The Council's fifth and final episode arrives next month

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Louis de Richet's story comes to an end.

The fifth and final episode of narrative adventure game The Council will be out on December 4, Focus Home Interactive has announced.

The episode, called Checkmate, will round out the 18th century story of Louis de Richet, who’s searching for his mother on the island retreat of a secret order that counts George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte among its members. 

It's a game about conversation: as de Richet, you verbally joust with characters to get what you want, trying to avoid blunders and pursue the right lines of enquiry. There are 15 character skills, 44 talents, and 20 traits that can give you a trickier tongue—and you only have partial control over which ones you accrue. 

Checkmate will bring “all your decisions, mistakes, and victories to the fore as Louis’ alliances, enemies, and family all come together for a climactic confrontation”, apparently, so hopefully it can provide the finale that the other episodes deserve. 

If you're curious, Phil wrote about why The Council is so good here: conversations are basically boss battles, and Phil compared them to the insult sword-fighting from the Monkey Island games. The voice acting is awful, but I like how it blends traditional game-y systems like talents and traits with decidedly non-traditional mechanics.

When it arrives, it'll only be available as part of the complete season of The Council, which is currently £15.59/$18 on Steam—a 40% discount.

You can see one new screenshot from episode five at the top of this post, and another below.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.