The Disco Elysium-likes have arrived: heavy narrative with meaningful choices, dice rolling, and a strange title. The zombified publisher of Disco just released Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, and back in March we got Esoteric Ebb. Created by dungeon master Christoffer Bodegård and based on Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition’s Standard Reference Document, Esoteric Ebb feels like the purest form of this new genre: six attributes, saving throws, and natural 20s.
When I played Disco Elysium on PlayStation 4 during covid, I was enraptured by its world and mechanics. I could play an eternally hungover detective interested in communism in a world that was aged and unknown. Esoteric Ebb brings those memories back, playing a devout detective interested in socialism in a world that is aged and unknowable. Let’s roll the dice and see where they take us with Esoteric Ebb.
For the uninitiated, a Disco Elysium-like is where you play a leftist and bumble through crime solving. Other than walking around and performing the most basic interactions on the map, everything is done through extensive dialog trees, often arguing with your own ids. In Esoteric Ebb, this means listening to Wisdom’s advice, Dexterity’s dares, Strength’s taunts, Charisma’s boasts, Intelligence’s logic, and Constitution’s… hunger. Mapping these inner thoughts to D&D’s primary attributes makes them easily digestible and understandable. They’ll pop in with their thoughts all the time and are often very witty, especially when you fail dice rolls.
Being based on Dungeons & Dragons and set in a homebrewed world that has typical sword and sorcery trappings, Esoteric Ebb does honestly feel like you’re playing at a slightly deranged friend’s table. Set days before a medieval city’s first ever democratic election, your amnesic protagonist is freshly resurrected from death to return to the task of investigating the destruction of a local teahouse. Much like Disco, you’re thrown in the deep end and expected to figure out not only the larger mystery, but also who you are. And of course the most important question: who are you going to vote for in the election? Fortunately, the world of Esoteric Ebb is a familiar place to D&D and fantasy fans.
The writing is why you should be playing Esoteric Ebb. You play as The Cleric, a low-level loser in the Church of Urth assigned with the aforementioned investigation. Your talky stats are constantly reminding you how many times you’ve failed at something in the past and are likely to again, but why not give it a try: it will be funny for everyone watching. Failed dice rolls often lead to hilarious situations, including getting stuck on a water wheel and being fooled by ancient traps. The main story takes a long time to get going as you’ll immediately get distracted by the city at large and all the colorful characters and quests available to you.
The highlight of the game’s big cast is Snell, your goblin co-detective who plays the Kim Kitsuragi part well. He’s thrust upon you upon meeting with the local goblin rule, but is a welcome addition to the small party. Simply having a voice of reason to cut through the incessant bickering of your abilities is worth his weight in gold. Your final conversation with him at the end of the game sliced right to my heart, causing me to tear up. I was very much not expecting that and it raised my overall view on Esoteric Ebb quite a bit.
If you enjoy parsing out history and politics from snippets of lore, Esoteric Ebb also has that in spades. Being a familiar D&D world, it’s not quite as unknowable and strange as Disco Elysium’s Revachol; there’s pros and cons to that, but I found myself treading water lore-wise much more quickly in Ebb’s city of Norvik.
There are a handful of battles in the game, but they take place completely within the game’s dialog system. There’s still initiative, health points, spell slots, and everything else that makes up a fifth edition fight, it’s just the actual actions that are streamlined. I can imagine Christoffer Bodegård, the game’s designer and DM, being the kind of guy who encourages his party to seek atypical routes through a fight. Most of the time you’ll be tanking hits and attempting various persuasion or dexterity checks while your party does that actual damage.
The big difference between this and Disco Elysium is that Esoteric Ebb is completely unvoiced. Without a doubt one of the highlights of Disco is the incredible voice acting, accentuating some of the most unique game writing ever put on screen. It certainly feels missing here, and reduces the memorability of some of the side characters. I know it could easily take the game from a $25 steal to $60 with this much dialog, and over the course of the game’s 20 hours the need fades away, but damn, here’s to a future Final Cut!
Being based on D20 rolls with boosts from your stats and equipment, it’s not too difficult to game the system a bit if you’re feeling unlucky. There’s also an incredible feat called Beautiful Lie that grants you advantage on your rolls whenever you have full health, a very easy stat to maintain with the abundance of food around the world. This almost guarantees you pass most checks and saving throws. Also you’re not restricted to just being a cleric, the game was a lot more open ended on this front than I expected!
I haven’t had the opportunity to play many tabletop RPGs since my D&D group fell apart in February 2024 (it was a whole thing), but Esoteric Ebb was able to scratch that itch a bit (I also bought a copy for my dungeon master!). The game ran well enough on my Steam Deck (but utterly failed on my Ayn Thor). I highly recommend Esoteric Ebb to fans of Disco Elysium or Dungeons & Dragons, you too can have your prayer answered.
