The biggest difference between Jackbox’s fifth outing and previous collections is the level of concentration required to learn the ropes. The games here are as fun as ever, but the learning curve reaches a new high. The payoff, however, is that the games are immensely enjoyable with a group of experienced partiers. Take the time to let these titles steep, and you’re in for a gut-busting whirlwind.

Each game has specific rules and nuances, so I’ll touch on each individually. The score at the end is indicative of my rating of these games as a collection.

You Don’t Know Jack: Full Stream

There’s no way around this: You Don’t Know Jack plays like a dream and is an absolute blast. Melding high stakes trivia with quick thinking and a downright hilarious fake content feed, it’s the pinnacle of trivia games. Compared to Jackbox’s Trivia Murder Party, it holds its own with a more straightforward theme and unique insular jokes. The only downside is the inevitable knowledge gaps between players. If one player has an encyclopedic mind, it’s rarely a contest. Still, Jackbox does a bang-up job of evening the playing field in various ways.

The “screw” mechanic goes a long way in putting players on even ground, making it harder for leading participants to answer their questions. The need for speed is also prevalent, somewhat negating the ability of people who know answers but aren’t quick on the draw.

Split the Room

Split the Room puts a unique twist on the Quiplash format by feeding players situations with a blank word or phrase. Players fill in the blank, and others answer “yes” or “no” to the scenario at hand. Splitting the room, or earning votes on either side, gives the answering player more points. In other words, you want people to answer differently when you complete the scenario.

This departure from the typical “I hope they ONLY vote for me!” format proves refreshing, but it leaves behind some of the wacky antics found in the likes of Fibbage or Quiplash.

Mad Verse City

By far the best of the litter, Mad Verse City is everything I love about Jackbox. Players simply fill in a blank with a word or phrase, then write an entire line that rhymes with the first one. MC Robots read them in computerized voices, often terribly screwing up the rhythm. Of the five games in the pack, this one made me full-on belly laugh the most. Forcing rhymes brings out the best and the worst of people’s poetic experience, and the entire game just plays like some convoluted robotic comedy bit.

Patently Stupid

Patently Stupid earns my silver medal. It’s a shining example of creativity and worthwhile departure from the usual Jackbox format. Players submit “problems” with funny fill-in-the-blank answers, then other players “solve” those problems with inventions. The inventions include a drawing, a name, a tagline, and a presentation.

The presentation is Patently Stupid’s bread and butter. Sure, the computer will present your invention for you if you wish, but it also allows players to do make their own pitch for the problems at hand. Among my friends, I was the only one to take advantage of this option, and by all accounts (just my own, honestly), I killed it. When you solve a problem like “I want to have people over, but my IBS just gets in the way” with “Bathroom fairies—friends that come to the bathroom WITH you!” hilarity ensues.

Zeeple Dome

I really wanted to like Zeeple Dome, but it just doesn’t work within the Jackbox format. Players fling on-screen avatars at aliens in a deadly arena. The mechanics work like a slingshot—pull your finger down on the screen and your avatar will fling upwards—but the lag between phone and screen is too much to make this a worthwhile game. Seeing my character miss an alien by an inch without being able to quickly adjust with another flick of my finger proved frustrating to the point of rage quitting. Zeeple Dome would be infinitely better served with a normal controller and near immediate reaction time.

The Verdict

With a healthy stable of amazing games and just one dud, Jackbox Party Pack 5 iterates on the successes of its predecessors to mostly positive effect. With a few misses but many more big wins in terms of game design and refreshing concepts, this installment is worth the ride and will guarantee laughs.

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The story that unfolds at the hands of the player boasts countless oddities, all of which eventually culminate in a fittingly strange ending. In any review of The Midnight Sanctuary, one thing should be made abundantly clear: this game leans heavily on story as a crutch to make up for various other shortcomings. In fact, The Midnight Sanctuary is more of a story than it is a game, and the developers advertise it as an “interactive novel.”

The only actual gameplay involved sees players choosing which cutscene to watch next. Just select a location on the map from the options presented (sometimes five locales are available; sometimes merely one), and you’re treated to that particular clip. Your choice has no bearing on the story whatsoever other than the order in which you see things unfold. There’s never a risk of missing something unless, like me, you get bored halfway through a cutscene, tune it out, and then wonder what happened when you return to the menu.

At its best, this interactive novel format is an intriguing hook, but, in essence, it means that The Midnight Sanctuary is just a 4- or 5-hour movie. When boiled down to its base ingredients, it will rely so heavily on the player’s taste that its uniqueness will become a detractor. If you like strange, supernatural tales told with a Japanese flair, this is for you.

Other issues arise throughout the experience, stemming from the game’s format. It is crudely animated—so crudely, it’s confusing at times. Certain character sprites have transparent elements, and when you look through them, you see a portion of a permanent, static background. It’s difficult for me to explain in writing, but it’s worth noting as a significant distraction. If you play the game, you’ll quickly understand what I mean. The animation itself is laughably bad, but I felt that it added to the game’s minimal charm—at the very least, the animation was consistent.

