The year is 1793. Mom and son duo Sarah and Louis De Richet, members of a secret society, are hot on the trail of the Al Azif, a mysterious grimoire said to hold secrets of the occult. They discover that a prospective buyer will attend a conference held by the mysterious aristocrat Lord William Mortimer on his private island, and Sarah sets off alone to find them. Weeks later, Louis is summoned to the island to help search for his mother, who has disappeared. There, he discovers there's more to this case than he first thought.
The Council is a narrative-driven experience that promises a fresh take on the genre by throwing RPG mechanics and character building into the mix. Unlike many of its genre peers, The Council has no combat mechanics of any sort, nor does it have QTEs. Instead, Louis can have up to fifteen different skills which he can use during conversations to persuade others, as well as during investigations to uncover clues.
Backing this system are the effort points, a limited resource which is expended during skill checks according to the difficulty of the check and the current level of the skill, thus making the player consider when to better employ their unlocked talents. Skills can be unlocked and leveled up at the players' discretion with exp. points accrued at the end of each of the game's fifteen main quests.
A lot of people seem to compare The Council to TellTale's games, but I find that comparison inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that The Council is a lot more elegant about how it handles player choice. Instead of bombarding the player with cynical "x will remember that" prompts in a desperate attempt to make them care about what they're doing, The Council keeps its cards close to its chest: does this moment matter in the long run? Maybe it does, maybe it does not. You'll have to live with the anticipation, now, won’t you?
Plus, in The Council, there is no failure state. The game never reaches a Game Over screen and keeps going regardless of how badly you mess up. Apart from just making wrong choices in general, the game features complex puzzles in which the player may come to the wrong answer, as well as confrontations, which are heated dialogues where Louis must talk a person into or away from doing something, and can only pick so many wrong dialogue options before they become angry or lose interest. Interestingly, each character has specific weaknesses and immunities to your skills, and it pays off to discover them beforehand.
All the while, the game is quietly noting down the paths you take. Every so often, the choice legitimately doesn’t matter: it will be acknowledged in dialogue, but mostly forgotten. Sometimes, information or items obtained will open up new possibilities in the future, like new dialogue paths that would otherwise be grayed out, but other times, events will leave lasting marks: Louis will be left scarred or maimed, or a character will die and be absent for the rest of the game. And among all of these, there are moments that decide the game’s ending, a handful of situations that, even if you don’t notice at first, will shape the story’s conclusion, both for Louis and the supporting cast. There are a surprising number of ways in which the final scenes may resolve, depending on how resourceful Louis proves to be during his quest and who he chooses to side with.
The game takes place in a singular location, that being Lord Mortimer's island-mansion, and allows the player to more or less free roam around it searching for their next objectives instead of taking them from scene to scene, which enhances the sense of freedom even though, apart from a couple of forks in the path, the story plays out in a linear fashion. In fact, I almost wish it was more linear: sometimes, the game will allow you to pick one of two scenes to experience – it does so four times in the first episode alone – but it’s but a contrived choice, and if one were able to experience both scenes linearly, their understanding of the narrative and characters would have been enhanced.
Mechanics getting in the way of storytelling like that are the main issue I see in The Council. The biggest offender is the exp yield: exp is earned from finding items in the environment and completing predetermined objectives in each scenario. The former will have you combing each room obsessively trying to hoard as many items as possible, but it's when exp gain becomes the driving factor behind your choices that enjoying the narrative becomes harder. You can miss out on a lot of exp by not making the correct choices and/or not having a necessary skill unlocked at the right time, the latter of which, granted, is more common during the beginning hours than anywhere else.
The character builds and roleplay, as enticing as they are, also feel janky at times. During the opening moments, there's a choice of character class for Louis that determines his starting skills. Never mind that there are clearly superior choices of character build due to the uneven opportunities to use each skill, but it's always better to make Louis a jack-of-all-trades instead of specializing in a particular archetype: there are few cases where a skill check can't be bypassed, and in most of those, if you plan carefully, having a Lv1 skill is enough to get the full benefits.
Still, as flawed as the game may be, it doesn’t take away its successes: it presents a fascinating framework for a narrative-driven RPG, one that can and should be studied and iterated upon. Mechanics like character weaknesses and vulnerabilities, opportunities, confrontations and even parts of its skill systems are exciting ways to solve problems without combat, and the game still boasts an entertaining narrative that, while a bit convoluted by the end and not entirely spotless, presents an unusual setting and compensates for its less than extraordinary budget with smart art and scene direction.
