"The Council" might be the most interactive adventure game/movie I've seen yet.  I enjoyed the Telltale Games, but The Council makes them look bad by showing us exactly how much more the Telltale stuff could have been. The Council is set in 1793 on an island of a wealthy powerful man, and you play a member of an international secret society searching for his mother (a major member of the organization).  And on this island a party is taking place with a group of similarly powerful players, some fictional and some real.  Party guests include a Cardinal from the Vatican, as well as George Washington and Napoleon (still just a lieutenant), meeting for the first time.

What makes this so interactive is how many different ways you can play through the story. The Telltale games all had major decisions that influenced who stayed in your group, which adventures you took, but were tricky in how they all worked you back to the same place.  It didn't take much to save a game, and replay a section a second time, and then you could say you pretty much saw every variation the game had to offer.

The Council does this, only times ten.  You have various traits, like 'manipulation' allowing you to maneuver conversations your way, or like 'vigilance' letting you notice little details, 'etiquette' which gives you a unique way to act or respond, and 'agility' letting you reach items or dodge situations. There are about fifteen of these, and you can build them up by choosing to do things, reading books, and how you start.

You can start as either a diplomat, detective, or occultist, which gives you a head start on five traits. It's hard to be a jack of all trades type, so you tend to want to focus on some, and this is tough for most gamers who like to inspect and try every aspect of the game, because as you play you keep getting little flashes like "opportunity missed - needed subterfuge", or politics, or languages, or science, or occult, etc..

Aside from these traits, there are also about forty extra skills you can work towards and learn, and when you finish them you get a bonus, or a penalty, depending on what it is. You might be caught doing something and all the guests are a little more wary of you, or by successfully handling multiple confrontations, your convince trait is knocked up a point.

And even treasures you find, like books that raise a trait, make you have to think how you want to play the game. You might collect 4 books in a chapter, but at the end of the chapter only get to use one of them to upgrade a trait.  You really have to choose how you want to play the game, more than how you think will be the easiest way to play the game.

The trait choices really do change the way the game plays, and how much you might enjoy it. The skill tree is brilliant because depending on the class you choose, the other traits aren't locked out to you, but are mostly just more expensive in experience points to take. Want to be a Diplomat, but want to build up heavy in science knowing you are going to come across chemicals and engineering puzzles? You CAN put a lot of points into science, but it will cost you much more than if you were an Occultist character.  Same if you are a Detective, but want to build up the linguistics skills of a Diplomat, because you know there will be clues in Latin, French, or other languages that you normally could not read.  I played through the first part as two different characters just to get a feel for it, and this system really works!

The story is great - I don't want to spoil it for you. It's worth trying just to watch it. The game does give you a pretty good direction you are supposed to go in, but you get rewarded for exploring off the beaten path where you get new gossip, dirt, on people, that will make a difference when having a conversation with them later.  If you explore and find a secret letter to one of the guests, you might be able to manipulate a conversation by mentioning their sister, for example.

The graphics and art direction are superb. The voice acting is even better.  Some reviews for the PC seem to knock the look and feel, and I'm wondering if some of the other paths I have yet to take will have glitches. Or if because I played it on an Xbox I'm looking at a superior gaming engine.

The whole first part of the game is free (on PC and Xbox), and well worth trying, as it gave me at least 4 or 5 hours of enjoyment on it's own.  (And over 500 free Achievement points!)

(Writing about the skills system is giving me a flashback to the first RPG I played that had a similar skill tree, it was on the Atari ST back around 1992, and the name is escaping me, but I remember how killing monsters gave you experience points, and if you were a barbarian putting those points into doing more damage with an axe was minimal, but for a wizard very expensive.  And the opposite with improving your spell casting.  So you could have a cleric who could pick locks, but if you weren't a thief it was very costly to learn to do so.  It was brilliant!)