If you’re a history buff and/or a fan of the Telltale adventure games, The Council might be for you. Just announced today, it is an episodic murder mystery game with an alternate history twist. In The Council, you play as a member of a secret society in the year 1793 invited to a private island for a deadly dinner.
In a search for his lost mother, main character Louis de Richet travels to the island and becomes entangled in a mystery that also involves great history figures like newly-inaugurated United States President George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. You solve mysteries using any of the 15 unique skills at your disposal including diplomacy, investigation,
and occultism.
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The debut title of French studio Big Bag Wolf, The Council has choices and consequences at its core. Every decision you make is permanent. Lacking any real game over means you won’t have to worry about restarting, but it also means your character (and the rest of the cast) could continue in future episodes with noticeable physical and psychological problems.
The Council boasts “wildly varying consequences” depending on the methods you use to uncover the mystery. The Social Influence system has you encounter characters on the island and choose how you will manipulate or maneuver your way through the confrontation. You can prepare ahead of time by investigating and figuring out a character’s hidden agenda or vulnerability, and using that to “win.”
Being that The Council is an episodic adventure like Telltale’s Batman, there will be five total episodes in its season released. For those interested in its unique, historically inaccurate mystery, the first episode entitled “The Mad Ones” will be coming out pretty soon. Episode one of The Council releases sometime in February 2018 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC.
