Awesome Art: The Twilight Zone-esque atmosphere of Split the Room was praised by many players, as was Push the Button's claymation style.
Awesome Ego: The Wheel of Enormous Proportions from the game of the same name is entirely full of himself, yes, but he's also pretty modest about it by making the players feel honored to spin a deity such as himself, not to mention him holding the answers to all of your burdening questions.
Bidiots is derided by some as being too complicated and dragging on for way too long, while others like it for requiring some degree of forward planning and its interesting deduction elements.
Survive the Internet is considered to be boring by new players, but hilarious among ones with enough experience. It all comes down to the fact that not only can jokes be hard to land, as being able to make a good joke in the first place depends on getting a decent prompt or photo (and it's worth noting that some of the questions that are asked to make the prompts are quite specific, which may result in prompts like "I don't know" or "I have never done it") but they also hurt the other players' chances as well as your own if they don't.
Breather Level: Due to how difficult it is to imitate handwriting and the fact that no luck is involved, "Mirror" is considered the easiest of the Killing Room minigames of Trivia Murder Party 2. It becomes even easier in rounds involving streamers and their chats; there's always going to be somebody who takes the opportunity to write a very obvious meme on the mirror (while Aunt Mildred chooses mundane – if creepy – words).
Drawful: Animate's titular animation gimmick has fans polarized; some think it's a great spin on the formula, while others think that it doesn't add much and ultimately just makes the game a lot more tedious.
While generally considered better than the original from a gameplay perspective, Tee K.O. 2 abandons the Youkai avatars of the first game (except for one) in favor of comprising the roster of characters from previous Party Packs. To some, this is seen as nostalgia pandering and strips the game of its charm and identity, while others think they are fun callbacks to the legacy of Jackbox Games.
Creepy Cute: Several of the monsters from Monster Seeking Monster could count as this, such as the Ventriloquist Puppet, Werewolf, and Glob. Also worth noting is the Timer, which is operated by a little smiling skeleton.
Schmitty is probably the best remembered out of all the hosts, mainly because he's associated with the fan-favorite Quiplash and being a fairly popular former You Don't Know Jack host.
[redacted], the Trivia Murder Party host, is up there as well thanks to his voice and dry wit. Perhaps not so coincidentally, there is a rare chance of his voice changer shorting out during the Scoreboard screen, revealing that he may in fact be one of three different game hosts, including Schmitty.
Mayonnaise, the host of Split the Room, has become popular enough to warrant his own merch.
M. Bubbles, the host of Job Job, has become a beloved character for being a surprisingly likable example of a Pointy-Haired Boss as well as being the series' first confirmed nonbinary character.
Fan Nickname: The cat host in Split the Room, Mayonnaise, has been given a few by the fans, including Schrodinger and Rod Purrling.
Fans of Push the Button get along well with fans of Among Us, due to both being sci-fi games where the players try to find out who is an impostor.
On the same boat, Fakin' It has also received some comparisions to Among Us, as the two games have a similar premise, although the former relies more on process of elimination (there's prompts that the players must answer instead of tasks, and the voting system is slightly less abundant and with a different elimination process).
The Mother has another player assigned as their child, and gains points when that other player is rejected. Any screw-up from the son's part is the mother's gain, which is fair, but the problem is that the son isn't notified of this until after the mother is revealed. It's no wonder people who play as her are usually the first to have their role revealed.
The Zombieinfects their date, and so do other infected players. At the end of the game, if everyone is infected, the zombie wins regardless of who has the most hearts. This is pretty easy to achieve by successfully getting a ripple effect going, especially in games with few players.
The Vampire transforms other players via the same means as the Zombie above and, at the end of the game, receives half a heart for every transformed player for a maximum of 3.5 hearts. The reward for doing this can give players a huge boost in ranking, even if not everyone was transformed; and the transformation spreading easily helps them out a lot.
The Glob doubles its hearts each time it dates three different players. This gives them the opportunity to double their hearts twice if playing a game with at least six other players, for a total of 18, a score completely unacheivable by most of the other monsters. Its single disadvantage is that it can accidentally end up causing the Zombie virus to spread easier.
