Also on: Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X
Publisher: Jackbox Games
Developer: Jackbox Games
Medium: Digital
Players: 3-8
Online: Yes
ESRB: M
I totally get the idea of an M-Rated Jackbox Party Pack. Even if none of the Party Packs were necessarily geared towards adults, with the right group of people the games could get a little risqué, even raunchy. You have to assume that someone at Jackbox Games figured: why not make that the whole point of this year’s Party Pack?
As The Jackbox Naughty Pack shows, it turns out that forced smuttiness is a whole lot less interesting than organically generated smut. It’s the difference between having a game of Drawful degenerate into lewd pictures and innuendos on its own and the game literally just telling you to draw a vibrator: when the game is overtly pushing you in that direction, it’s a lot less fun. It gives the game a sad, desperate feeling, which presumably isn’t what they were going for – though that’s not totally clear, which is a thought I’ll return to in a bit.
Mind you, The Jackbox Naughty Pack’s main issue could be that the three games here all feel like they’d be the worst part of a standard Party Pack, naughty versions or not. In each case, you can’t help but feel like the game is frantically trying to live up to its name, with the gameplay suffering because of it.
This is most obvious in Let Me Finish. The game draws inspiration from Party Pack 7’s Talking Points, where you had to ad-lib a speech on the spot. In Let Me Finish, the game gives you a prompt in the form of a random picture and an outrageous (or “outrageous”) question, and you have to argue it out with one of the other players. It’s not a terrible idea, but the execution makes it feel like the worst Jackbox game in history. The questions are things like showing you a picture of a building and asking where its pubic hair would be located, or asking you to point out where a jellyfish hates to be touched during sex. At best, Let Me Finish feels like a half-formed idea that could generate a surprised laugh; most of the time, though, it just felt like it was using swear words and outrageousness to cover up its lack of interesting ideas.
The other two games are marginally better. Fakin’ It All Night Long is a naughty-fied version of Party Pack 3’s Fakin’ It, a social deduction game in which you have to figure out which player is the faker. The gist of it is that all players but one are given a prompt – whether to raise their hands, do an action, or answer a question – and the faker is told to answer something slightly different. Everyone has to then vote on who they think the faker is, based on whose response seemed the most incongruous. As someone who didn’t really care for Fakin’ It the first time around, I can’t say that it’s made any better by questions like “Raise your hand if you know that your butt smells better than average” or “How many minutes of foreplay do you like?”
The closest the The Jackbox Naughty Pack gets to having a decent game is Dirty Drawful, which is basically just plain Drawful but with racier prompts. Though, really, that’s not even accurate: for every prompt where you were drawing a vibrator, there were also prompts like “handcuffing a big butt” and “crying while watching a TV dinner” that feel like they wouldn’t be out of place in your usual Drawful. To be sure, there were enough “scandalous” prompts that Dirty Drawful couldn’t be anywhere other than The Jackbox Naughty Pack, but it still felt like a misguided attempt at being edgy (or, as one friend said, “This feels like something a 16-year-old would love.”).
Really, though, that underlines the other big problem impacting The Jackbox Naughty Pack that I referred to earlier: it can’t seem to decide what it wants to be. There are times when it feels like it’s trying to be sexy-ish, like when it’s asking you to describe how you’d have sex with a giant cloud. But at the same time, it feels like Jackbox understood that kind of subject matter is pretty limiting in terms of who you’d want to play such a game with, so it occasionally reverts back to the usual kind of prompts and games you’d see in any other Jackbox game. It never sticks with one or the other long enough to find a consistent tone, making it all feel like a bit of a whiplashing mess.
Is all that to say that a Naughty version of Jackbox can’t work? Absolutely not. It’s easy to imagine games like Quiplash, Trivia Murder Party, or Fibbage getting a scandalous treatment for a future edition of another Jackbox Naughty Pack. But this time out? Unless you desperately want to be able to draw a few penises and argue about stuff that’s way less sexier than it sounds, you’re better off ignoring The Jackbox Naughty Pack entirely and sticking with any of the previous ten Party Packs.
Jackbox Games provided us with a Jackbox Naughty Pack PC code for review purposes.
