Esoteric Ebb finds brilliance by imitating an all-time masterpiece

In light of all that, there’s something insanely ballsy about saying, “Yeah, I can probably do something like that, too.” And, at first, I rolled my eyes at how slavish Esoteric Ebb can be in the ways it apes its most obvious reference point. Your six stats—pulled straight out of the 5E handbook—not only have viewpoints, for instance, but stridently political ones: Your Strength pushes you toward fantasy nationalism, your Wisdom stumps for Dungeons & Dragons-style socialism, and Dexterity is a shill for free-market democracy. Meanwhile, your bumbling semi-amnesiac hero quickly finds himself set up with a drily sarcastic sidekick from a deliberately othered culture within the game world—although, instead of my beloved Kim Kitsuragi, you’re rolling with a goblin fixer named Snell. And the entire tenuous existence you find yourself stumbling through is soundtracked by the clacking of tumbling dice, as your woefully confused Cleric wanders into awkward situations—social, lethal, and a distressingly frequent mixture of the two—with only random chance and his own skills to keep him alive and unhumiliated.

These elements are imitative, and undeniably so, with Bodegård and his team unashamedly riffing on Kurvitz et al.’s ideas for their own purposes. But the deeper I got into Esoteric Ebb, the more I was struck by what a massive accomplishment even an imitation of something like this must be. I can cheaply point out all the ways Ebb copies from and makes references to Disco Elysium (and Planescape: Torment, the ur-text for this sort of RPG of self-discovery). But that doesn’t make actually gathering the wherewithal to approach an adventure through this lens, viewing every situation through how the warring chorus in your head would respond to it, any less impressive. The writing here isn’t necessarily up to Elysium‘s muster, sure—but given that’s also a true statement about, at least by my estimation, every other video game that’s ever been written, it’s a pretty harsh standard to judge anything by. What is here is a story that’s smart, quick-moving, and often funny, with a mystery that spirals out from an exploded tea shop, and ends up encompassing vast theological questions about both the nature of self-governing, and the constant battle to govern oneself. (To say nothing of featuring a romanceable party member in a video game who I actually felt invested enough to pitch woo at, a decided rarity for me.) By the end of my 20 hours with it, I was dazzled by the game’s big swings and its smaller moments of joyful digression. It reminded me that “imitative” isn’t a blanket negative, and that the things they choose to imitate—and the effort they employ to do so—says as many important things about a designer’s merits as any simple analysis of borrowed ideas could do.

At the same time, Esoteric Ebb has aspects that are all its own, tapping the “inspiration” side of my initial dilemma far harder. Admittedly, many of these are pulled, in a “numbers filed off” fashion, from Dungeons & Dragons—but those ideas are so suffused into the gaming body politic as to feel universal, no matter how often Bodegård and his team have had to change spell names from “Goodberry” to “Goodapple” to duck the Hasbro lawyers. Many of these aspects are aesthetic, as you wander through a colorful fantasy city filled with devils, dwarves, and mushroom folk, all carrying their individual political and social ideals. Others are mechanical, as your Cleric steadily learns new spells, and has to manage his daily drip of spell slots in order to tilt encounters in his favor. (The magic system is probably the game’s wildest mechanical swing, giving you surprising amounts of power in social situations. And, yes, you can cast Charm Person on people. And, yes, the game lets you know you’re a mind-controlling piece of shit every time you do so.) But some of these tabletop inspirations are more fundamental, and tied into the game’s ideas about choice and fate—as when it drops you down into dungeons, then asks you to seriously consider the nature of chance and probability as applied to giant tentacle monsters with big mouths trying to eat you. Every Dungeons & Dragons player knows there’s something a little absurd about living in a world where every strenuous thing you do carries a five percent chance of catastrophic failure, and a five percent chance of unlikely success; as with Disco Elysium (and Baldur’s Gate 3, for that matter), Esoteric Ebb‘s decision to put the bouncing dice in front of players’ eyes hammers home that the best we can do in these circumstances is adjust the odds however we can, then accept that the dice will land where they will.

Some of Esoteric Ebb‘s additions to the design playbook muddy these waters a bit, admittedly. I try very hard not to save-scum in games like this, where choices and rolls matter. (Because, as every good DM knows, failure is often just as interesting as success.) But the increased focus here on life-or-death combat, lifted from the game’s tabletop roots, gets in the way of that acceptance. I’m happy to take a bad roll if it simply means I’m fucking up parts of solving a mystery, or getting my Cleric humiliated in front of some angel or dignitary. But when a game is straight-up throwing death saves at me to determine whether my adventure ends right here? Forcing me to contend with a TPK Game Over screen that any Dungeon Master worth their screen would find a way to fudge past? There’s no choice then but to ride the save/load button, and manipulate matters in my favor, wrecking my immersion in the process. It’s one of the reasons Disco Elysium (almost) entirely avoids combat, and has a generous system that allows you to heal rare instances of fatal damage before they can force you back to a distracting menu. I understand that player death is a key element in the random factor that makes tabletop games so appealing. But if I don’t have the opportunity to actually roll up a new character or otherwise roll with the failure, what gameplay agenda is actually being served?

But this is, mostly, a quibble—and when it’s brought about because we’re talking about one of the rare places Esoteric Ebb really pushes itself to get out of its forebears’ shadow, it feels a tad petty to harp on. Like its predecessors, Esoteric Ebb fails in spots because of overwhelming, not insufficient, ambition, and I will always prefer that flavor of excess. The fact is, there are not nearly enough “Disco Elysium-likes” in the gaming world, period. (Given what a Herculean task this game must have been to write, I can’t imagine there will be a huge glut of them any time soon—even as various ZA/UM alum reportedly toil away on their individual efforts.) It’s comparatively easy to copy a shooter, or a roguelike concept, or any of a number of other cookie cutter ideas that come flowing down the gaming pike every single day. It’s far harder to take, as your model of imitation, the idea of giving this much of a shit, of writing and designing a game that cares about words and feelings as much as it does swords and sorcery. If Esoteric Ebb is imitative, then, this is the kind of imitation gaming could stand to have far more of.