I don’t know about you, but more often than not, a round with any of the ten entries in the long-running Jackbox Party Pack series winds up taking a crude and dirty turn despite best initial intentions to keep drawings clean or prompts clever. So, upon hearing this year would not see the presumed release of the eleventh instalment but instead an adult-focused trio of games, it did raise the question. Was this really necessary? We were already doing a pretty good job of lowering levels of conversation as it was.
Despite that initial scepticism, after a couple of evenings trying out Jackbox Naughty Pack with my usual group of crass friends, the answer to that question wasn’t as straightforward as expected though.
Fakin’ It All Night Long is all about deception, a crude version of Jackbox Party Pack 3’s Fakin’ It where everyone in the group responds to a prompt they are sent to their phone, well, all except one person who is given nothing and must do their very best to simply blend in. Turns out this formula works just as well now as it did all those years ago, rounds filled with yelling, accusations and grand jaw-dropping reveals when the true faker is revealed. While the prompts for the most part are undeniably cruder in tone (ever wanted to point to the person you think is likely to have the cutest and cleanest butthole?), their consistency of quality varies between hilariously awkward to just… well strange and unamusing. It’s funny to see everyone point to the same person when asked who they think would be loudest during sex or watch as everybody rates their sexy voice but to see confusion in the eyes of the room as they’re forced to count how many politicians, they want to get terminal diarrhoea is quite the opposite.
It’s not all rude and lewd though with updates made to the game including upping the player count to eight, allowing for information to be shown on screen (making online play possible) and reworking rounds both old and new. All these changes are smart and welcomed for sure.
Dirty Drawful meanwhile is (as you’ve probably guessed) Drawful with rude prompts to draw. While it is pretty much a carbon copy of the original game, the crudeness actually works rather well, drawings becoming even more nonsensical and eyebrow-raising as players attempt to tackle each prompt. Previous Drawful games would introduce the option to download other custom-made packs and even create your own disgusting nightmarish mix of suggestions which does raise how necessary this is. However, it is nice to have something ready to go out of the box without the need for setting up your own or fishing out the work of others online.
Let Me Finish is the final game of the pack, the only truly new experience offered in Jackbox Naughty Pack and unfortunately a real dud. In it, players are forced to draw on pictures of inanimate objects as they try to answer seemingly ridiculous and unrelated questions such as showing what foreplay with a building would look like or which home appliance gets turned on by pimple popping. Drawings get revealed in a series of one-on-one battles as the drawers get 20 seconds to plead their case and win the votes. It’s incredibly dumb but not in the often entertaining way the series has proven it can pull off so well in the past. Instead, our three rounds fell flat every time, creating sketches that were funny, let alone made sense a real chore and then having to present to the room why your lacklustre effort was even worth a vote an endeavour best described as pointless.
So, what are you really getting with this year’s pack of party games? Two that prove a fun time and one brand new addition that unfortunately is a big misfire. Not a terrible ratio when you do the math, but then when the two winners are essentially retreads of older games, that takes some of the shine away. And what of the ‘naughty’ elements? Do they bring much to the experience? Sure, to varying degrees I suppose especially when it comes to Dirty Drawful. However, as I mentioned at the start of this review, our group could get by perfectly fine with the PG originals, in fact, we often found turning something seemingly innocent into something laughably crude all the more rewarding. Then again, hearing Cookie Masterson utter the F-word is pretty great. So too, is watching the awkward reactions of everybody pointing to who they believe does the most complicated sexual positions.
So, you see, it’s complicated. While we certainly had fun playing Jackbox Naughty Pack, its very existence at times feels questionable. For every laugh had at a sex-related question it left me wondering if we’d have just as much fun returning to the family-friendly entries. Plus, it certainly doesn’t help that Let Me Finish is a bad idea, crude or not. But then again Cookie Masterson does say the F-word… It’s tough but Jackbox Naughty Pack is… fine. While its implementation of crude ideas isn’t terrible by any means, I just hope the developer returns next year with Jackbox Party Pack 11.
Version Tested: Nintendo Switch
Review copy provided by Jackbox Games