While Jackbox Games is in the near constant pursuit of new ideas and fresh twists on familiar ones to stuff into their Jackbox Party Pack each year, there’s always that hankering for a nice little dose of nostalgia, a re-run of a fan favourite from yesteryear. That’s led, of course, to Fibbage 4, Quiplash 3 and Drawful: Animate, but then there’s the standalones. Trivia Murder Party 3 is the latest to crawl its way out of the TV and terrorise you with questions all by its self.
Now out in Steam Early Access, Trivia Murder Party 3 is, admittedly, a bit rough around the edges. This is the first Jackbox game that is using Unreal Engine, where everything is now animated with 3D animations and personalised avatars, and that’s before you add in things like online matchmaking to the mix. It doesn’t yet run on Mac, fails to load matches properly on SteamOS, and since it’s all in 3D now, it will force your CPU to actually do some rendering. But this is early access, and so there’s also a lot of potential for this game to be refined and improved, and there’s already a good bit of variety available for fans.
It’s the classic Trivia Murder Party format, with up to eight players joining in with their smartphones to play a mixed up trivia game with murderous minigames between each question. Answer a question correctly and you’ll be safe during the minigame. Answer incorrectly and you’ll be at risk of being murdered by [REDCATED] if you fail or come last in the following game. That’s OK, because you can keep on playing as a ghost.
It goes back and forth like this, players earning points for correct answers and trying to survive the minigames, until just one person remains alive. Now it’s time to try and escape, with a string of multiple choice trivia questions while all the characters run after a truck. The trick is that ghosts chasing the live one have three answers to choose from instead of just two, and they’re all correct/incorrect toggles so you can move forward more spaces and snatch the lead. The final escape needs you to be in the lead – this stealing the force from someone if you overtake them – and then get a question completely correct for a cinematic leap towards the flatbed.
It’s still such a good formula, allowing for the lead to swing back and forth, for obscure trivia to not be quite so punishing in earlier rounds, and [REDACTED]’s modulated voice and leaning on schlock horror tropes remain delectable. I hope that having all the questions be read out by [REDACTED] is on the cards for the full release, though. That’s something that feels absent.
I also enjoy that there’s Plot Twist modifiers, making some of the questions trickier to answer. Flashlight Trivia, for example, requires players to pick a point on the question board to illuminate, needing coordination to get more of the question highlighted. Those questions can then be very misleading without a key part shown, such as “What shape is represented by 1+1+1+1+1+1 sides?” If you don’t get to see all the 1’s, you’re not going to say Hexagon, are you?
That can also feed into some of the Killing Floor minigames, with a mix of new games and remixes for the past. Chainsaw is a bit like the Skewers box from TMP2, but with a smaller number of squares, icon clues for where will be in danger, and multiple rounds. You often have the safe players playing against you, and that can sometimes just wipe out all those at risk – Math is the worst for this, because you need to answer simple sums as quickly as possible, and outscore both the other at-risk players and all the safe players. If everyone dies, then someone is picked randomly to be the alive player.
The biggest possible upside to Trivia Murder Party 3 is that you don’t necessarily need to gather friends to play it. Yes, it will still be at its best as a party game when you’ve got friends and family visiting, and second best with a host player streaming the game online, but TMP3 comes with online matchmaking so you can find a game at any time of day. It generally works quite well, in my experience, able to find games fairly easily in the middle of the day, though I do wonder if the additional layer of networking adds a little sluggishness to the scene changes and the phone connectivity to Jackbox’s browser page.
So, there’s some teething issues and some waiting potential with Trivia Murder Party 3, and with this in mind it’s probably best to wait for a few updates. If you’re gagging for a new Jackbox trivia game, though, and want to help nudge the team towards the best final version of this game with your feedback, then that’s what Early Access is really all about, isn’t it?
