The Council

Tedious as fuck pacing, no actual gameplay, like a bloober game BUT! redpill after redpill including some damn awesome occult, political and theological exchanges. Art and architecture is AMAZING at points, decisions do make dramatic changes BUT lipsync is off, characters are ugly bastards, performance is horrid on gtx1060 or equivalent and lower, controls are okkk, pacing is fucked. Overall pretty poor game EXCEPT in its formula. Spending points, talking, conversations, and the general story is fantastic despite mediocre ending which leaves you satisfied though. I can recommend this game to anyone who loves smoking reefer and reading occult, esoteric and generally highly philosophical texts and literature like Kybalion, John Milton´s Paradise Lost as examples. The books in the game gave me enough to study already. Paracelsus was a weird motherfucker...... Redpill the game on top some rothschild based conspiracy about napoleon, washingtons freemasonry, "plottwist" and how easy it seems to some to imagine what the illuminati, bilderberg etc would actually behave like. Grown up children /Kappa. And this is where it crumbles, sometimes it´s serious, other times it´s execution turns out to be... comical. Some femi sentence here, some conserv sentence here, you can see I´m emphasizing this hard as it´s a pretty long game for it´s pacing issues and you really need some love for classic literature, philosophy, history and sadly some too comical fantasy elements. Recommended for any knowledge seeking based lifeform. Not recommended for the casual adventure player who wants to enjoy themselves in a lovely game.

"The Council" plays like The Colonels Bequest took place in Cultist Simulator, art from IcePick Lodge Pathologic 2 era, with RPG elements ripped from Cute Knight / an '00s flash dating sim. The main character is a Golden Dawn cultist hunting for his vanished mother at a proto-Bilderberg conference. He gets thrust into her place in the meeting, having to juggle his search, his nation's interests, and the welfare of the cult. Great premise, and for half the game well executed! Gameplay wise it's a social stress simulator, in the best of ways. You know nothing and saying the wrong thing will have serious consequences. Finangle your way through bespoke, unique interactions with The Elite, building up knowledge of what's going on and how to exploit the conversational foibles of the various players. Escalation is well timed - as you gain enough awareness to make good decisions the decisions themselves get tougher. The game autosaves, no manuals, so you have to live with your choices. It IS possible to backtrack to a chapter break, but these are far apart, so changing your mind is costly and burdensome. As noted in other reviews, there is a twist that recontextualizes everything prior, which isn't necessarily bad, but coming at the halfway point it is also when the writers had to start trimming back the branching narrative so it can all end at The Big Ending. Much of the gameplay becomes padding between important choices, and the effects of those choices erode away quickly. The positioning of characters in conversations start to drift, with people speaking over each other's shoulders. New locations stop being introduced. The MC starts just knowing things and making decisions contrary to the player's. It feels rushed, and we never get decent closure on the first half before it goes from eliptony-spycraft to an almost-gonzo railroaded walking sim. As two games, the first half is 5/5, the second.. 2/5? Maybe 1/5 for unnecessary blasphemy.

I had fun playing this game but unfortunately I had a correct hunch about most of the mysterieus stuff, which made the game less mysterious than I would've liked. Overall good experience but could've been better. I like the different characters and how they were related to/interactive with each other. Good character development(s).

So the premise is not bad, setting is interesting and hook is good. But game starts nice and early with punishing players for exploring dialogue options, potentially due to dubious way it saves progress, but ultimately because not only not offered options are viable but most of them are merely there to punish player for trying to explore the dialogue tree. Early on this is not much of a problem for the restore potions are abundant (tho inexplicably limited in terms of how many can one carry), the further in game i got the more frustrated i was with the system. Partly because i consumed all the jelly but mostly because dialogues are more and more designed to just drain the abilities. And often the whole system seems to be just there to burn as much of the effort as possible (effort being the expanded resource to use certain dialogue options). Yes at some point certain dialogues are for free, but those are rarely pivotal. What angers me the most is the inevitable fault of entirely too many games i give bad scores to - player input ceases to matter at points, tho in this case it is far worse than i have seen in a while, potentially worse i have ever seen it be. Several choices are outright mentioned but than ever offered, Culminating in final confrontation for which even prior regeneration of E.P. wont give enough points - leaving me sitting there watching game just kick me in the nutsack for no particular reason. Sure some people do not mind this stuff but i can not recommend avoiding this enough. tally: + graphics + intrigue + setting - basic gaming concept ends up punishing player for trying to use it - outright removal of player choice in last 2 chapters - highly questionable save system

The Council is definitely one of the most interesting adventure games in recent years so I sure recommend it to everyone. Fresh setting, plot, and characters. Also, it has options for different outcomes and endings. Sometimes it's even very surprising what happens when you do things differently or explore and pick up stuff that's seemingly irrelevant. The game has mild RPG elements that provide for some variety in dealing with the dialogues, puzzles, and investigation. It might be a bit weirdly optimized though and sometimes unclear how to approach some situations in the game. The edibles management might be a bit confusing too. The game autosaves all the time and you only get to select one savefile for each playthrough, so that might be annoying to some people, but the game doesn't game over you if you fail, you just might see something different or something that might put you in a tougher position in your story. But still a worthwhile game. The story and various outcomes of it make up for any shortcomings and annoyances the game might have.