Jackbox Naughty Pack Preview: The Game Goes “Rated-M”

Jackbox is back with the new Jackbox Naughty Pack. Jackbox has long been a go-to party game for anyone looking for a good laugh. Their games are interactive, thus letting the players fill out the provided material, which means that you can play the game over and over again with many different results. This is also true of the group that is playing. A combination of adults and kids produces a much different game than an adults-only game, and this is who Jackbox is playing to with their latest pack, the Jackbox Naughty Pack.

The Jackbox Naughty Pack is the company’s first pack directed solely to adults and has an M rating. The games themselves, despite having slightly different names geared towards the tone of the pack, are games that exist within the Jackbox universe already. The difference lies with the questions and prompts that move the game along. According to Creative Director and Product Manager at Jackbox Games Brooke Breit, “The tone of the questions inform the level of spicy answers.” Of the impact that the mature content has on the game, Breit added, “The tone feels very Jackbox. It is our voice but for a more mature-related game.”

One obvious question was raised during our preview event with Jackbox Games, “Isn’t any Jackbox game a mature game depending on the people playing it?” The CEO at Jackbox Games, Mike Bilder, sort of agreed, saying, “If you’ve played a game of Drawful without any kids around, it can get pretty blue. This is just us leaning into that.” He reiterated Breit’s comments on the questions and prompts, leading you into that tone of gameplay.

There are three games in the Jackbox Naughty Pack:

• Fakin’ It All Night Long, a game where one person (The Faker) is answering different questions than the rest of the players and needs to justify why their answer works for their question.
• Dirty Drawful, which is Jackbox’s Drawful, but dirty. You are given a prompt and your goal is to correctly guess other people’s prompts based on their drawing and ensure people vote for yours when your drawing comes up.
• Let Me Finish, which tests your skills as a talker when the game asks the tough questions, like “Where is the Mailbox’s butt?” You circle where you think it is and justify your choice to the other players. The winner of each round is the one with the most votes.

With games working with this subject matter, Jackbox Games wanted to be sure that their own staff assigned to the game was comfortable working with that material. “We made sure folks who were working on the title were comfortable working on the title,” said Bilder, who also noted that the sensitivity level of the work varied over different areas of the game’s development.

We had the opportunity to play a couple of sample rounds of the games during the preview and the same fun of your everyday Jackbox game is there with questions that sometimes make you say, “Wow, they went there?”

The Jackbox Naughty Pack releases on September 12 on Steam via the Jackbox Picker, Xbox, Playstation and the Nintendo Switch. Expect a full review to come in a few weeks, but prepare for a game that may give your dirty mind a run for its money.