The Two-Faced Creep is a Difficult, but Awesome character to be, as despite requiring to shake up the gameplay formula a little bit, it's easy for it to gain bonus hearts out the wazoo. With only four messages at play, it's easy for the Two-Faced Creep to message two players twice, one of them likely either being a rejected player or the Audience, and get them to both want to date them. And because all messages are private, it's nearly impossible to try and sabotage the Two-Faced Creep, since nobody knows who else they're messaging until it's date time. Sure, if the Two-Faced Creep gets rejected, they'll lose the opportunity at a bonus heart, but they're guaranteed to get two hearts for every date they pull off if they manage to swindle two players, which is easier than one may think thanks to anonymous message logs.
The aliens from Push the Button are given quite the advantage over humans – ones the game likes to explicitly mention. Not only do Aliens have the ability to hack and tamper with the results, making other players look suspicious, they can explicitly communicate with one another non-verbally (in a game meant to be played with verbal communication) and coordinate their plans. If you're playing with a team of aliens that uses this function liberally and/or your human teammates aren't able to co-operate, you are doomed to fail.
Good Bad Bugs: Blather 'Round doesn't require exact spelling for figuring out its answers, only ones that are "close enough", just sharing a few key letters in the right place. For example "Princess Leia" can be marked as correct even if the answer was actually "Princess Zelda".
Growing the Beard: The first entry in the series was considered to be fun but lacking, as the games didn't lean as hard into streaming value and had varying levels of quality (Word Spud and Lie Swatter were mostly filler, You Don't Know Jack 2015 was considered a lackluster entry in that series). The Jackbox Party Pack 2 improved upon it by including new versions of popular games and other new, distinct ones, even if some of them still weren't too well-liked. The Jackbox Party Pack 3 finally hit its mark with the very popular Tee K.O., Trivia Murder Party, and Quiplash 2, and all entries since then were well-received for having the same level of polish.
The Invisible Person's only real power is to appear to be in last place until the end of the game, which not only fools nobody, but makes the character easily surpassable by the other players. At least starting with two bonus hearts gives them a slight advantage, and players may be incentivized to date them since the Invisible Person can't affect them negatively.
The Monster Hunter obtains a bonus for every night they dated a specific monster in the game. Not only is it impossible to figure out who that monster while it's disguised as a human, but there are also a lot of roles that would really have no reason to date them more than once (Witch, Glob, Zombie), or are outright harmful (Serial Killer, Leprechaun, Body Swapper). The one exception to this is the Invisible Person, who (as mentioned above) is at the very least easy to find.
The Mummy curses every player who dates them or another cursed player, and at the end of the game, steals half a heart from every cursed player. The problem is that if all players are cursed, the mummy gets no bonus hearts, which is so easy to pull off by accident that it makes the ability pointless in the eyes of many, especially when compared to the Vampire, who operates similarly but lacks this restriction, which – as listed above – turns him into a Game-Breaker.
Memetic Molester: The Zombie from Monster Seeking Monster, considering the game is about dating, has been jokingly referred to as having an STD.
Memetic Troll: The Vengeful Ghost from Monster Seeking Monster has the ability to make any player who rejects them lose a heart. This allows them to outright blackmail the other players into dating them once he's been revealed, or forego winning entirely by picking players that are sure to reject them – be it to knock hearts off high-scoring players, or to troll the people they hate.
Most Wonderful Sound: Pretty much every sound effect signaling a perfect win, unless you happen to be on the receiving end:
The "Quiplash!" and "Super Quiplash!" chants from the Quiplash games, which happens when every other player (and a majority of the audience, in the latter's case) voted for your answer.
"Super Split!" and the accompanying lightning strike from Split the Room, indicating a 1:1 split ratio between the players.
The airhorn from Mad Verse City, which means you were largely cheered by the other players and audience.
"Synergy!" from Job Job, indicating that everybody prefers your response/résumé, provides an oddly therapeutic aesthetic and background jingle.
