"The Council of Hanwell" is a fairly basic Unreal asset flipped first person horror adventure, one of many hundreds, if not thousands of these glutting Steam. The "developer" paid for/pirated a few Unreal Marketplace assets, arranged them haphazardly in a first person adventure game template, and submitted it to Valve as if they're real game developers. In fairness, some effort went into rearranging other people's game assets, but at the end of the day this is what it is, and it has been removed from Steam.

And the reason for removal is an interesting one because it's tied to another game which this is a subset of. The developer made that game (Welcome to Hanwell) completely free, and it's always nice when developers stop trying to get your money for someone else's game assets.

So what was this anyway?

Well, as mentioned, it's a first person horror jumpscare asset flip, although it does also feature some puzzles, some (awful) voice acting... and in terms if technical implementation, it's a clunky mess.

Taking this shovelware seriously as if it was a genuine attempt to make a game, it doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

The game assets are fairly mediocre/low quality which fits with the idea they weren't developed by the game creator... they look like they're "just reasonable enough" to go on sale as part of an asset pack. The issue of asset flipping aside, ultimately the quality of these assets is low and low quality always makes for a less than optimal gaming experience.

While the graphics look okay, the developer weirdly decided to lock the number of resolution options you can get... now, if you have a modern GPU, you'll probably get a bunch of superresolution options (to render the game at a higher resolution than your monitor... brute forcing AA if you like), and these are the only options that appear, because the developer decided there's no need for you to scroll through the resolutions available to you. The upshot? You can't set the game to your monitor native resolution. Now, if you're gaming on a CRT, that's fine... but come on, everyone uses a fixed resolution LCD or OLED monitor nowadays. That kind of screwup from the developer isn't acceptable.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 12 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 110,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

This kind of asset flipping isn't harmless. It makes it harder for gamers to find genuinely made games from ethical developers. It makes it harder for genuine indie developers, who put hard work into trying to make real games, to find an audience for their products. It gives indie developers a bad name.

So, if you can get your hands on a key for this, should you?

Nope. The other game is free and bigger, although also not worth your time anyway.