Preview: The Jackbox Naughty Pack leans into the joke a little too much

It sounds good on paper, but an adults-only Jackbox game isn't as fun as it sounds

Jackbox Games

In the past, I’ve generally enjoyed the Jackbox games. They haven’t all been hits, with a few games within the packages being a bit dull or far too involved for their own good, but nevertheless I buy every Jackbox Party Pack and play it with my family – my parents and my sister – which is great fun. The next game in the series, though, is definitely not one I’ll be playing with my family, and honestly, I’m not sure I would enjoy playing it at all outside of rare instances. 

Everyone knows how a Jackbox game goes with good friends. You play a little bit of a trivia game, do a bit of social deduction, and then hop into Drawful and suddenly your screen is littered with genitalia. There’s something alluring to the human soul in drawing a penis, and when you give a group of adult players a game where they’re allowed to draw literally anything, at least one penis is going to be drawn. Jackbox games know this, of course, and decided to lean into that with its newest game, the Jackbox Naughty Pack. 

Billed as a Jackbox game that’s strictly for adults only, the Jackbox Naughty Pack taps into your primal desires to draw penises and tell dirty jokes. It expects it, encourages it, and even requires it. It’s a game aimed squarely at the people who wouldn’t dare play Jackbox with their parents, because they know that the second the word “eggplant” comes into play, all bets are off. It’s for the streamers who won’t play a game of Drawful live on Twitch because they don’t want to be banned. 

In a preview event, Jackbox Games said that this isn’t the first step to transitioning into a mature-rated company, assuring us that it will still be making plenty of teen-rated games in the future. That’s probably a good idea, because as a first foray into adults-centered content, the Naughty Pack leaves a little bit to be desired.

I’ll quickly go over the three games included in the Naughty Pack, although two of them will seem familiar to anyone who’s played one of these games. The first is Fakin’ It: All Night Long, an adult twist on a game first featured in Jackbox Party Pack 3. Here, one person is the imposter, given fake prompts while every other player gets a real prompt, and the imposter has to try and blend in before other players figure out who they are. While the original Fakin It included prompts like “Raise your hand if you own a hockey jersey,” All Night Long has prompts like: “Raise your hand if you think the term ‘trouser trout’ is acceptable in polite conversation.” You get the gist — it’s the same game, just with suggestive questions. 

Fakin' It seems like the most fun of the three games / Jackbox Games

Dirty Drawful plays out much the same way, with slightly suggestive prompts like “butt holding a newborn butt,” which a player then has to draw. Players then see this drawing and offer up believable alternative prompts to try and trick other players into believing their fake prompt is the real prompt. This can get silly, and there will be a lot of penises drawn here, but it’s still just Drawful at the end of the day. At the very least, Dirty Drawful now has an undo button while drawing, a first for the series and something that will be very well appreciated by terrible artists like me. 

The last game, Let Me Finish, is the only wholly original game in the pack, and it definitely has the most suggestive prompts in the pack. Here, you’ll be presented with a picture of some kind, followed by a prompt. In our press preview, the picture was some kind of mechanical object, and the prompt was “Where would you give this object head?” Players then took turns to circle a part on the engine, then give a speech explaining and defending their choice. That speech is pitted against another player, who gives their own speech, and everyone else compares the two and votes for a winner. 

Let Me Finish only works if everyone has the same sense of humor / Jackbox Games

My biggest problem with the Jackbox Naughty Pack is that I’m just not entirely sure why it exists. On a superficial level, I get it — people are going to be dirty playing Jackbox, you may as well give them what they want. But I think half the reason being a bit spicy in a game like Jackbox is enjoyable is because the game isn’t leaning into it, and it’s not funny if you just shoehorn it in, so you have to wait for the opportune moment to strike. It’s a bit like how a meme is ruined the moment Elon Musk tweets it — you can’t force comedy.

It’s the spontaneity of the raunchiness that makes it exciting, and it’s hitting the right prompt at the right time that makes it funny. When the game leans into it, that spontaneity is gone, and it all feels a little bit embarrassing. When everything is silly and dirty, nothing is, and the novelty of it all wears off very quickly. 

At the end of the day, though, these kinds of games live and die by the people you play them with. The press preview is not an ideal playing scenario — being thrown into a game with people you don’t know, whose senses of humor you haven’t had a chance to suss out, and who you desperately don’t want to offend means you can’t get caught up in it quite as well as Jackbox would have hoped. Maybe, when I invite my friends along to play it in my home, or hop into a Discord match with some buddies, I’ll have a better time. For now, though, I’m not sold on The Jackbox Naughty Pack, no matter how many penises it encourages me to draw. 

---

The Jackbox Naughty Pack will be released on September 12, 2024 on Xbox, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, and PC.