An episodic game with a weird and mysterious premise. Sounds like a lot of games in that genre but The Council is actually pretty interesting. Featuring a bunch of interesting characters some of which are quite famous historically. The game’s genre itself is said to be “Social RPG” since the core gameplay really depends on how you socialize with characters and the world which effects your story. The Council- Episode 1: The Mad Ones is out now for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC. So is this weird yet interesting game worth your investment or should it just be cast away, let’s find out.
The Council is a game that is set in 1793 and begins as our player character Louis de Richet, a member of a secret society is on his way to a private island off the coast of England after receiving and invitation from Lord Mortimer. He’s not the only guest invited as high profile guests like George Washington, the first president of the Independent United States of America and Napoleon Bonaparte have also been invited. But that’s not all, Louis’ mother has gone missing on the island and he’s trying to find out where she is. That won’t be an easy task though, since almost everyone on the island seems to have a hidden agenda of their own and it is your job to use your social skills to gather information from them.
Information gathering is the biggest part of the game and must be done by interacting with characters and with the environment. Once you start the game, you get to choose from 3 different backgrounds for your character which affect the skills you begin with. These include Psychology, Manipulation and Occult which you can level up and after doing so you unlock “Talents” which are over 40 in number. The skills are what you use directly in gameplay when it comes to investigation and dialogue but the Talents is what augments those skills. This is a very deep and complex system which allows you to mold your character to play around the different characters. The characters that you interact with have a weakness and an immunity to different skills. While some might be immune to manipulation, some might be weak to logic. Using your Skills requires Effort Points which are limited in number but can be refreshed by various activities and environmental objects and items. This is important since you cannot return back to a situation once it is done, the game saves constantly which means you can’t go back. Characters remember what you said and did and check up on you and point that out later on.
Now the presentation of the game in terms of audio and visuals is really weird. At some places they excel while at others they fall flat. The visuals have a very hyper realistic art-style mixed with a faux-realistic style which creates this bizarre yet interesting art-style. Characters look so real yet so weird, I personally loved it. The world design is also fantastic with great lighting and texture work but then falls flat when it comes to variety. Once you start to explore around the area, you’ll just see random tables and chairs copied and pasted all over just to fill in the empty spots of the environment.
Also, the performance issues really plague the game. It requires a patch to fix this. Even with a decent system, you wont be hitting 1080p 60fps with stutters and freezes occurring which pull you out of the immersion. The sound effects are great and so is the ambient sound. The soundtrack is lean but when it does show up it’s great. The voice acting from the other characters is nuanced and good but our player character talks like he doesn’t care about what’s happening in the story and feels extremely uninterested.
The Council- Episode 1: The Mad Ones has a very innovative take on choose your own adventure RPGs with its social system. It does come with a significant number performance issues, various audio and visual issues, however, one can hope that a lot of those will get patched soon.
