Played on PS5
Playtime: 8 Hours
Play Status: Completed
Completion Date: January 7th 2023
No Spoilers
Ruined by Ambitions and Reality
If you don’t know, The Council is an interactive movie type of game following the path laid by Telltale Games and the Life is Strange franchise. But it tries to add some gameplay and RPG elements into the mix as well to come up with a familiar but still distinct feeling. While the first two episodes of this five episode journey accomplishes this, the later 3 episodes kills the momentum by including filler after filler, big story changes and terrible backtracking.
To start from the beginning, The Council is about, a council. A secret council that consists of important figures from around the globe like George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte. These important figures comes together in a distant island under the direction of two very rich people to decide on the fate of the world basically. We play as Louis de Richet and come to this island to search for our missing mother who was last seen here.
While the story starts out good, some questionable plot twists that happens in Episodes 3 and 4 breaks the momentum of it and derails the plot out of it’s path. Trust me it’s very very ridiculous. But the problem isn’t the fact that it’s crazy, it’s the fact that the team clearly did not have the budget to take the story to that place.
I will come back to this again in the gameplay section but the whole 8 hours of the game is spent in the same mansion. Which consists of like 8-10 rooms. You never leave this mansion. It’s crazy. And while this makes sense for a game about super secret council gatherings, it does not make sense for where the game goes in it’s later stages.
As an interactive movie, a bad story takes away a lot of the game. But The Council is a bit different. It has much more of a gameplay focus than any other title I mentioned. In The Council, you will mostly explore, make choices and solve puzzles. Exploring starts off great. But, we come back to the same issue. 8-10 rooms. I looked at everywhere very closely during the first half but in the second half, I just rushed through the spaces because I didn’t want to look at them for the fifth time.
Making choices is a bit more interesting. We have the classic important choices that affects the story while we also have the other classic, your other choices doesn’t matter. But here is a very interesting thing. There are things during the exploration you can do that does not look like choices but they actually are. That might have seemed a little complicated.
Let me explain it like things. You need to be careful with every move of yours. Where you go, who you talk to. If you just explore and click on everything you see, you might close off some paths you didn’t even know if they existed or not. Basically, you need to watch your every move. This thing mostly happens while solving puzzles actually. You know, in some other games, you can eventually come up to the solution of a puzzle by just trying every possible option.
Not in this game, you need to be careful about what you choose because you might decrease your in game reward if you don’t. I think this explained what I was trying to say better. As an example, you have a page and you believe something is written on it. In order to reveal what that is, you need to do somethings. If you do a wrong thing, you might cause some of the writing to get damaged and you might not get the whole message once you solve the puzzle.
There is also a level system. And skills. Ok so, you get XP by completing objectives, finding collectibles or talking with people and discovering their weaknesses. Manipulation, politics etc. When you level up, you get skill points and you can use that skill on one of those abilities like manipulation or politics to reduce their cost of using. You have these points and whenever you want to make a special action, it will cost you these points. So giving skill points to the skills you use most will make the most sense.
Example, let’s say you found a very old artifact. If you have Level 1 Archeology skill, you can use 5 of your points to inspect that item archeologically. But if you make it Level 2, you can use the same skill but for 2 points. If you make it max level, Level 3, you can use it for free. It’s a nice system that awards good skill distributing. And that’s it on the RPG system of the game. Some of your choices are locked behind this skills and their costs mechanic.
The Council is not a pretty game. It came out on 2018 but it looks like a PS3 era game. Frame rate is solid most of the time but there are some glitches and bugs. Nothing game breaking though at least. Music, I don’t remember anything. It has an easy platinum, 1 playthrough. You might look at it if you want to have a platinum I guess?
As a lover of The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, Heavy Rain, Detroit and many other games like these, The Council was a huge disappointment. Story went to weird places, gameplay became very repetitive and boring and technically the game is weak. It has some good ideas but it fails to use them as well. I don’t recommend it, in fact, I recommend you to stay away from it. It was a waste of time for me.
