Playing Esoteric Ebb is like rolling the dice with a great DM

It took me a while to get into Esoteric Ebb, a new CRPG from developer Christoffer Bodegård. The elevator pitch is basically Disco Elysium, but in the fantasy style of Dungeons & Dragons: You play as a cleric wandering around a small town who’s trying to figure out, among other things, the mystery of why a tea shop in town exploded, and all the while, you’re having conversations with different character traits in your head. Like Disco Elysium, you see the world from an isometric, top-down perspective. Also like Disco Elysium, Esoteric Ebb requires a lot of reading, weighing the opinions of your competing voices, and making some bold dice rolls that don’t always work out. The first few days I played the game, I felt like I was slowly and aimlessly mucking through. But by the end, I found myself engrossed — and laughing out loud more than I have with any game in recent memory.

When you start Esoteric Ebb, you build your cleric by assigning out different ability scores — the traditional D&D ones like strength, wisdom, and charisma — and a background focus to give your character some history. There are also a handful of prebuilt characters if you don’t want to spend too much time tinkering, and I picked the one with the highest charisma stat, “Unstable Cleric,” because I like having persuasive conversations in these types of games. (This option also has a high dexterity score, which was great for pickpocketing things off of people.) After I set my character, the game’s intro said I was the “dumbest cleric imaginable.” You can get other descriptions of your cleric depending on your starting stats, but in my case, it was very useful framing; instead of always trying to get the “best” outcomes, which is what I often default to in RPGs, I instead followed my silliest instincts just to see what would happen.

Over the course of the adventure, this led to all sorts of ridiculous moments. As part of an ongoing election plotline, I encouraged everyone to vote for me, promising I would rule as a god-wizard-king. (The citizens were generally wary of my suggestion.) One time, while fishing with a merman who was also a landlord, I chose a dialogue option to bite my tongue instead of commenting on the fact that my conversation partner was a merman, and the game described how my character literally bit his tongue such that blood pooled around his boots, which the merman apparently ignored.

Every once in a while, you’ll get into a combat scenario. While they’re still mostly weaving through text conversations, you’ll have some tense dice rolls that can affect the outcome of the fight. I died often, but since I usually saved before meaningful encounters, this wasn’t much of an issue. You can cast spells to influence situations, improve your dice rolls, or open up new opportunities to talk with characters of all kinds in the game. I even chatted with a giant snail.

In retrospect, I think my initial, unfocused-feeling experience is actually the intended experience of Esoteric Ebb. Like a great fantasy novel, it just takes a little while to settle into the game’s world, and over time, I realized its characters are interconnected in ways that would slowly reveal themselves. After I bit my tongue in front of the merman, for example, he told me a surprising fact about my cleric’s past.

Esoteric Ebb’s introduction is actually signed by Bodegård, and he says that “we’ll play” for about “5 to 8 sessions.” It sets the tone that you’re in the hands of a capable Dungeon Master who has worked hard to craft an entertaining campaign but who will also work with your wildest instincts to create an interesting journey. Bodegård succeeds, heartily. As I neared the end of the game, I was so caught up in the story — and seeking out every ridiculous situation that I could — that I was racing to see it to the end. Somehow, the narrative threads actually ended up tying together, making my 16-hour journey feel worth it. I learned that even my bumbling cleric could become a hero.

^{Esoteric Ebb is now available on Steam.}