Sitting down with Esoteric Ebb developer Christoffer Bodegård was a humbling experience. Here we have a young man who for seven years has put his heart and soul into producing Esoteric Ebb, an absolutely stunning piece of craftsmanship that combines his deep love of all things Dungeons & Dragons, classic fantasy tropes, Scandinavian folklore and even a bit of our own dear Terry Pratchett. To see the game in action and hear Chris speaking about it with such passion was a real treat, and once this one actually drops, players are in for one too.
This CRPG – which Bodegard openly admits was heavily influenced by Disco Elysium and Planescape: Torment, puts you in the shoes of a bumbling cleric and his cynical goblin sidekick, as you travel around Norvik -a city gripped in the throes of an impending political election – its first – and investigate a mysterious explosion that has just torn the innards out of a quaint tea shoppe.
Because of the sheer level of depth in play, there is essentially an almost limitless amount of conversations to have and scenarios for you to unfold, with traditional combat replaced by old-school rolling of a D20.
The writing is sharp as a tack, extremely funny, and with some frankly ludicrous, genuinely daft moments, but also a nice undercurrent of darkness. It bends the rules and conventions of D&D in a beautifully idiosyncratic way, introducing its own takes on various races of monsters and things like spellcasting. Without spoiling them all, each race of creatures in the game have their own language. Cats are Spanish. Fairies are Welsh. The ominous race of Angels – that are far removed from conventional portrayals of the winged celestial beings – converse in Polish.
The fact that this is unashamedly described as Disco-like will be music to the ears of Disco Elysium fans, but this one is uniquely Bodegard’s own baby. The way it is written and the way it unfolds in play makes it compulsive, funny, and pulls you into to its bonkers world where you can converse with pretty much everything, even things like corpses and flora and fauna. There are lots of different ways to go depending on how you customise the personality traits of your Cleric, skills trees and the excellent Questing Tree which keeps track of the things you have accomplished and what you may wish to do next.
Everything is glorious to look at. The comic book art style also has more than a hint of Mobius, with 3D animated sprites on lush 2D hand drawn environments that pop in a way that reminded me of how Arc System Works pull off the same trick in some of their stunning recent fighters.
The zany plot, plethora of things to do and compulsive dice rolling have me extremely excited to play the finished article. We were privy to a short opening segment but even this snippet of fifteen minutes showed the sheer scope of what is being put together here. I laughed several times, had a comedic punch up with a zombie, and came into contact with the horrifying concept of Mosquito Sand, something which I wont forget in a hurry.
Esoteric Ebb is shaping up to be one of the most entertaining takes on the formula that has been since the aforementioned greats, and will be a day one purchase for me.
Esoteric Ebb is “coming soon” to PC via Steam. Impressions based on a trip to Raw Fury HQ, travel and accommodation were paid for by the publisher.
