The Council - Episode 2: Hide and Seek (DLC)

The Council is one of those narrative RPGs that earns its genre label honestly. Rather than bolting dialogue choices onto an action frame, Big Bad Wolf built a system where your character's skills, class, and accumulated knowledge directly gate which conversational options you can even attempt. Episode 2: Hide and Seek continues the story of Louis de Richet, a member of a clandestine 1793 secret society who washed up on a private island chasing his missing mother, and it keeps that mechanical promise mostly intact. If you built Louis as a Diplomat, your persuasion windows open in different places than they would for an Occultist or a Politician. Choices from Episode 1 carry forward, and returning players will notice threads pulled tighter here in ways that reward paying attention the first time around. The setting deserves real credit. A fog-wrapped island estate filled with historical figures doing historically shady things is a genuinely compelling backdrop, and the writing in the stronger scenes has a drawing-room paranoia that sits somewhere between Umberto Eco and a very literate point-and-click. The guest list includes recognizable names whose real historical baggage the writers use well, and eavesdropping on their private agendas feels like actual detective work rather than a checklist of waypoints. When the Confrontation system clicks, and you read a character correctly, exploit their weakness, and walk away having extracted exactly what you needed without blowing your cover, the feedback loop is satisfying in a way that few dialogue-heavy games manage. That said, Hide and Seek is a DLC episode, and the seams show. Runtime is short, somewhere in the two-to-three hour range depending on how much you poke around, and the pacing lurches a bit because the episode has to set up future payoffs more than it delivers on its own. Some investigation segments feel like connective tissue rather than content, and if your skill spread is thin in an area the episode happens to test heavily, you will hit walls that the game papers over with effort point expenditure rather than clever alternate routing. The Metacritic score of 67 reflects a critic consensus that was watching the series as a whole and finding the individual episode format a bit stingy with resolution. For players already invested in Episode 1, though, this is the obvious next step. The character system is interesting enough that a second playthrough with a different build genuinely does open different conversations, and the 1793 setting remains one of the more atmospheric locations in recent narrative RPG releases. Just go in knowing you are buying a chapter, not a complete arc. The story will not wrap here, and if unresolved cliffhangers frustrate you, waiting until you have the full season in hand is a reasonable strategy. Monika, Scout Team