The Jackbox Party Packs are collections of 5 games in each pack, meant to be played in a group. In my circle, we never go a Jackbox night without at least one round of Trivia Murder Party. It’s trivia with a fun twist of death games, whether you get a question wrong and have to play for your life or are trying to kill your fellow participants whenever you get one right. The best part is that only one person needs to own the games. Playing over Discord or in person is equal amounts of fun, and while the games within each pack can be very hit or miss depending on the type of game you like and who you’re playing with, that’s also a strength of the series: there’s truly something in there for everyone.
Which is why it hurts when I say that my impression of Trivia Murder Party 3 was not favorable.
I booted it up with a few of my regular Jackbox veterans, and before we even started playing the actual game part, we found something we did not like: Having to make a Jackbox account to customize your character. Needing to make an account to level up and get new outfits, accessories, and characters—that’s all fine and dandy; not my favorite, but not a deal breaker. But not even being able to pick between the four base characters available without creating an account? This started us all off with a very bad taste in our mouths, especially in an age where everyone is selling their information or getting it hacked off of their “protected” systems. From what I can tell, there’s also no ‘play again’/rematch button either, which makes it really tedious to have to restart the lobby even when you’re playing with the same group of people.
Another aspect that drags is the narrator. To be completely frank, everyone’s least favorite parts of the Jackbox games are the dialogue, ‘quips,’ and the constant talking. I know that sounds harsh, but like I said to my friend who does like the dialogue in most Jackbox games—“it’s still your least favorite part, isn’t “it?”—in which she begrudgingly agreed. I’m someone in particular who has never minded the Murder Trivia host, but I feel like it’s especially grating here with both him and his mother talking at each other (instead of to each other, they feel disconnected). It’s a cute nod to the Friday the 13th series, but I’m not sure it adds enough.
Being able to hop into an online game with strangers is this game’s best asset, easily. It’s a lot less chaotic without people talking over each other, screaming, and complaining while on-call/irl (although the chaos is one of my favorite parts of these games), but it’s so convenient to hop in for a quick trivia fix, and besides one disconnect, the experience ran very smoothly. There were a lot of cosmetic bugs in the animations, with characters being static when they shouldn’t be and half-sunk into the ground during some of the minigames, but none affected the gameplay itself.
The core of the gameplay besides the trivia are the minigames, and most of them are great. There are some fun twists on the classics, like the sword stabbing one being remixed into blowing up a suitcase that hides one of your friends, while being confined to certain shapes to give the whole thing an extra layer of complexity and mind games. Some of the new ones have also been added to my favorites: the estimation of pouring blood in a container to try and fill it the most without spilling and trying to escape a chainsaw, where it shows you where it’ll be coming from from different angles to confuse you. I also like that they added a little song during the math minigame; it adds a bit of extra challenge by trying to overstimulate all your senses.
There are a few with janky controls (arrow minigame) and very different experiences online vs. with a friend group (canoe minigame), but the eyeball minigame is the worst of the new ones. Eyeballs fall from the ceiling, and you have to guess how many are landing in the bowl on the floor, but they’re so fast and there are so many that no matter whether I was playing with friends or online, no one got even close to the correct amount. It turns into just guessing a random number, with no real skill involved. There were also multiple times where the instructions would bleed into the minigame’s art and make the rules hard to read.
Among my complaints are also a few nitpicks that might not matter to anyone at all but feel weirdly important to me. I prefer the sound of the old screams and the look of the old end credits screen where it describes how everyone died. In this iteration, I could ingest poison from the chalice game and get animated as being electrocuted, which has no correlation whatsoever. The dedicated farting button (and I guess there are other emotes too) is fun to spam, but if you get stuck in the emote screen while a question flashes on-screen, you are screwed. The only way to get rid of the menu is to double tap the screen, which 100% of the time will result in you picking an answer by mistake.
The animation at the end, where everyone who makes it tries to jump in the wagon, is really good, much more exciting and better at building tension than in previous entries, and the dramatic jumping into the wagon only to bounce off it if you didn’t win is great.
There’s also been a surprising amount of repeated dialogue and questions compared to previous Trivia Murder Parties. Now is it fair to compare an Early Access game to a finished one? Well, that’s actually my next point: why is this game in Early Access?
On their Steam page it states:
“Why Early Access?
Jackbox Games is attempting to add true online multiplayer and matchmaking to this game, which would be a major first for our studio. We’d like to see if we can build and grow a meaningful multiplayer community, which also means supporting this title with regular new content, online features, and game modes over a multi-year roadmap.
We are interested in Early Access because we want to involve a large audience in helping to shape the future development of this game…. What online multiplayer features, game modes, or content are players enjoying that we should expand upon? What feels missing that we should consider prioritizing next? We expect our early access period to help us answer many of these questions to shape the future development roadmap of this game for years to come.”
Jackbox has put out updates for their complete games before, and adding more content to a game does not mean it has to be in early access. I’m sure it’s not an easy game to make—no game is—but Trivia Murder Party is the most straightforward of the Jackbox Games in my opinion: answer trivia questions, die if you get it wrong, and try to be the last one standing. I don’t like the growing trend of Early Access titles because it often seems to be an excuse to profit off an unfinished product.
Overall, I guess we will see where this new step for Jackbox will take the series, but for now, my friends and I will stick to the older, finished versions of the game.