Playtime: 8 Hours
Play Status: Completed
Completion Date: January 7th 2023
No Spoilers
Ruined by Ambitions and Reality
If you don’t know, The Council is an interactive movie type of game following the path laid by Telltale Games and the Life is Strange franchise. But it tries to add some gameplay and RPG elements into the mix as well to come up with a familiar but still distinct feeling. While the first two episodes of this five episode journey accomplishes this, the later 3 episodes kills the momentum by including filler after filler, big story changes and terrible backtracking.
To start from the beginning, The Council is about, a council. A secret council that consists of important figures from around the globe like George Washington or Napoleon Bonaparte. These important figures comes together in a distant island under the direction of two very rich people to decide on the fate of the world basically. We play as Louis de Richet and come to this island to search for our missing mother who was last seen here.
While the story starts out good, some questionable plot twists that happens in Episodes 3 and 4 breaks the momentum of it and derails the plot out of it’s path. Trust me it’s very very ridiculous. But the problem isn’t the fact that it’s crazy, it’s the fact that the team clearly did not have the budget to take the story to that place.
I will come back to this again in the gameplay section but the whole 8 hours of the game is spent in the same mansion. Which consists of like 8-10 rooms. You never leave this mansion. It’s crazy. And while this makes sense for a game about super secret council gatherings, it does not make sense for where the game goes in it’s later stages.
As an interactive movie, a bad story takes away a lot of the game. But The Council is a bit different. It has much more of a gameplay focus than any other title I mentioned. In The Council, you will mostly explore, make choices and solve puzzles. Exploring starts off great. But, we come back to the same issue. 8-10 rooms. I looked at everywhere very closely during the first half but in the second half, I just rushed through the spaces because I didn’t want to look at them for the fifth time.
Making choices is a bit more interesting. We have the classic important choices that affects the story while we also have the other classic, your other choices doesn’t matter. But here is a very interesting thing. There are things during the exploration you can do that does not look like choices but they actually are. That might have seemed a little complicated.
Let me explain it like things. You need to be careful with every move of yours. Where you go, who you talk to. If you just explore and click on everything you see, you might close off some paths you didn’t even know if they existed or not. Basically, you need to watch your every move. This thing mostly happens while solving puzzles actually. You know, in some other games, you can eventually come up to the solution of a puzzle by just trying every possible option.
Not in this game, you need to be careful about what you choose because you might decrease your in game reward if you don’t. I think this explained what I was trying to say better. As an example, you have a page and you believe something is written on it. In order to reveal what that is, you need to do somethings. If you do a wrong thing, you might cause some of the writing to get damaged and you might not get the whole message once you solve the puzzle.
There is also a level system. And skills. Ok so, you get XP by completing objectives, finding collectibles or talking with people and discovering their weaknesses. Manipulation, politics etc. When you level up, you get skill points and you can use that skill on one of those abilities like manipulation or politics to reduce their cost of using. You have these points and whenever you want to make a special action, it will cost you these points. So giving skill points to the skills you use most will make the most sense.
Example, let’s say you found a very old artifact. If you have Level 1 Archeology skill, you can use 5 of your points to inspect that item archeologically. But if you make it Level 2, you can use the same skill but for 2 points. If you make it max level, Level 3, you can use it for free. It’s a nice system that awards good skill distributing. And that’s it on the RPG system of the game. Some of your choices are locked behind this skills and their costs mechanic.
The Council is not a pretty game. It came out on 2018 but it looks like a PS3 era game. Frame rate is solid most of the time but there are some glitches and bugs. Nothing game breaking though at least. Music, I don’t remember anything. It has an easy platinum, 1 playthrough. You might look at it if you want to have a platinum I guess?
As a lover of The Walking Dead, Life is Strange, Heavy Rain, Detroit and many other games like these, The Council was a huge disappointment. Story went to weird places, gameplay became very repetitive and boring and technically the game is weak. It has some good ideas but it fails to use them as well. I don’t recommend it, in fact, I recommend you to stay away from it. It was a waste of time for me.