Esoteric Ebb Review

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.

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.