Disco Elysium Meets D&D — Sort Of
Esoteric Ebb, the debut CRPG from Swedish solo developer Christoffer Bodegård, wears its inspirations proudly on its sleeve. If you've ever wanted to play Disco Elysium but with a more classic high-fantasy skin — think clerics, mysterious curses, and exploding tea shops — this might be exactly the oddball niche title you didn't know you needed.
The premise is delightfully strange: you're a wandering cleric who arrives in a small, eccentric town and quickly becomes entangled in a web of bizarre mysteries, chief among them the inexplicable explosion of the local tea shop. As you investigate, your character's competing internal voices chime in with commentary, arguments, and insight — a mechanic directly borrowed from Disco Elysium's famous psyche-as-party-members system.
Reading, Rolling, Reflecting
Make no mistake: this is a game for readers. Esoteric Ebb is dense with text, and the writing is the whole point. Conversations unspool slowly, internal monologues pile up, and decisions often hinge on weighing the opinions of your fractured inner voices before committing to a dialogue choice or skill check.
The dice rolling is central to the experience. Like a tabletop session with a thoughtful dungeon master, outcomes feel genuinely uncertain. A failed roll doesn't just mean a locked door — it recontextualizes conversations, shifts NPC relationships, and sometimes flings the story in an entirely unexpected direction. There's a generosity to the design: failure is almost never a dead end, just a different road.
The top-down isometric perspective will feel immediately familiar to anyone who has played Disco Elysium or classic CRPGs like Planescape: Torment. The art style leans into muted, painterly fantasy aesthetics — nothing flashy, but consistently atmospheric.
A Slow Start Worth Pushing Through
The game's biggest hurdle is its opening hours. Esoteric Ebb takes time to establish its rhythms, and early on the town can feel small and its systems opaque. The writing quality also varies — some exchanges crackle with wit and personality, others drag. Players expecting the polish of a big-studio RPG will need to recalibrate their expectations.
But for those who stick with it, the payoff is real. The mystery deepens in satisfying ways, the character voices develop genuine personality, and the sense of being inside a thoughtful, handcrafted world — assembled by one person clearly passionate about tabletop RPG storytelling — becomes its own reward.
Worth Your Time?
Esoteric Ebb is not a game for everyone. It demands patience, a tolerance for wordiness, and a taste for mechanical uncertainty. But for fans of narrative-driven CRPGs who've exhausted Disco Elysium's replay value and want something scratching a similar itch in a different key, it's a worthwhile roll of the dice.
It's rough around the edges, occasionally meandering, and absolutely not mainstream — but it's the kind of weird, sincere indie project that keeps the CRPG genre alive and interesting.
Source: The Verge
