《The Jackbox Party Pack 12》评测：HyperFace 或成其最佳作品

The Jackbox Party Pack 12 is about to be released, and with it a new collection of party games to break out. With five new games, this Party Pack has a wide variety of approaches to gameplay, from stone-cold and chaotic trivia to picture-stretching games to fit a specific mood. Does this varied approach help create a well-rounded experience, or does it mean the Jackbox Party Pack 12 loses its cohesion?

For anyone who hasn't played a Jackbox game in the past decade and a half, the Jackbox Party Pack is a collection of party games that can support players up to eight by allowing those involved to join the game via their phone, tablet, or really any device with a browser. From there, you'll be prompted by the game to select jokes, draw images, or type responses into the game.

We Forgot A Card, Formula Needs Some Work

The first game in the new collection is We Forgot A Card, a game where you get to create a greeting card that's never been created before.

Round 1 has a general theme picked for all players, then players will select from one of three messages for the front of the card and then write their own messages on the back of each other's cards. It felt a bit like playing one of those games where everyone writes a sentence of a story, and then it's all unfurled to create a chaotic theme-swapping mess.

Once everyone has collaborated together to create cards, they're pitched head to head for players to vote on which card they like the most. This is generally the most fun part of the game when everyone's chaotic creations are put up on the big screen for everyone to laugh and react to.

The second round is similar to the first, but the third shakes up the game a bit. Now you'll be creating a message for a stuffed animal that can go with the card. Where Round One and Round Two did a lot to steer you into the theme, Round Three was a lot more freeform and let you more directly respond to player prompts. There wasn't really a theme or card phrase that was supplied to you, so you could just do your best to make something funny.

We Forgot A Card feels like the safest and most 'on rails' of the experiences for Jackbox Party Pack 12. It feels like the game you'd break out at the family event that keeps the rowdiness a bit more on-topic before you devolve into absolute madness.

As someone who likes a bit less guardrails, I do think the Round Three idea of a game where people make plush toy messages, and the game reads them out with text-to-speech, was really the highlight of the experience, and I could have done with a lot more of that.

Show Off Your Friendships In MegaPals

MegaPals immediately falls off any rails by offering players a chance to just post word associations to prompts and see how many of them pair up with their friends.

The game might prompt you for Broth, and from there you'll start listing things off: meat, chicken, bone, vegetable, etc. People who are more creative (or ran out of more normal ideas) might submit 'er' to reach 'brother', etc.

The rounds give you a set amount of time to just type out as many possibilities as possible before everyone can put their phone down to watch the screen and their results.

Players floating on the screen will begin to shake hands and connect with other players as matches are made. It's really fun to see the strange web of 'MegaPals' begin to form as Player A and B connect to Player C but not each other. Player B might connect to D as well, but Player E and F are off on their own.

It's an entertaining and satisfying way to represent the web of common thoughts when asked to just type feverishly.

The following rounds pair up players and prompt questions like "The kind of store that Player A and Player C should run together." From here, points are awarded to players who guess things that the players of the topic liked the most.

Scoring here is strange because each player has a different level of 'score' with each of the other players. You don't win because you got the highest points, but instead because you and another player aligned with the same ideas together the most.

At the end of the game, two winners are crowned as the two MegaPals that share the most in common.

This game was absolutely chaotic from the get-go. While there were some tense moments of quiet or silence when everyone was mashing in their answers, the times when everyone grouped together to review their scores were always a huge laugh. This is Jackbox Games at its finest, setting up hilarious prompts and then just letting a group be as crazy as they want.

Debate and Switch Will Find Its Audience, It Wasn't Me Though

Debate and Switch is really what you'd expect from the name. Everyone gets paired up to debate some topic, then after one round of debating, the loser gets to change one thing about the prompt that gets suggested by the audience.

A debate topic like "Sea animals should include seagulls" could have one word altered to be "Sky animals should include seagulls", "Sea animals should include sea monkeys", or something more nonsensical. After the change has been selected, it's time to debate again.