Sonically, The Midnight Sanctuary outright fails. The story would’ve been bolstered by a hauntingly melodic soundtrack and well-timed sound effects, but those elements are absent. The repetitive music frustrates and distracts, and the sound effects rarely match up with the actions portrayed.

These shortcomings are crucial to understand as we dive into the story again, so let’s get back at it. By far The Midnight Sanctuary’s most active, most prominent element, the tale within still has problems. Mainly, the first two chapters of the five-hour adventure chewed up most of my time with the game while producing minimal narrative momentum. In other words, the pacing is incredibly slow for the game’s first half, and scenes that could’ve given me details in a matter of seconds drew on for minutes. Fortunately, the story speeds up and builds suspense through its latter half, and the faith-based supernatural tale is actually quite fun.

The Japanese voice overs resonate quite well, despite my inability to understand any of them. The entire script is captioned in English, and following along as I listened to emotive readings of the dialogue was by far my favorite aspect of the game. When The Midnight Sanctuary steps out of its own way and allows the story to shine through dialogue, it succeeds.

On that note, the actual story is chock-full of mystery, suspense, and intrigue. The Midnight Sanctuary asks good questions about faith, death, and meaning beyond life. Once you sift through the terrible presentation, these concepts shine through and make the game almost worthwhile. I can’t possibly share anything further without spoilers, so I’ll leave it here: if you’re open to supernatural tales with a religious foundation, the story may be up your alley.

Generally speaking, The Midnight Sanctuary’s few triumphant moments are so incredibly niche that it’s hard to recommend it to anyone. While I minimally enjoyed parts of the tale, it was devastatingly marred by crude animation and design choices.

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Childhood friends Arina and Frendt headline as our protagonists. They’re dropped into beautifully rendered and surprisingly contained “Gardens,” or as I creatively call them, “levels,” packed with over-sized versions of items that assumedly play significant roles in their friendship. The levels themselves are reminiscent of Captain Toad thanks to their simplicity, but the similarities to a certain mushroom-headed treasure tracker more or less end there, and The Gardens Between sky-rockets the player into a realm of captivating originality from beginning to end.

Instead of controlling Arina and Frendt as avatars exploring the game’s world, players take charge by controlling time itself, guiding the two besties along their predetermined path through the garden isles. At first, the control scheme is jarring, but it’s actually devilishly simple. Moving the joystick to the right moves time forward, and left turns it back.

The puzzle element involves pressing one other button to interact with the environment in ways that will stick, even when time moves forward or backward. These puzzles are glorious feats of game engineering, and I found myself awestruck at the deftness of the game’s architecture at multiple points during my 4-ish-hour playthrough. The Voxel Agents display a sheer mastery of puzzle design that remains virtually unmatched in games today. I’ll say it: The Gardens Between earns its keep in puzzledom with the likes of Monument Valley or *gasp* Portal. It’s not as flashy or lengthy as Portal, nor is it as visually stunning as Monument Valley, but it’s every bit as fun and satisfying as both.

Within the gameplay, certain systems keep things fresh and engaging. For example, most of the gardens have small bridges that connect two portions of the level. Once you cross the bridge, it disappears, indicating that you no longer need any of the items or mechanics from the previous segment to complete the remainder of the level. It may seem small, but this saved me many precious minutes of gameplay. There were multiple times I would’ve definitely backtracked way further than necessary if that seemingly innocuous bridge hadn’t disappeared.

Those helpful systems and intriguing mechanics evolve, too. The Gardens Between introduces new puzzle elements at an expert pace and none of them overstay their welcome. The levels proved progressively more challenging, and each time I jumped into a new garden, I looked forward to discovering something fresh.

The single thing that kept me from hailing this game as a masterpiece is the story. There’s only so much that can be accomplished with silent characters, and The Gardens Between does what it can with a superb soundtrack and amazing visuals. Every aesthetic element of the game shines on its own, but it doesn’t quite culminate into a poignant, punchy ending in the way I would’ve hoped.

Usually, I’d take this opportunity to rant about ambiguity in video games and how it’s a lazy way to top off an otherwise amazing experience, but in this case, I think it’s just a slight knock on a downright terrific title. In other words, The Gardens Between soars despite its lack of straightforward narrative.

All things considered, The Gardens Between is hands down one of the best games I’ve played all year, and it deserves to be on the radar of any puzzle game fan.

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Let’s get one more thing out of the way. Hipster Attack unabashedly imitates Plants vs. Zombies with very few differentiating factors. If you’re thirsty for originality, maybe try something more mainstream.

When the developer combines that unabashed emulation with such ebullience, the result is a polished and fun mobile game that’s worthy of a slot on any casual gamer’s device.

