It’s very hard to have a clearly defined opinion of The Council, a title developed by BIG BAD WOLF and Cyanide a few years ago. It’s a story-driven episodic adventure game with clear influences from the Telltale formula, yet also lots of unique twists on the ideas, including a skill system and XP gain. It’s both a good looking and a really ugly game with terrible performance issues. And it easily swings from moments of brilliants to utterly rubbish and cheap scenes. It’s an interesting ride, but hardly a truly enjoyable one.
The premise of the game is intriguing – you are a young member of The Golden Order, arriving to a secluded island in search of your mother who suddenly disappeared. And you quickly learn that this island has gathered several key figures of 1793, including George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte for a special meeting that might define the world to be. Using exploration and usual adventure problem solving and dialogue heavy gathering of information, along with learning weak and strong points of other people on the island, you must discover the answers to all of the mysteries that keep piling up.
At its best, the game works really well, heavily leaning into careful maneuvering around difficult questions and asking precise questions, using what you’ve learned about people against them and slowly learning more and more about the situation you’re in. You don’t know if you can trust anyone, sometimes doubting even the main character himself. You take risks, make choices that might bite you much later. All while clearly supernatural elements creep in. The skill checks and the skill system they’re tied to are interesting enough, the resources that you find that can help you with using the skills are well placed for the players who like to explore and the story develops at a good pace. The first episode is, perhaps, the strongest at all of the aspects of the game and while it has its own issues, it’s a wonderful setup.
But as soon as the second episode, the problems start becoming more and more pronounced. Some puzzles are extremely long and tedious, without being truly exciting or fun. Some are badly explained. There are several instances where, either due to poor translation (there’re constant issues with typos or complete mismatch between text and voice overs), or due to poor planning, the game says conflicting hints about the puzzle. The weird bugs, both in terms of story logic and in terms of technical issues, become more frequent. General cheapness of it all becomes more apparent, with jarring cuts, weird transitions and moments where something feels cut out.
And the story becomes more and more muddled and bizarre, both in terms of the plot and its delivery. Given that this is a choice-driven game, you might get situations that make more sense than what I got, or some where the sense or continuity are completely gone. And the plot itself somehow manages not only to follow the most predictable path, but take it so far into predictable, that it becomes surprising at how ridiculously silly everything is and how inconsistent the characters become between chapters. Somehow, even the soundtrack by the wonderful Olivier Deriviere manages to be just “fine”, not as much for the quality of music, as much for how underwhelming the use of it is. Also, the voice acting is… not great.
I can’t call The Council bad, but I cannot call it good either. And even though I’ve found some interesting elements in it, I can’t even say that it’s really worth checking out even out of curiosity. I’d suggest checking it out, especially since the first episode is free, and then deciding if you wish to see more of it. Just remember, that the first episode is the most competent and interesting of them.