There's a far greater performance aspect here, as the debates happen verbally to the people that you're playing the game with. There will without a doubt be people who absolutely eat a game like this up, and there will be others who will run away from this with stage fright.

There are some options you have as a speaker to start and stop your time, and even to extend it if you feel you're on a roll, but it really is just flying by the seat of your pants and begging the audience to try to engage with your point of view.

For me, this was one of the weakest games in the collection, but I'm also someone who is more into Jackbox Games for the quick bits and callback jokes rather than a longer-form discussion.

Hyperface Might Be My New Favorite Jackbox Game

Speaking of quick bits, Hyperface is a game where players will be prompted with an esoteric situation and asked to morph a face, Super Mario 64 style, to create the kind of reaction you might expect to have in that moment.

You're provided with a number of pre-populated faces to select from, or you can even take a selfie. From there, you can morph the image by dragging, growing, or shrinking it. You can also draw on the image in a variety of colors to create the kind of intricate scenes the game is asking you to perform.

In a later round, you're given a more complicated prompt and can either pick a new image or take a modification you've already made and add even more to it.

This was the perfect level of quick bits and hysterical outcomes that got quickly mixed with the personal element of getting to see friends around the room getting twisted and contorted into weird shapes to represent situations.

The sign of a really good Jackbox Game for me is hearing everyone mumbling to themselves or giggling at their creations during the planning phase, and then everyone rolling in laughter as weirder and weirder faces hit the screen.

This will be a Jackbox Game I'll look forward to returning to time and time again.

Idol Factions: The Most Gamey Game On The Jackbox Party Pack

Idol Factions was a game whose premise really blew me away, as it was a really intricate game that merged trivia knowledge with teamwork and coordination, as all of the players are broken up into two teams and need to solve trivia by sorting answers into their categories.

The gameplay itself is almost tower defence in nature. On the edge of the screen, travelling down a road, will be an answer that needs to be sorted. As it reaches a player, that player will direct it to the next person or into a category bucket. By sorting the answer correctly, you'll get points. By sorting it wrong, the answer will return to the board, but you'll only get half as many points.

The first round lets you ease into learning how to direct the answers. The second round introduces bombs and movement, where one space will be empty, so you'll need to be moving around to make sure all answers are currently moving. Each round there's more to answer, and the categories get harder.

The party went from rolling on the floor laughing at HyperFace to immediately locked in as we were screaming whether the B-52s were a Boy Band or made up of men and women.

If you like pure trivia games you can also check out our recent preview of Trivia Murder Party 3 that just released into Early Access.

As a trivia game, it's chaotic and a lot of fun to play, but it's also very different from the rest of the comedic offerings available on the Jackbox Party Pack 12. It stood on its own as a really fun trivia game that was fun to play, but it also didn't quite mesh with the vibes as much in the complete package.

Jackbox Party Pack 12 Review | Final Thoughts

There's always some big hits and a miss in a Jackbox Party Pack for me. I think my miss is going to be Debate and Switch for this Party Pack, but I think what impressed me the most is that the rest of the games weren't just hits, but each was a hit in a very different way.

'We Forgot A Card' is a chance to ease into the game session with some on-rails entertainment, even if the first rounds don't quite land. MegaPals is a game that promotes the same-brain and weird inner jokes that a friend group is so good at generating. HyperFace has incredible precision with funny moment after funny moment with an insanely high 'chuckles per minute'. Idol Factions does away with a lot of the joking and is just a great Trivia game on it's own.

I feel like this isn't a Party Pack that I'll load up as much to do a round of everything with a party, but there will be a time and a place where the mood will really hit for just one or two of these games, and it's going to be enough to keep a gathering alive for multiple hours.

These games all being so different does make me less likely to play them as a pack, but it doesn't change the fact that these are going to be games I'm very much going to want to return to playing.

The Jackbox Party Pack 12 was reviewed on PC via Steam with a copy provided by the publisher - All images were taken during the course of the 8-hour review.