Review: In The Jackbox Party Pack 10, a Talented Crew Runs Low on Ideas

Jackbox Games’ Party Pack franchise has existed for a full decade at this point, delivering party games for rooms real and virtual and making a lot of people very happy. Along the way, though? There have been some real stinkers. Highlights and lowlights are par for the course with these packs, and you never really know what you’re going to get from year to year. The Jackbox Party Pack 10 follows suit, with its mixed jellybean bag of experiences both new and revised. On balance, though? It ends up feeling a bit stale.

Time Jinx

At this point, including some sort of trivia game in the pack is almost a requirement, and Time Jinx is the new one! It’s at least something different, focusing on questions about when things happened. There’s some normal multiple-choice stuff mixed in, but mostly you’re trying to pinpoint a year as close as you can. There’s some attempts at time travel humor here and there, but generally the theme is used for some vintage comic book aesthetics.

Like many successful Jackbox designs, Time Jinx is inspired by many existing physical party games, and estimating a year has proven through them to be a compelling time. There’s usually not too much to say about the trivia game in the pack, but be assured that this one doesn’t fumble the ball with its progression and flow like The Wheel of Enormous Proportions.

Dodo Re Mi

We… thought Jackbox learned this lesson.

In the past, the dev team has tried to expand the possibility space of games controlled with phones. There have been some successes with weirder controls, like the various tasks of The Devils and the Details and Push the Button or the simple left-right sorting of Quixort.

But action? That just hasn’t — and likely wont — work in a browser. Most notoriously tried in 2018’s Zeeple Dome, there are just too many points of failure and it’s more frustrating than fun to attempt. There’s a sync process that’s quick, and we can see what they were trying! But ultimately, we didn’t feel like we were playing anything together. Instead, it felt like we were playing our own phone rhythm games without interacting with each other.

Dodo Re Mi attempts to let you enjoy the music with a replay afterward. This is a chance to sync up those tracks to an interesting performance! And the instruments are fun, with options like a fast food cup or a cat mixed in with normal guitars and drums. But it’s hard to hear them even if you do everything right, and the music playback system doesn’t really allow for performance elements. You don’t get a cool-sounding track of your own if you’re good, and you don’t get a Trombone Champ-like laugh from failure.

Hypnotorious

Playing in the same space as games like Spyfall, The Jackbox Party Pack 10‘s Hypnotorious has you take the role of different people and things and answer questions in character. Then you get points for grouping each other into categories, with one player totally on their own.

This is an idea that could work, maybe? But it feels like the team had trouble balancing social aspects with competition. In practice, the game is phenomenally easy, and we didn’t find a lot of chuckles along the way. If your answers are too in-character, it’s generally obvious to everyone who you are. If you’re trying to win, you can give a less ideal response and essentially break the game for everyone. The scoring system doesn’t always have to work great for a Jackbox game if the experience of playing it is just fun (think Talking Points or Patently Stupid). But if it’s neither fun nor balanced? We’re not going to inflict it on our friends and family.

FixyText

The premise of FixyText is that you’re responding to someone’s errant or undesired text messages for them, and you’re doing so by typing together in the same text box. Then other players vote on their favorite parts of the responses. Like many successful Party Pack entries of the past, it’s a chance for your group to joke with each other. Like some unsuccessful ones, though, it doesn’t provide a heck of a lot of context or prompting to help you with that.

In our plays, FixyText did actually bring the laughs for our group, but only because we brought them to it ourselves. (It turns out that pretending to be a family pet works pretty well?) And typing a funny thing into a text box has carried Jackbox games before! But the surrounding text message premise seems to only get in the way, and we didn’t get anything out of the ability to mess with others’ segments.

Tee K.O. 2

Each pack these days includes a sequel to a popular game as a safe, reliable anchor, and Tee K.O. 2 fills that role this time around. We’d usually talk about it first, as there’s less to explain, but we thought it was important for you to know the context to feel the burden it must carry. Given that? We’re not sure there’s enough here to keep the pack afloat.

It’s a lot like you remember, but with a few additions to shirt variety. You can make tank tops and hoodies, and the text at the bottom can be rendered in a few different typefaces. These are nice enough touches, and maybe they’ll sell a few more physical shirts? But ultimately the game you’re playing is largely identical. In terms of encores, it’s a step above Drawful Animate’s well-intentioned two-frame animation adding more work for players, but it doesn’t revitalize its source as well as Fibbage: Enough About You.

The aesthetics of the games? They remain on point. The Party Pack games recycle and revisit particular looks, but they manage to make something appealing every time. The writing and voiceover work is still top-notch, too! Years of practice and refinement have really helped to support the batch of new concepts, whatever they happen to be, with a great look and feel.

It’s truly an unenviable position. The five-games-a-year format means that they’re burning through ideas at a ludicrous rate, and your fiftieth-best concept for “party game you play through a phone browser” just doesn’t hold the same promise. Then again, the first batch had Word Spud? So maybe The Jackbox Party Pack 10 is just a slump. But the best Jackbox games are clear from the moment they start, and finding more simple-but-effective designs at this point is undoubtedly a challenge.

The Jackbox Party Pack 10 launches October 19, 2023 for $34.99 on Steam and Nintendo Switch, as well as PlayStation and Xbox platforms. It’s developed and published by Jackbox Games.