The game is basically Disco Elysium but inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s a lot of fun.
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.
