Jackbox Games has been rolling out family-friendly party packs for over a decade, and now the studio has finally waived the white flag with The Jackbox Naughty Pack. It seems that years of players asking for an adults-only version of the game eventually wore down the developers, who have conceded by embarking on the frontier of a mature rating.
This decision may be quite controversial to those who prefer the teen rating these titles typically procure, but you can rest assured in knowing that The Jackbox Naughty Pack seems to be more of an experiment than a change to form for the company.
As the team showcased a preview of the three new games that come with this pack: Fakin’ It All Night Long, Dirty Drawful, and Let Me Finish, the CEO of Jackbox Games, Mike Bilder, assured us that there are no plans to leave the family-oriented gameplay that has become a foundation of the franchise.
Inside this box, players will find some familiar territory, brand-new challenges, and more occasions to introduce adult humor. But let’s be real, if you’ve ever played a no-filter game of Jackbox with a close group of friends, you already know exactly where this is going.
The Jackbox Naughty Pack Is Going For Gold, But Without Losing the Studio’s Identity
Before discussing the games themselves, I believe it is important to note that, from my point of view with The Jackbox Naughty Pack preview, the game still feels very on-brand. If you are going into the latest installment, hoping for a no-holds-barred explicit experience reminiscent of Cards Against Humanity, then you might be surprised.
Everything presented and discussed in the preview suggests that the developers have taken care to avoid excessive amounts of in-your-face offensive content. In fact, in many ways, the game tries to be as inclusive as possible and maintains the spirit of previous Jackbox titles, which lets the player control the range of extremes.
Fakin’ It All Night Long
The first game that was presented was Fakin’ It All Night Long, a returning favorite directed by Tim Sniffen. Fakin’ It is a social deduction game where everyone is assigned a secret task except the “faker” and the objective is to find the outlier.
It takes about 20 minutes and requires 3-8 players. As explained by Sniffen and the rest of the Jackbox team, Fakin’ It was already primed for spicy content, and so it didn’t take much to push this game over the edge of maturity.
The game presents all of the players with a question and everyone, including the faker, has to choose to raise their hand or not. However, the faker does not receive the question and has to do their best to blend in and avoid detection. Add in an NSFW element and banter between players and you have a pretty humorous experience.
While the game itself is simple, this style of playing looks to give the game mode new life. The questions asked in the preview ranged from raising your hand if you slip into an accent when drunk, to asking if you think “trouser trout” is acceptable in polite conversation.
The new version of Fakin It’ includes a remote play option that makes sense for those who may want to stream the game and play with friends or family in other parts of the world. It also has selectable avatars and includes emojis in the game, which is a feature aptly called Emojional Damage. The emojis make things even more challenging for the faker trying to guess the most relatable option. It will allow users to borrow emojis from a curated library, or to use ones from their phone.
Dirty Drawful
The next mode the Jackbox team walks us through is Dirty Drawful, another returning game with an adult twist, directed by Warren Arnold. The instructions are fairly simple. The player is told what to draw, and when finished, everyone has a chance to create captions based on the images. The captions are then put to a vote, with the actual prompt thrown in the bunch. Dirty Drawful is a 3-8 player game that takes about 15 minutes to complete.
There’s not much to say about Dirty, other than the only thing limiting the user is their imagination. The round we viewed felt very familiar, but with a suggestive changing background and a clever toilet paper roll countdown. One example of a drawing prompt was a “butt holding a newborn butt,” which was easily one of the most hilarious things we saw from the preview.
As someone who is no Picasso when it comes to Jackbox phone drawings, the addition of more inappropriate subjects seems like it will make the task much easier. If your drawing is terrible, it’s only going to make the game funnier going forward, which may make this an improvement to the original. There’s also an undo button that certainly would have been useful in the first iteration of the game.
Let Me Finish
The last game, Let Me Finish, was also directed by Warren Arnold and is the new kid of the bunch. The game takes some of the best elements of the other two and honestly might be the most fun of the three. The goal of Let Me Finish, a 3-8 player 15-minute game, is to assign attributes to various objects, such as an Avocado, a random machine, or art.
Players are shown an image, given a prompt, allowed time to draw on the picture, and then they go against another player in defending why their answer is the better of the two. The remaining players vote on who is the best. The greatest part of this game is the presentation aspect of it, because the player really has to defend why their reasoning is a winner.
Let Me Finish, being the newly added experience, is probably The Jackbox Naughty Pack’s most 17+ game as well. The two prompts that were presented were much more directly sexual, which seemed to better reflect the mature rating. However, the Jackbox developers assured that, while questions might be more or less suggestive, players will not be shown anything graphic.
The Jackbox Naughty Pack Has Promising Potential
Although I won’t make any conclusive statements, without reviewing the game further, The Jackbox Naughty Pack looks to be a win for fans, based on what I’ve seen.
Although two of the three games are somewhat recycled and there are fewer modes than a typical Pack, it’s an understandable direction for the Jackbox Games team. The developers wanted to give fans this highly requested game, but it also needed to be true to their past work. It is designed to test the limits of the constantly evolving formula.
Now that The Jackbox Party Pack 10 is released, the team is ready to continue thinking outside of the box. The Jackbox Naughty Pack is an obvious first step into new territory, but it is meant to protect the heart of the studio.
The game is designed to be sex-positive and tries to avoid subjects that would be considered mean-spirited. The development of the game was also taken very seriously to ensure that everyone involved was comfortable while working on the project, which further shows Jackbox has had the right attitude.
And now that The Jackbox Naughty Pack has been announced on all major platforms for a September 12th, 2024 release, gamers won’t have to wait much longer to try it out for themselves!
What do you think of The Jackbox Naughty Pack? Will you be picking it up when it launches next month? Make sure to leave a comment and let us know what you think about the game.
