Esoteric Ebb is one of the more compelling games I’ve played recently. There’s real depth to The Cleric’s quest, and at its core, a journey of self-discovery. It is most often funny and occasionally genuinely heartfelt. And all of those narrative successes are backed up by an RPG system that is locked in on the many resonant themes found within.
Esoteric Ebb’s particular mechanics, set within this narrative structure, create emotional distance from failure. This shifts the experience from punishing the player to presenting awkwardness and incompetence as something emotionally resonant. Ebb works because of its sense of place, the protagonist, and the narrative and mechanical synthesis that drives the action forward at all times. And that’s not to undersell that this game is just genuinely funny.
Even if this isn’t the type of game for you to play yourself, I hope that as you read this, you come away with an understanding of why I think this game is special.
Tolstad, and the Realm of Jor
First, to set the stage.
Esoteric Ebb takes place in the district of Norvik within the city of Tolstad, which sits within Askanii, one of the eight bands along the Coast of Jor’s Realm. And yes, there are pages of text in this game about all of those named places, and many more. The world of Jor’s Realm is unveiled to the player through the eyes of The Cleric of Norvik, but while he has some familiarity with it, the player is exposed to a flood of proper nouns and names right from the start. This is overwhelming at first, but the world lets you soak in it, pick up what stands out to you, and engage where you want. Whatever you do manage to internalize, the stories and weaving threads create a sense of place, and it is easy to understand The Cleric’s place in it. At least to the extent that he does. Jor’s Realm is vibrant, magical, and full of history and possibility. It is a land of dead gods, dying magic, rising capitalism, and emerging democracy. Home to many different nations, species, and histories that clash and collaborate in equal measure. It is, to put it succinctly, alive.
The Cleric
The campaign begins with The Cleric of Norvik waking, confused and alone, in what is essentially the city morgue. You decide how to allocate his ability scores, but he is not a character you make. He is a person with a job and a life, and one of my favorite things about Ebb is that I don’t feel like I played as The Cleric as much as I feel like I got to watch and influence him on his quest. He is a buffoon and extremely prone to embarrassing himself. Nothing like me at all.
However, there is a clear, deeper self that becomes more apparent the longer you follow his quest to solve the mystery of the exploding tea shop. He is a man, employed by the city, servant of a dead god, a gifted spellcaster, looking for a place to belong, and, as you can awkwardly announce in various conversations, lives with his mom. You, as the player, have the privilege of accompanying him for five days, fostering his talents and attempting to help smooth over his fumbles, until the quest ends. The place he finds in all of this is influenced by you, but at the end of it all, I felt so proud of what The Cleric himself had accomplished. Who he had chosen to be.
Abilities, and the Lineage of Disco
As Esoteric Ebb is a heavily text-based RPG, The Cleric spends a lot of time looking at things and interacting with things. In all cases, his core abilities will come into play, influenced (or sometimes avoided entirely) by a collection of spells and items. This is where the clear influence of Disco Elysium is seen - as each of the core D&D abilities takes on an internal persona within The Cleric’s personality.
Strength is the devotion of The Cleric to his god, to his duty, and to being a man in this world. A red warrior impaled by a sword. Dexterity is his desire to minimize risk and maximize return on investment for every action. A yellow, grasping hand. And each of the six is a detailed individual personality in this way.
Occasionally, these personas snipe at, argue with, or reluctantly agree with each other. The haughty, often egomaniacal Intelligence would rarely acknowledge that “the green one” (Wisdom) saw the truth of a situation, but mostly teases her as a naive bleeding heart. When presented with a particularly powerful and dangerous person or creature, these internal voices all join together in a chorus of fear, led by the trembling stomach that represents Constitution.
No matter what abilities you prioritize or choose to ignore as a player, these voices are all a part of The Cleric. They will chime in frequently and offer assistance or criticisms. They also align with other narrative and mechanical aspects of Ebb’s world, such as Dexterity being a champion of the capitalist Freestrider political party, or Intelligence’s desire for The Cleric to declare himself a Wizard God-King. And when dice need to be rolled, it is by leaning on one of these 6 abilities that The Cleric’s success or failure is determined.