Paranoia Fuel: Willfully invoked in Push the Button, which casts one or more players as the alien and, unless the person is really bad at disguising this fact, can quickly lead to people starting to accuse each other.
The "Write for Me" button in any game that has it. Answers produced by it rarely have anything to do with the prompt at hand, which very often causes all the other players to vote for the opponent and giving them more points than if you had at least given it a go, and even if somehow someone votes for an answer that uses these, the points obtained with one of these are halved as a penalty. Quiplash 3 attempts to rectify this by having Safety Quip responses be specifically tailored to the prompts, but the score penalty still applies.
In certain games, when playing with specific numbers of peopleSpecifically...Survive the Internet and Patently Stupid with three players, and Mad Verse City with an odd number of players, Gene will be added to the game as an A.I. player. Players quickly found his presence to generally be unwelcome, considering his answers are randomly-selected, pre-written phrases which rarely ever make sense in context. In Mad Verse City, he is also likely to skew the results due to other players ignoring him and voting for the person he was against, earning them a much higher score than they would have got if they were matched up with a human player. Unsurprisingly, he gets mostly ignored by players, and it's not uncommon to see him end up in last place.
Monster Seeking Monster adds a Robot as an A.I. player when there's a low player count, and if it comes in last, everyone automatically loses regardless of heart count. While seen as an interesting mechanic by some, others found it to be too destructive to be fun.
Every time a new game that cannot be played through a stream is released, or at least one whose gameplay is severely hampered when playing through it, it's met with anger from many Twitch streamers and would-be-players. Examples of this include:
Bomb Corp. has sequences with strict timing that become impossible due to stream lag, as well as requiring active discussion that is much easier face-to-face (or at least with a microphone).
Fakin' It! is completely unplayable through a stream, due to it requiring the players to be able to look at each other.
Zeeple Dome, due to being an action game, becomes nigh unplayable through a stream due to the input lag. This is one of the many reasons why this game ended up being derided by players as one of the worst.
Role Models ups the ante by requiring players to know each other personally in order to work cohesively, unlike the similar Fibbage: Enough About You, which could be played with strangers fine.
Talking Points is fully about quick-talking and improv. Unlike Patently Stupid, where it was only an optional part of the game, it's the star of the game here, and its stream-friendliness suffers because of it.
The Poll Mine attempts to avert this by offering a Streamer-Friendly option, but it ironically turns out to be less streamer-friendly than the normal option. In normal play, active discussion is heavily encouraged, though not necessarily an easy thing to do with teams at play, but it's not an outright requirement, and attempting to predict a teammate's move without discussion is still likely to net a win if a player is observant enough, so the base mode thankfully averts the trope full-stop. Streamer-Friendly Mode, on the other hand, turns the players other than the host into designated audience members making the decisions, which sounds practical on paper, except for the fact that verbal discussion outright can't happen, a scrolling chat is hard to read cues for, and sabotages are more likely to occur as a result. In Streamer-Friendly games, the host is more likely to win due to making decisions by themself.
The Jackbox Party Pack 6 is often seen as a step-down from 4 and 5. Trivia Murder Party 2 is great, but the other games are questionable: Role Models is seen as forgettable and unplayable with strangers, Joke Boat relies too much on inside humor, Dictionarium is too short for its own good, and Push the Button is a bit too hard for newcomers. Technical issues also include a lack of the fan-favorite drawing games and the bathtub aesthetic being incredibly bland. Most of these problems would be mitigated in 7, and further improved upon in 8.
The Jackbox Party Pack 9 is generally seen as a major step backwards after the exemplary 8, with Quixort being the only game from it that seems to be universally liked. Of the remaining games, Fibbage 4 is somehow a downgrade from its predecessor (largely due to Enough About You inexplicably lacking the second round), the reality-show gimmick of Roomerang doesn't really land properly and turns the rest of the game into a disjointed mess, Junktopia relies too heavily on inside jokes and presentation (making it fall flat for streaming), and Nonsensory is not only confusing, but the fact that the prompts are wildly up to one's own personal interpretation basically turns the entire game into a massive crapshoot.
