Let’s check in on The Council. Last week, the third episode, titled Ripples, was released.
The new episodes of The Council still include a number of technical issues. Most of these don’t affect your ability to play the game or experience the full impact of the narrative, but are minor annoyances. The camera still jumps around, there’s artifact clipping, the load times are long and occur frequently, etc. At one point Louis’s eyes were stuck looking in opposite directions during a cutscene. Again, these are mostly opportunities for polish. The only truly disruptive instance was the transition from the opening cutscene to the screen where you equip manuscripts. The transition was so abrupt that I thought I’d accidentally hit a button and skipped the rest of the cutscene. When it happened a second time, it was just as jarring, but at least this seemed to be a poorly executed transition, and I didn’t actually miss any dialogue.
As far as The Council’s narrative, at this point I’m starting to lose patience with the game. The game introduced an overtly supernatural plot line and frankly, I lost a substantial amount of interest at this point. It was at the same point in the game that Sarah is telling Louis a story about something that happened in her 20s, and Louis refers to it as 60 years ago. Is Louis bad at math, or are we supposed to believe Sarah is 80? Speaking of Sarah, she is still a much more engaging character than Louis, and after some of the reveals in Episode 3, I’d be very interested in playing a game with the same leveling mechanics where you play as a young Sarah, rising through the ranks of the Order and stealing babies in the middle of the night.
The leveling up is still an interesting mechanic, and well-balanced, so I feel I must be deliberate in my dialogue choices to preserve my effort points, but there’s still a sense of progress in each chapter. Beyond that, the mechanics get fairly frustrating. There’s a hedge maze that seems to exist solely for the purpose of slowing down the players, and especially those with a poor sense of direction. Louis has an inner dialogue about every object in the manor, but when you stumble upon someone sprawled out on the balcony, suddenly there’s no opportunity to interact or comment on that. And the puzzles and confrontations frequently rely on the player’s memory of previous episodes, which would be fine if this was not an episodic game with months between episodes. I think I would have been more frustrated with this, but I’m not very invested in Louis or what happens to him as a result of failing these challenges.
My recommendation: If you want to stand a chance at succeeding the challenges in this game, take detailed notes or wait until the full game is available. For my initial impressions of The Council, please see our review of the first episode, The Mad Ones.
