My experience with this game started all the way back in Dec 2025 with the first demo from steam fest and ever since then I've been hooked and the final release of the game just made it even better!

The Voice Acting
The biggest aspect of the game that hooked me in the first place is the voice acting. The performance from Reed, Morgan, Ivel, Better, and Niv is fantastic, there's so much emotion and context there that in my opinion brings a lot of depth to the game I don't find in a lot of other Deck Building Roguelites.
Narrative
This games overarching subject is about addiction and how others around you are effected by it. You start out with no idea who your character is and then as you progress through hell those around start to recognize you and establish the main characters history. As you progress every run you learn more and more which incentivizes the player to dive back into another run.
Gameplay
The only criticism with the gameplay of Black Jacket that I can come up with but I don't agree with is that the game was too easy but I personally had died like 4 times at the beginning of the campaign and I love all the systems within.
Design
This game feels like a warm oil painting. With how the cutscenes feel like they're taken from a dark dreamscape. there's something beautiful in the way that the characters are designed exclusively based off of their hands. The way that the Face Cards all have unique designs and secret interactions with one another is really nice. The different decks you use throughout the game all have this unique style that make you look at each run uniquely every time you go through the game.

I don't usually like to leave a review before completing a game, but since the current 89% rating seems absolutely baffling to me, I'd like to make an exception for "Black Jacket".

As a lot of other players have noted this is a top-notch deckbuilder:

• Gameplay and RNG are flawless. Runs feel just the right amount of difficult. I've played my fair share of roguelikes and deckbuilders, but I'd certainly regard myself as mid with regard to ability. ("Slay the Spire" was fun, but I struggled A LOT.) I'm currently slowly climbing the difficulty ranks, mostly successfully, but not always. Yes, seeing the cards pulled out by the AI can seem wild sometimes, but it never feels unfair. Progression is fun. There appears to be a wide variety of builds or ways of gaming the system, though I feel I'm still grasping for a solid strategy.
  As for players struggling or thinking the AI unfair, I would suppose that this isn't a skill issue but simply the result of a misconception: the goal isn't to hit 21 but to be closer to 21 than the enemy AI. And there are many ways to achieve that. In general, I'd say that this is less a matter of finding that one grand strategy and more of having a flexible and adaptable deck.
  
• The story is absolute cinema. I really enjoyed "Inscryption", but "Black Jacket" is much more concise, evocative and, yes, incredibly, emotional, even meta. The story alone makes this worth playing and makes you want to go just another round.
  
• Sound design, graphics, VA - flawless.
  
• The achievements are relatively straightforward for the most part, but reaching level 21 should be a tough nut to crack. Still, I find them much fairer and funner than say in "Balatro".

All in all this is a VERY easy recommendation for anyone that likes deckbuilders or card games in general.

If I could give a neutral reccommendation I would.
For now I'll consider the positives of the game as its main selling point and what the developers aimed for.

Positives:
Art direction, story, voice acting. All top notch. Its a big plus, although I find the finale a let down.
The deckbuilding aspect is enjoyable in the earlygame. The length of a game is appropriate for what you do in it, around maybe 30 minutes once you really start to learn about all the cards.

Neutral:
Artifacts are hit and miss in their design. Much of the artifacts behave as double-edged swords, obviously playing off the gambling motif. Expect to skip situations where the game offers two random cards (or sometimes 3 as you progress unlocks) into your deck. Most of the time you don't even want to add ANY cards to your deck, at higher ascensions you want to remove more cards before adding any, leads to some boring situations early on.

Negatives:
The gameplay tends to get quite boring after a few games and ascensions, for me it happened around ascension 8. Expect the AI to cheat. The goal of this game is not to get to 21, its to exhaust your opponent's choices and lock them into a losing state. There are a few reliable ways of doing this, and once you find best paths to victory you'll just keep doing this over and over. There is little motivation to change your style.
Ascension difficulty - I don't feel it past the first act in a run. If the ascension is just made to burn your time early on then its not really well balanced.

Note: I play a lot of card games, tabletop and digital. The only difficulty in this game can be overcome when you acknowledge that its not a blackjack based roguelike. Its a Roguelike with the number 21. This is in contrast to where I see some people comparing this game to Balatro. Balatro is a poker game with roguelike elements that may manipulate the rules of poker. You don't manipulate the rules of blackjack here. I'd sooner compare this game to Gwent: The Witcher Card Game, where action states, turn order and placement are key.