Talk it Out (Switch)

When you’re watching a game show like Family Feud or playing a multiplayer game like one of the Jackbox Party Packs, the antics of the host and their interaction with the players can sometimes feel like it is distracting from the game being played. However, if you decide to play Talk it Out, you’ll realize how truly vital those announcers are to giving the game life. Talk it Out’s empty presentation will make you yearn for the over-the-top reactions and corny jokes hosts add to the experience, because without them, it hardly feels like you’re playing a game at all.

 

Talk it Out requires two players to play and tries to capture the appeal of limited communication guessing games like the game show Password. During a round of Talk it Out, one player will be shown a symbol they need to remember. This symbol is usually easy enough to parse, the black and white silhouettes you see being simple objects like a tombstone, toilet, or snail, but there are definitely stranger or more complex ones to be found. A sunset descending behind water or a mythological creature like a gorgon might end up the symbol of choice, and the stranger sights can complicate the guessing if the player isn’t quite sure what traits the image embodies. However, the guessing player does have only a small pool of nine symbols to pick from when submitting their guess, meaning the process of elimination can be used to eliminate the other options. The guesser is the only one who knows all of the nine symbols though, so the person who knows the symbol can’t try to steer them away from potential pitfalls.

So far, this design seems like a decent enough formula for a party game. You do have to pass the Switch around literally every turn and that can get very old, but the bigger problem during the game is that you are not really meant to communicate with the other player verbally. Instead of talking it out like you would in the board game Taboo, you are encouraged to rely entirely on Talk it Out’s systems to communicate to the person you’re sitting right beside. The guesser will start things off by choosing a question from a random set of six, and while some of these can be helpful like “Is it soft?”, “Is it small?” or “Do I resemble it?”, most of them are basically borderline nonsense. These are meant to be humorous, and admittedly, there are some that might catch you off-guard and make you laugh. Seeing “Is it as hairy as your buttocks?” is the kind of ridiculous but possibly relevant question a player might hope to find, but you’re just as likely to get something such as “Are… are your veggies making noise?” or “Am I being difficult?”, these random queries and ones that can’t really be relevant feeling like wasted time and thus losing their appeal incredibly quickly. The non sequiturs are incredibly common and seem to actually hurt attempts to play the guessing game, but the sad truth is that the answers are just as bad.

 

Since the person who knows the symbol is struggling to convey any clue they can to their play partner, the off the wall responses the game throws into the bunch feel even more annoying. “Praise Jeebus, we’re safe!” and “When I was in the forest I met your brain. He told me he left you long ago.” would work as silly exclamations or a mild barb to throw into the mix, but when you’re trying to work together against a ticking clock to suss out the symbol, these definitely don’t land in the way the developers intended. Like with the questions, these can pull out a random one that hits your funny bone, but it’s much more likely you’ll see a set of six answers and just be left without any clue which irrelevant and often unfunny line you want to send back. There is some room for clever usage of language though. Sometimes it is as generic as selecting a positive or negative response despite it not really fitting the context of the question, but other times, on either end of the questioning, there is a little room for interesting tactics. Asking “Anime is real, right? Right?” could be completely random… but if your partner picks up that you’re trying to ask if the symbol is something normally tied to anime, then maybe this can be an interesting case of you two overcoming the game’s design to figure out the answer. Sometimes it’s best to focus on the main noun of a sentence or its tone and hope the other player is on the same wavelength, but it’s still not such a substantial barrier to play that you truly feel like you’ve won out against the game for using its deliberately unhelpful design against it.

There is one trick you have that can alter the meanings of your questions and answers though, and it is at least one of the strongest cases of the player altering the bad selection they’ve been handed into something useful. In a normal round of play, both players get one exclamation mark of fairly large size. You may drag this onto the question or answer you are about to send to the other player, placing it anywhere in the sentence you like. It can be used to accentuate your response of course, but its more interesting use is in covering up words or drawing attention to one part of the reply. You can alter a sentence that was formerly negative by covering up a word like “not” and if it’s one of the longer replies, you can slip the exclamation point in at a part that is at least somewhat relevant. You can get a few more of these if you pick certain characters, the game having some well-drawn but mostly irrelevant cartoon animals you can choose to be your avatars. They wiggle around a bit, but other than abilities like extra time or exclamation points, they mostly just adorn the rather sterile pink and teal play area.

 

Unlocking new characters just requires either playing the game a certain amount of times or winning that many times, and even if you try to sit down and unlock them with a friend, it can be a rather dry process. The same goes for unlocking the few modes on offer, the main version of the game usually mixing together a variety of symbols but the food only and creature only versions can be unlocked if you slog through repeated plays often enough. The main reason these are slogs though isn’t technically because of the design of the game or its sometimes ridiculous responses, but because its rule set basically disallows communication between the two players outside of the Switch’s screen. To talk too much would negate the reason the game is even involved, and while you can certainly get away with chatting some without breaking the unenforced rules, the slow back and forth play on the system really drags out what could have been a dynamic and possibly humorous session if players could actively speak or were able to communicate more quickly than the constant Switch passing. This is also why the game feels so hollow, because without any host chiming in to keep the energy alive, it can boil down to silently passing the game back and forth only to see irrelevant words on the screen during your turn. The very reserved background music certainly doesn’t apply pressure in rounds that are designed to last over five minutes, so squeaking any fun out of it has to be done in spite of the ingredients Talk it Out is adding to the experience.

THE VERDICT: Talk it Out is a two player guessing game with a cumbersome design and hardly any soul. While the character art is nice enough and one of the game’s quirky responses may eventually make you chuckle, most of the game is a very slow back and forth where interacting with the other player is discouraged and the way you’re meant to play together is by selecting often aggravating random jokes that are irrelevant by design. With no in-game host and the concept being invalidated if you just spoke plainly outside of the game’s context, you’re left with a slow, tedious way of playing a guessing game. What’s worse, this style has been done better by decades old game shows and board games and with more amusing outcomes possible because, unlike Talk it Out, their design is actually conducive to enjoyable player interaction.

 

And so, I give Talk it Out for the Nintendo Switch…

A TERRIBLE rating. Talk it Out, referred to on the Switch eShop with the strange full name Talk it Out: Handheld Edition to perhaps warn you it can’t be played docked, had a kernel of a fun multiplayer guessing game but failed immensely on the delivery. Perhaps only the exclamation point system really feels like a clever addition to the game, and that’s mostly because it helps you get around the often groan-worthy random responses you’re given. Talk it Out doesn’t even have a large bank of questions and answers to draw on either, meaning to unlock new characters and modes, you’ll keep seeing the cracks about Jeebus and a brain in the forest again and again. Working around limited communication restrictions isn’t even the main issue of the game, because games like Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes derive all their fun from trying to work out how to communicate information under pressure, but Talk it Out is a slow back and forth where a response can sometimes be completely useless. The process of finding out the symbol feels so shallow because you are encouraged to not interact much with your partner besides passing back and forth the Switch, and while there is definitely room to talk as you play, explaining why you sent a response invalidates the intended challenge of the game.

 

Pretty much every rule added to the guessing game at the heart of Talk it Out makes it less exciting and more cumbersome, and you’ll probably end up wondering why you aren’t playing something that doesn’t cost money like 20 Questions instead. With its barren presentation and active discouragement of adding your own dashes of personality to the symbol guessing process, Talk it Out ends up being almost the antithesis to multiplayer play. Your partner seems to be there just to make the game function rather than as someone to talk to and laugh with, and the game itself brings only the necessary data to make this ill-conceived guessing game function. So many other games make talking out the answer far more enjoyable than this lackluster dud.