All in all, The Council is a novel, fascinating game that has been on my mind since I finished it. It’s easy to see why it’s such a controversial experience, but for fans of narrative-driven experiences, it’s a definite recommendation.
The Council is a narrative-driven experience that promises a fresh take on the genre by throwing RPG mechanics and character building into the mix. Unlike many of its genre peers, The Council has no combat mechanics of any sort, nor does it have QTEs. Instead, Louis can have up to fifteen different skills which he can use during conversations to persuade others, as well as during investigations to uncover clues.
Backing this system are the effort points, a limited resource which is expended during skill checks according to the difficulty of the check and the current level of the skill, thus making the player consider when to better employ their unlocked talents. Skills can be unlocked and leveled up at the players' discretion with exp. points accrued at the end of each of the game's fifteen main quests.
A lot of people seem to compare The Council to TellTale's games, but I find that comparison inappropriate for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that The Council is a lot more elegant about how it handles player choice. Instead of bombarding the player with cynical "x will remember that" prompts in a desperate attempt to make them care about what they're doing, The Council keeps its cards close to its chest: does this moment matter in the long run? Maybe it does, maybe it does not. You'll have to live with the anticipation, now, won’t you?
Plus, in The Council, there is no failure state. The game never reaches a Game Over screen and keeps going regardless of how badly you mess up. Apart from just making wrong choices in general, the game features complex puzzles in which the player may come to the wrong answer, as well as confrontations, which are heated dialogues where Louis must talk a person into or away from doing something, and can only pick so many wrong dialogue options before they become angry or lose interest. Interestingly, each character has specific weaknesses and immunities to your skills, and it pays off to discover them beforehand.
All the while, the game is quietly noting down the paths you take. Every so often, the choice legitimately doesn’t matter: it will be acknowledged in dialogue, but mostly forgotten. Sometimes, information or items obtained will open up new possibilities in the future, like new dialogue paths that would otherwise be grayed out, but other times, events will leave lasting marks: Louis will be left scarred or maimed, or a character will die and be absent for the rest of the game. And among all of these, there are moments that decide the game’s ending, a handful of situations that, even if you don’t notice at first, will shape the story’s conclusion, both for Louis and the supporting cast. There are a surprising number of ways in which the final scenes may resolve, depending on how resourceful Louis proves to be during his quest and who he chooses to side with.
The game takes place in a singular location, that being Lord Mortimer's island-mansion, and allows the player to more or less free roam around it searching for their next objectives instead of taking them from scene to scene, which enhances the sense of freedom even though, apart from a couple of forks in the path, the story plays out in a linear fashion. In fact, I almost wish it was more linear: sometimes, the game will allow you to pick one of two scenes to experience – it does so four times in the first episode alone – but it’s but a contrived choice, and if one were able to experience both scenes linearly, their understanding of the narrative and characters would have been enhanced.
Mechanics getting in the way of storytelling like that are the main issue I see in The Council. The biggest offender is the exp yield: exp is earned from finding items in the environment and completing predetermined objectives in each scenario. The former will have you combing each room obsessively trying to hoard as many items as possible, but it's when exp gain becomes the driving factor behind your choices that enjoying the narrative becomes harder. You can miss out on a lot of exp by not making the correct choices and/or not having a necessary skill unlocked at the right time, the latter of which, granted, is more common during the beginning hours than anywhere else.
The character builds and roleplay, as enticing as they are, also feel janky at times. During the opening moments, there's a choice of character class for Louis that determines his starting skills. Never mind that there are clearly superior choices of character build due to the uneven opportunities to use each skill, but it's always better to make Louis a jack-of-all-trades instead of specializing in a particular archetype: there are few cases where a skill check can't be bypassed, and in most of those, if you plan carefully, having a Lv1 skill is enough to get the full benefits.
Still, as flawed as the game may be, it doesn’t take away its successes: it presents a fascinating framework for a narrative-driven RPG, one that can and should be studied and iterated upon. Mechanics like character weaknesses and vulnerabilities, opportunities, confrontations and even parts of its skill systems are exciting ways to solve problems without combat, and the game still boasts an entertaining narrative that, while a bit convoluted by the end and not entirely spotless, presents an unusual setting and compensates for its less than extraordinary budget with smart art and scene direction.
All in all, The Council is a novel, fascinating game that has been on my mind since I finished it. It’s easy to see why it’s such a controversial experience, but for fans of narrative-driven experiences, it’s a definite recommendation.