Hipster Attack places the player in a coffee shop, where respectable mainstream businessmen must defend it from hordes of hipsters looking to get their fill of artisanal coffee and discuss craft beer, avocados, and other hipster things. The laughs roll in right from the start. The first level sees a corporate fat cat (dubbed “HR Junior”) tossing job applications at a bearded hipster with thick-rimmed glasses and purple overalls. As more characters enter the fray, more hilarity ensues. My personal favorite moment was the entrance of the “Music Master,” a hipster who flings vinyl at your corporate defenses.

The entire game neatly packages itself in a beautiful pixel-art style that lends itself well to the mobile player. Too much detail, and it’d be lost. Too little, and there’s nothing to sink your artsy teeth into. Hipster Attack gets it juuuuust right.

Outside of HR Junior, though, most of the available defenders don’t pack as much of a comedic punch. The idea of job applications repulsing hipsters exudes humor, but other defenses, like the logistics junior or the security guard, aren’t injected with that same style. Instead, they’re bland PvZ clones.

One mechanic stood out significantly: each defending character has a unique power that, like many people’s true capabilities, can only be triggered by money. Give a defender a “bonus,” and he or she will enable a superpower that helps even the odds when a particular wave of hipsters proves too difficult to overcome.

Mechanically speaking, the only difficulty I encountered surfaced when a particularly chaotic level flung countless obstacles and/or hipsters at me. On mobile, the screen real estate barely feels large enough to accommodate all the necessary taps, and I often felt compelled to choose between placing a new defender, tapping away an incoming vinyl record, or collecting coffee, the game’s in-game currency. Ideally, I should’ve at least been able to sift through the chaos and perform two of those tasks within reason, but the limited screen space wasn’t conducive to the mechanics here.

Hipster Attack evolves with the player, scaling up in difficulty as you progress. Plus, each level boasts a three-star system that will please perfectionists. It took me multiple attempts to finish the 30th and final level, and it put a nice exclamation mark on the end of my experience with the game. There’s no narrative meat on the gameplay bones here, but in a game meant to be played in short spurts one level at a time, that really doesn’t matter.

All-in-all, Hipster Attack plays like a dream and easily earns enough points to overlook a few mechanical hiccups and its derivative style. It’s worth a play for any casual gamer looking for a fun, hilarious tower defense adventure.

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On the Switch, controlling Red turned into an absolute nightmare for me. Despite knowing that full touch controls were available, I stuck to my instincts and used the d-pad for the first half of my romp through Red’s nutty world. I made a terrible mistake, it turned out, because, in this isometric world, the directional buttons only marginally corresponded to the direction I wished to go. “Up” sent me to the top right of the screen while “Down” sent me to the bottom left. This can be rotated, but that only shifts the problem ninety degrees.

The slippery mechanics of navigation in Red’s Kingdom only serve to amplify the frustration. Every screen is a puzzle, and even when I solved an area, I often had to circle back and retrace my steps through a puzzle I’d already completed. This is an important note because Red rolls in the chosen direction until he hits an obstacle or falls off the course. This would’ve been forgivable, but the game forces re-exploration and backtracking more than it has any right to, lending only tedium to what would otherwise be a charming, squirrel-themed adventure.

The adventure, it turns out, surprises in ways both good and bad. I played all of Red’s Kingdom in just two sittings, and each uniquely struck me as I pondered the adventure. During my first outing with the game (approximately two hours), my jaw dropped at the breadth of Red’s titular kingdom, especially considering the game sells for only $10. But during my second play session (approximately four hours), I began desperately hoping that no more of the world would be revealed. Sure, new navigation and puzzle mechanics trickled into the game, but they never satisfied longer than a few minutes before they felt overused. Stack that on top of the tedious navigation, and Red’s Kingdom quickly turned to boredom.

The story evolves much the same way in Red’s Kingdom. First, it’s fun tracking down objects necessary to explore new areas–it takes a page from the Metroidvania genre here–but soon after I asked myself “I have to get two CRESTS now?” and, a few hours later, “Now I have to fetch three golden acorns?!” Simply put, the series of fetch quests wore me down to the point where I was excited for the credits to roll. The game’s one saving grace in this regard was that, toward the end, it sent me to three smaller island worlds that introduced new enemies and more difficult puzzles. That’s where the game succeeds: placing the player in a contained area with truly mind-bending isometric puzzles that require all of the skills acquired up to that point. I can think of two or three instances where the frustration melted into a desire to solve the puzzle at hand. Still, those moments were disappointingly infrequent.

Despite most of my disdain for the drawn-out nature of Red’s Kingdom, I feel it’s just not at home on the Switch. Had I discovered it in the App Store and played in short spurts on the bus to work, I think I’d have enjoyed it far more. It begs to be played for a few minutes at a time, so players can soak in a few puzzles, progress the story just a bit, and sign off for the day. In this way, Red’s Kingdom could be great. On the Switch, played in two mini-marathon sessions, it just doesn’t work.

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