The experience of this system feels clear and understandable, as someone with deep experience in the Dungeons & Dragons systems. It immediately felt cleaner to me than the overwhelming number of internal skills in Disco Elysium, but of course with that clarity some nuance is lost. In the end, Ebb’s approach felt more digestible and easily understood in a way that let me appreciate all of the ability-based characters, even those that I intentionally left with low scores.
The Campaign and the D20 System
Outside of the abilities, Ebb uses much of the core D20 System from Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Well known D&D species, spells, monsters, and magic items are all present and assimilated into the unique world of Jor’s Realm. Dice rolls are almost all a standard D20 check that determines success or failure. Often embarrassingly in both directions. You also unlock Feats for The Cleric through an interesting mash-up system of a classic video game skill tree and quest log, called the Questing Tree. As you complete important quest lines, The Cleric will have an internal dialogue between the ability personas to process what happened. Then the player gets to choose from a few Feat options that can provide powerful bonuses.
Often, these are presented as a debate between the abilities, leading to different internalized thoughts that The Cleric can introduce to his own self-image. Do you take the strength-based approach of masculine duty to gain advantage when speaking with masculine characters, or the wisdom-based feminist opposite (with some good tongue-in-cheek comedy stating that you feel good about how progressive and egalitarian you are)? Sometimes you just do something enough that it unlocks a part of The Cleric that he internalizes as himself, such as being a democratic herald who gets a minor heal every time you ask someone who they are voting for in the election. This system marries The Cleric’s personal growth with the goings-on in Norvik and provides mechanical bonuses that are often exciting as well as thematically interesting. Or funny. Sometimes both!
In addition to mechanics borrowed from both D&D and Disco Elysium, the entire game is framed as a D&D campaign led by the developer Christoffer Bodegård, who serves as the Dungeon Master. He leaves you session notes on the main menu about what happened last, and summarizes the state of things each time you sleep for the night, questioning what you will do next. His voice is sparse but injected with a friendly hope for the player of his campaign. When the quest was over, his grateful message about the journey and what the state of this world and its characters could be next hit me harder than expected.
Humor, Humiliation, and Humanity
The primary mode of Esoteric Ebb is dry, goofy humor. You are constantly given dialogue choices that intentionally put The Cleric in an awkward position, and characters react in varied and hilarious ways. In one early interaction, when questioning a minor side character, I accidentally backed The Cleric into a corner where he had a problematic thought he wanted to express. Trying to navigate around his social anxiety and lack of charisma led me to a constitution-based die roll to “bite his tongue”, which he failed spectacularly. The result was The Cleric literally biting his tongue so hard that he took damage that caused him to almost die. Then I had to help him navigate exiting the conversation while blood was spilling from his mouth, and his words were muffled by gurgling sounds.
That tone extends to Ebb’s combat, too - The Cleric in my game had strength as his lowest stat. This made for a lot of pratfalls and hilarious whoopsies when I encountered something that wanted to kill me and not talk. Between the other stats, a book of spells, and bags of magic items, I was always able to find a way to see The Cleric through danger alive, but often after a few truly horrendous fumbles.
And this is one piece of Esoteric Ebb’s magic that I want to highlight. The ability of the game systems to allow for (and arguably require) constant failure, the writing to support it in entertaining ways, and to pull it off without feeling like the game is slapping my hand as the player. Because I felt like a guiding spirit for The Cleric, I didn’t feel the heavy weight of every outcome. I was just there to help and observe. The Cleric’s failures and successes were his, not mine. The goofy tone helped define The Cleric as a character who is kind of a loser, but worth rooting for.
Lastly, on tone, Ebb also manages to be very human. Stories about fascism and genocide, the weight of the past, wishing for a better future, and the importance of an individual are conveyed through thoughtful and varied viewpoints within the world. When Ebb decides to pause on something important it does so with a heavy breath, giving the moment the space it deserves. There isn’t any fake gravitas, however. Cheeky remarks or nervous attempts to lighten a scene give players options to manage tone and maintain that core humanity, but the demands of the moment will drive home a point if one needs to be made.
In the end, this campaign and The Cleric’s journey were personally impactful to me as a story about people. About power. About freedom. About the importance of both the self and the collective. About duty. About friendship.
And above all, about hope for the future.
