplay system. It may not quite reach the structural perfection of *Slay the Spire* or the narrative impact of *Hades*, but it nonetheless succeeds in carving out a niche for itself through a unique sense of tension—one built around risk and the manipulation of rules. Among card games, its basic rules might arguably make it seem less intriguing; however, its gameplay additions are both enjoyable and stimulating.

Mi’pu’mi managed to pleasantly surprise me with Black Jacket. The demo felt like a clever experiment, but the complete experience feels like a complete, layered game with a welcome narrative component. Playing the demo, you would be forgiven to think it was just “Blackjack with hats”. The ceiling, however, turned out to be much higher than it looked, thanks to the willingness of the team to experiment with the formula. The cards do things, the bosses feel like people, and the run actually goes somewhere. The juxtaposition with Balatro has been hovering over Black Jacket like a Sword of Damocles. To be honest, I think it’s an unfair comparison. Maybe it’s not a genre-defining game like Balatro is, but it’s a weirder and more deliberately narrative proposition. Black Jacket tries, and in my opinion succeeds, in carving their own place in the genre. I can’t wait to see how it will be expanded in the future.