The Jackbox Party Pack 10 follows 9 as being the first Party Pack game to receive a generally mixed reception on Steam. While a majority liked Tee K.O. 2, Time Jinx is seen as an average trivia game that barely stands out against the Fibbage series or Trivia Murder Party 2, Fixy Text's gimmick of having multiple users type on the same prompt gets repetitive and boring under multiple playthroughs (not to mention the prompts are rather bland), Dodo Re Mi is plagued by numerous technical problems but is enjoyable when it works, and Hypnotorious is generally seen as being way too confusing to understand. It doesn't help that this was the first game to see an increase in price since 5, with many reviews complaining about the $35 price tag, and that it was noticeably less polished than past games.
Many immediately deemed Fibbage 4 in The Jackbox Party Pack 9a wholly unnecessary sequel and would've preferred a one-off game getting a sequel instead, believing they could benefit far more from it.
The announcement of The Jackbox Party Starter frustrated players who have been longing for a universal game launcher, and some were annoyed that the additional language options and various QOL improvements to each game (especially in the case of Tee K.O.) were being locked behind a separate pack rather than being added as part of free updates.
The reveal of The Jackbox Party Pack 10 being priced $35 generated mixed reception by players who felt the offerings of 10 didn't match the actual price of the game.
The Jack Attack levels from You Don't Know Jack 2015. If the game is played via stream with even a couple of seconds of lag, they are impossible to time correctly. This ended up leading to the first (and so far only) change to the Jack Attack format in Full Stream, which doesn't rely on timing and doesn't restrict correct guesses to a single player.
Bomb Corp.: Most playthroughs of the game found on YouTube tend to end on Day 3, and for good reason. The combination of the two following tasks in particular is what turns it into a nastyDifficulty Spike:
Defusing the bomb where the instructions were written by children. Said instructions are needlessly obtuse, especially in a game where the core premise alone is challenging enough, so said bombs tend to turn into an exercise in hair-yanking frustration as you and your team try to figure out exactly which wire is what while under intense time pressure.
Filing segments in general tend to be a real pain in the neck, especially in later levels which force your team to go several letters deep before finding a difference in names. Past their introduction in Day 2, these tend to be placed towards the end of the day. Misplace even a single file? Start the entire day over from the beginning! What makes the one in Day 3 so grueling is that – unlike Day 2, which always involved sorting in alphabetical order by last name – this one can involve either first or last names... in reverse alphabetical order, tripping up new players who weren't anticipating the sudden rule change.
Trivia Murder Party series:
"Loser Wheel". If you're forced to spin it, it's just a 5/6 chance of dying. Slightly mitigated in the sequel, as getting hit with it in single-player will only make you lose an extra life instead of causing a Game Over, but still royally sucks otherwise.
Unlike the original, "Decisions, Decisions" can be played by more than two people. Considering how unlikely it is for someone to "take one for the team", anyone who is forced to play it in that situation is bound to die.
"Phones" from the second game. The players are presented with a rotary phone, and they have to dial a fake number beginning with 666. This is considered a difficult task due to the way a rotary phone works, not to mention that it's very touch-sensitive, meaning you could get a different number than the one you were intending. Even [redacted] admits that it looked better on paper.
The Bioscanner from Push the Button. To open up the Bioscanner, the captain has to describe to the two assigned crewmates a series of odd-looking glyphs, some of which are very similar-looking. Expect a good chunk of your time limit to be eaten up if your crew decides to go for it, even if the end result makes it all worth it. This task becomes even more daunting when played through a stream, due to being the only part of the game that requires active communication.
Quiplash 2 InterLASHional, the standalone version of Quiplash 2 with added languages, initially lacked the feature to make and play with custom prompts. Following complaints, it was later added back in an update.
Fibbage 4's version of Enough About You completely axes the final round from the previous entry and ends after a single round of questions; many players found this baffling.
