Review for The Council. Game for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 13/03/2018
Without any doubt in recent years the graphic adventures with narrative crossroads, very focused on the dialogues and interactions between the various characters, are enjoying great success. Titles like The Life is Strange o Batman: The Enemy Within they are the irrefutable proof of this: but emerging in this current scenario, for a game of this type, is obviously not easy. The Council last license plate exit Big Bad Wolf, is certainly a title with enormous potential.
The Council, as has become tradition for this genre of games, has an episodic structure, in this case five. In the first episode, entitled The Mad Ones, we will meet Louis de Richet, a French nobleman at the time of the Revolution and belonging to a mysterious order with a Masonic flavor, the Golden Order, who goes to a barren islet off the coast of England to participate in one of the exclusive receptions held by the master of the island itself, the mysterious and extremely influential Lord Mortimer.
Louis will also have to search for traces of his mother, Sarah de Richet, also a prominent member of the Golden Order and mysteriously disappeared right on the island after an invitation from the owner.
As soon as we land, we will immediately realize the effective influence of Lord Mortimer and the caliber of his "parties". Our stay companions will be, just to give some examples, George Washington, Napoleon Bonaparte, a bishop very close to Pope Pius IV and a charming English Duchess, closely related to the Crown.
If the basic structure of the game is that of a classic graphic adventure, The Council still adds new mechanical roleplay-style mechanics, so as to make everything much more interesting. For example, at the beginning of our adventure we will have to decide what kind of career our Louis is pursuing. The possibilities are: the Diplomat, who will allow us to improve our communication skills which are very useful for managing dialogues better; the Detective who will greatly improve our investigative and clues recovery skills; and finally the Occultist, who instead will give a nice boost to our propensity for subterfuge, as well as a certain knowledge of non-canonical knowledge.
Once we have chosen one of the three "classes" we will be shown our skill tree, which can be improved by spending a sort of experience points that we will earn during the investigation, thus making our character progress in the way that is closest to ours to approach the plot . During our research, we will very often be called to spend "Effort Points", points that will be used to put into practice actions or access specific answers in the dialogues, always in relation to the career undertaken and the skills developed.
In addition to these innovations, in The Council we will also find a sort of consumables, objects that will prove to be precious to restore a certain number of Effort Points, remove some status alteration and discover on the fly some salient features of the people with whom we will have to deal . Despite these pleasant role-playing inserts, The Council remains a game of investigation and storytelling. We will always have to keep in mind the personality and the various weak points of our interlocutor, the type of he has towards us and, last but not least, what are (or what we believe they are) his purposes and motivations.
The story that unfolds in this first episode is truly intriguing, always poised between espionage and the occult. They will not mark references to secret societies and international intrigues in which we, even if as secondary figures, will have to take sides in some way. Or make believe you have! Either way, by completing The Mad Ones, you can't wait to play the second episode.
If from the plot and mechanics side this The Council comes out with its head more than high, we must make a small note to the characterization of the faces. Or, better said, some animations, really a little too woody. Some characters, especially if portrayed in the foreground, are very “past generation”. Same thing for certain animations of our character. Nothing serious or overly annoying, however.
If subsequent episodes of The Council prove to be up to this The Mad Ones, the series has all it takes to keep us glued to the screens for quite some time.
► The Council is an Adventure-RPG game developed by Big Bad Wolf and published by Focus Home Interactive for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One, the video game was released on 13/03/2018
