Gaming: Latest Esoteric Ebb Review

If you like RPGs, you owe it to yourself to play Esoteric Ebb.

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Esoteric Ebb is the best game like Disco Elysium that anybody's made since Disco Elysium, an RPG with a focus on exploration over combat, a literary, political bent, where your skills attributes talk to you. But it's not some rehash of the things Disco did well and few have managed to replicate: Esoteric Ebb has a charm all its own, and it's an impressively reactive RPG with an innovative approach to combat.

What is it? Disco Elysium by way of D&D, or D&D by way of Disco Elysium? But way more surprising and imaginative than that sounds.

Reviewed on: Steam Deck, also Windows 11, Core i5 12600K, RX 9070 XT, 32GB RAM

Where Disco was all surreal noir with a grounding in Twin Peaks, True Detective, and post-Soviet melancholy, Esoteric Ebb is more classically fantasy, approaching Dungeons & Dragons with a sensibility close to Shrek. Disco Elysium is one of the funniest games ever made, and Esoteric Ebb is even more madcap⁠. Not funnier per se⁠—I can't pit two queens against each other⁠—but it boasts a greater density of laughs per minute, while still telling an affecting, dramatic story.

The humor and grounding in familiar D&D elements⁠—attributes, classes, races, alignment, etc.—belie a shockingly confident, weird fantasy setting, something closer to Planescape or Spelljammer than the comforting (yet vanilla) Forgotten Realms. Mechanically, this game is capital-R Reactive, with seemingly minor items and choices reverberating throughout the story, and multiple dialogue-based "fights" whose complexity and variables rival Disco Elysium's climactic Tribunal.

With Disco by way of D&D, we've kinda come full circle back to Planescape: Torment, one of Elysium's big inspirations. Our brave, bumbling cleric protagonist wakes up in a mysterious morgue, already threatened with a low-level zombie encounter. One big break with the talky RPGs of yesteryear: This guy remembers exactly who he is, he just didn't see who pushed him into the river. Getting The Cleric to open up about his past sometimes requires harder skill checks than persuading NPCs.

The often-underappreciated divine spellcasting class feels like a perfect fit for this story. You're an "Urthguard," a cleric of the once-living god who founded your

Source: PC Gamer