If you’ve ever played Jackbox Party Pack with your friends, you’ve probably seen it get dirty. A game of TeeKO will ultimately always include at least one penis, and you’re sure to get some outrageous answers in Quiplash. That’s an organic energy that tends to come out of potty-mouthed adults just looking to unwind (perhaps with a few beverages). But can you intentionally push players into that mindset? And would it be nearly as funny if you did?
Those are questions that Jackbox Games is looking to answer with The Jackbox Naughty Pack. This year’s annual release isn’t your normal family-friendly party game; it’s an M-rated collection featuring three games that very much aren’t for your children. The prompts are spicier, the innuendos less subtle, and the Drawful owl wears a thong. It’s a party pack that encourages players to keep their mind in the gutter.
Whether that will be a success might come down to taste. In a hands-on session, I got to see all three of The Jackbox Naughty Pack’s games in action and even make my own spirited argument about library computer porn during a round of the new presentation game Let Me Finish. More than any other Jackbox game, the Naughty Pack is leaning on its own humor more than the outrageous answers of its players — and that has the potential to spoil a good joke.
Get dirty
The Jackbox Naughty Pack is a slim installment compared to the mainline series. It only features three minigames instead of five, two of which are rebranded versions of old favorites. Fakin’ It! All Night Long and Dirty Drawful will be immediately familiar to long-time players, while Let Me Finish is the pack’s only fully original addition. That lends to the idea that Naughty Pack is a bit more of an experiment than a confident headfirst dive into debauchery.
I can understand why as soon as we get into a round of Fakin’ It. Here, every player gets a prompt that they must answer, except for one player deemed a “faker” who blindly responds without seeing the question and must pretend they saw it. Considering the Naughty Pack’s M-rating, I was expecting some explicit prompts that got under the ESRB’s skin. Instead, tame questions like “Could you kill a raccoon in a fight?” and “Is ‘trouser trout’ acceptable to say in polite conversation?” popped up. Those prompted plenty of fun responses from the group, but I wouldn’t call them terribly dirty. They still feel like a teenager’s idea of mature humor.
You will be drawing lots of penises in Drawful.
That same vibe carried over into Dirty Drawful. Like the regular game, each player got a prompt and drew a picture to match it. Each player then had to guess what the prompt was, writing their own caption and tricking others into thinking it was the real thing. The prompts that came up were occasionally suggestive (“Follow! That! Furry!”), but ones like “beached whale sale” felt like they could have been in any T-rated Jackbox game. Maybe that speaks to how prude the ESRB is; my vision of the Naughty Pack might actually earn it an Adults Only rating.
In a Q&A after the presentation, I mentioned that what we saw seemed somewhat tame considering the M-rating. Team members at Jackbox noted that the prompts run the spectrum from suggestive to explicit so as not to overload players, but we were certainly seeing some tamer ones in our session. “You will be drawing lots of penises in Drawful,” creative director Brooke Breit confirmed to Digital Trends in a group Q&A.
Where the Naughty Pack actually did start living up to its name was in Let Me Finish. The new game shows players a picture and then asks a question related to it. Players have to mark it up to answer the question and then make their case. When I played, I was shown a picture of some abstract clay figures in a lineup. The question? Which one is more likely to look at porn on a public library computer? I picked a little round ball with an eye, making a case for it being a little Peeping Tom. I was bested when my opponent picked a clay ball with two appendages: one to look up the porn and one to, well, you know.
I didn’t fully get the appeal of the Naughty Pack until the second round where players were shown a picture of an engine and asked to circle where they would perform oral sex on it. It was a completely absurd premise that was far more explicit than anything I’d seen yet. The ensuing debates had players arguing over which knobs and levers were the engine’s true G-spot. That’s a much funnier premise than “trouser trout,” if you ask me.
I do worry that The Jackbox Naughty Pack might lean a little too hard on hacky innuendos rather than absurd open-ended prompts that players can morph into punchlines. That’s why normal Jackbox games can so naturally become mature experiences so effortlessly. Naughty Pack feels like it’s trying a bit too hard to force it, but it’s hard to fully get that sense from only a handful of prompts. After all, I haven’t gotten to draw a penis yet. I’ll hold my judgment until I do.
The Jackbox Naughty Pack launches on September 12 for PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It’ll retail for $21.69 — nice.
