The concept of a dedicated Jackbox Naughty Pack is an interesting one, not least because I’m pretty sure that most people play Jackbox games with a bunch of dirty jokes and swear words anyway. At least in the groups I play with, while we might start clean, everything eventually descends into naming anatomical parts of human bodies in as crude a manner as possible, and then most people giggling like school children who’ve just learned their first naughty word.
The Jackbox Naughty Pack includes three games, which you’ll note is notably fewer the five games that are typically featured in a bundle. Each of these has been designed to bring out the rudest and most adult themes and jokes going. Wait, no, that’s not quite right. Two of these are actually older games, albeit good ones, with more adult prompts, and one is a brand-new game that doesn’t quite land. I adore these Party Packs, so it pains me to say that this one just doesn’t hit right.
Let’s start with the golden oldies. Fakin’ It All Night Long is a dirty version of Fakin’ It, where you have to lie a lot and try not to get caught out. It’s still a great game , but it feels like a really weak inclusion here because, well, we’re all adults anyway, so most Jackbox games of Fakin’ it would end up with some R-rated undertones anyway.
The same is then true of Dirty Drawful. Drawful is an all-time classic of a game, the unusual prompts leading to even more unusual drawings, and the inevitably unusual titles that people come up with for them. We’ve seen Jackbox revisit the idea a couple times, with the standalone Drawful 2 and then Drawful Animate in Party Pack 8, and so Dirty Drawful is immediately familiar. It’s a filthy take on the classic drawing game that just adds in a few naughty prompts, and again… we were all doing this anyway, and everyone knows it. None of us are free from sin.
The new game, and the final one in the pack, is Let Me Finish, a presentation game, which will always depend a little bit on how confident your group is, and also how good at improv they often are. That being said, me and my friends are all incredible charming, funny, attractive, generous, and humble, so I’m not worried about that. This game pits players up against each other while they try to present scenarios about what your washing machine gets up to at night. It’s a fun enough idea on paper, but man, it just feels sort of trite and forced.
And that’s the lot. There’s just three games in this bundle, and with two of them being reskins and prompt packs for older games puts a whole lot on the shoulders of Let Me Finish. There’s not much space for innovation and trying new ideas when you’ve only got one crack of the whip, and a lot of the excitement for each new Party Pack is seeing new ideas and themes. Not all of them land, but then there’s always a couple of highlights. You don’t get that here.