Esoteric Ebb review: Critical success

You’ve got to admire Esoteric Ebb’s confidence, standing alongside gaming titans. It’s clearly pulling huge amounts of influence from Disco Elysium, but is holding fast to the well-trod rules of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s far more Planescape Torment than Baldur’s Gate 3, but just by entering the ring, it’ll draw comparisons to both.

These games are on some mighty high pedestals, and it’d take most games quite the high-level Jump spell to make it up that far. However, Esoteric Ebb’s confidence is completely earned. You can just tell the game is bursting at the seams with love; here’s a full review to help break down why. 

Disco and Dragons

You play as Ragn, also known as The Cleric, or Your Friendly Neighbourhood Druid, or a Dashing Rogue. He’s in a bit of an odd place right now, caught between classes and political parties, and not even dying lets him take a day off work. 

Your mission is to investigate the destruction of a local tea shop. How you get to the game’s conclusion, well, that’s up to you. You’ve technically got a time limit, as it’s only five days until the city’s first election, but it’s quite generous and – if you really need to – you can just avoid sleeping for a while to get things done.

There’s plenty to explore, and it could be quite a while before you even leave the first room. Once you’re finally free, you’ll find yourself not just with a city to explore, but multiple layers of undercity as well. There’s so much to do and see in Norvik, and you can find yourself drawn into long conversations that have absolutely nothing to do with the main plot. 

Talk with a Gnome about the concept of morality, or a local devil about his lawyering gig. If we consider Esoteric Ebb a DnD campaign, it has a terribly indulgent DM. 

Esoteric Ebb has very kindly made background lore opt-in only, as when a term gets highlighted in the flow of the story, you can click on it to get more information. 

Personality quirks

You’ve got to choose your stats before you even start playing, with each characteristic governing different skill checks and stats, like Dexterity for stealing and Constitution for health. 

However, as we’re in a Disco-like, these characteristics also have personality, and even more complicated, each of them is aligned with a different political paradigm. Strength longs to be a hero and a Norvik Nationalist, for example.

This creates such inherent variety in how you end up playing the game. In my first playthrough, I went with overwhelmingly high Wisdom, constantly encouraging me to empathise with people, engage with nature, and support the local workers. 

It also completely changes how you engage with the world around you. Your stat distribution changes whether you’re more comfortable braving the dangers of the City Below to get answers, or making fast friends and completing quests topside.

After you complete quests, you’ll even be offered different upgrades – in DnD parlance, feats. These are presented after some internal soul-searching and debating, as your different stats yield different conclusions to the same question. 

Your stats will offer feats that align with their ideals, with one particularly memorable debate on Ragn’s understanding of gender ending with Strength offering you a bonus on skill checks against male characters, while Wisdom offering you a bonus against female characters.

There’s no wrong way of playing, so long as you play in a way that speaks to you. Esoteric Ebb wants to see what you’ll do and offers a plethora of different skill checks for every little obstacle. While they might often lead to a similar outcome, it’s about telling you the story that feels right for your Ragn.

Bonds and Flaws

A key point of that storytelling is your partner, a character that the game more or less forces on you, but who you can ditch whenever you like. Snell is a Goblin and provides an incredibly interesting foil to the rampant and malleable Ragn. Snell knows who he is, knows who he works for, and knows what his goal is. However, importantly, he really isn’t neutral.

Snell acts as another stat, chiming in with his own opinions and help, but it’s all tinged with his own experience. He’s not here to keep Ragn on the straight and narrow; he’s here to keep you alive and see how things go. 

You can get some background information from the ‘Behold’ feature, where you can use a skill close to that NPC to unearth some initial impressions, but you’ve only got so much idea of what you’ll be drawn into when you talk to them. These characters are a lot of what makes Esoteric Ebb so special.

They don’t all like you, but they’ve all got their reasons. I wish that they were voiced; maybe one day we’ll be able to come back to a Definitive Edition with full voice acting, but they’re all written so brilliantly I can hardly complain. 

If there is any criticism to be made about Esoteric Ebb, it is a result of its ambition. I found a lot of the internal triggers seemed to get the wrong idea sometimes – either thinking a character was present when they weren’t, or a character reacting to a choice I didn’t make. 

It’s the result of what I’m sure is an unnervingly complicated web behind the scenes, but it meant there was a side quest I just couldn’t complete. There’s an item I needed that I should have gotten from an NPC, but they were convinced I had already taken it from them. 

I adore Esoteric Ebb, and its wonderful, ponderous, and empathetic storytelling style. I’d heartily recommend it to all Dungeons and Dragons nerds, all those who are looking for a new Disco-like, and all lovers of fantasy. It’s a world I already can’t wait to get back to, and an experience I want more people to share.

FAQs