Esoteric Ebb

D&D is a grand old time, but to play it in real life you'll need friends to gather a party, a DM to sit through all your shenanigans, and an incredible ability to organise hours of playtime around busy lives. That can be tricky, which is why we've seen video games bringing you the D&D experience really take off in recent years. Baldur's Gate III gives us the experience of a sweeping campaign, while solo developer Christoffer Bodegård's Esoteric Ebb opts for an RP-filled, thoroughly engaging one-shot.

After getting unceremoniously chucked in the river of Tolstad on the night of our arrival, we (as Ragn or The Cleric), awake in a mysterious lich house, where we find ourselves having forgotten most of our spells, some of our past, and now loaded with a theoretically simple mission of investigating a tea shop that blew up. As you'd expect from any D&D one-shot, this quickly unravels into a conspiracy that encompasses the entire town.

Esoteric Ebb uses the foundations of D&D for much of its mechanics and gameplay. You'll use a D20 for the majority of your actions in the game, the spells you gather are the same as they are in the TTRPG for the most part, and you'll roll initiative whenever you get into combat. However, to allow the system of Esoteric Ebb to flow in the way Bodegård wants it to (and possibly to avoid Hasbro swinging any sort of legal hammer his way), the game takes a lot of liberties, too. You've probably seen it described as part D&D, part Disco Elysium, and while there are other games that sprang to mind through my run of Esoteric Ebb, the label of D&Disco Elysium is one that sticks pretty well.

As you'd expect in any fantasy tabletop world, the setting of Esoteric Ebb is filled with dwarves, humans, goblins, halflings the odd orc, as well as other fantasy creatures that you'll encounter on your search to find the culprit behind the tea shop explosion. What's really impressive is the level of detail put into making this charming world its own fantasy land. There must have been the temptation to just make a generic fantasy world. A backdrop we'll never explore, as we're only ever able to venture through the small but detailed town of Tolstad and the dangerous depths of the City Below. That temptation is thrown aside, and you'll end up spending hours reading through the dialogue explaining Bodegård's world. It's all brought up quite naturally, never really weighing you down with too much exposition but instead inviting you to dig through the centuries of history that make the world feel lived in, and show the greater context behind the political themes and ideas put forward by the story.

At its core, Esoteric Ebb is a balancing act. Just like any D&D session, it can be chaotic, funny, complete balls-to-the-wall fantasy. It can also be deep, interesting, and dark. As we peel back the curtain on the tea shop explosion, and find out that the story isn't as wacky as it first seems, the narrative does a brilliant job at making sure you don't experience any whiplash from the tonal shifts as they come and go. Some of the early dialogue does fall a bit too far on the quirk chungus spectrum, at least for my tastes. There's a tad too much chaos = funny in those early moments, but considering how much dialogue and text there is in this expansive RPG, it's hard to say that's anything more than a nitpick.

Esoteric Ebb is a deceptively big game. You can walk around the whole map in a few minutes, but as each in-game day passes, more secrets, characters, and quests reveal themselves to you. You're under a set amount of time pressure, as you've only got a few days to solve the tea shop mystery before election day rolls around. Time is advanced purely through dialogue, meaning you can explore as much as you like, but you're unlikely to be able to speak with everyone and learn everything, especially on a first run. That's what makes Esoteric Ebb so engaging, though. You know you can't do everything, and so you're left to pick and choose what you'll do now, and what you'll save for another playthrough.

Bodegård reckons it takes around 25 hours to beat the game normally, but does admit it can take an hour if you know what you're doing. Our run took around 12 hours, and it's hard to see where you could have put those extra hours in, considering the aforementioned time limit. Esoteric Ebb's main story might not take you more than a few evenings, but the game's key to making you come back for endless hours is its replayability. The player agency on offer with character builds, political leanings, solutions to quests, means that you're always thinking of other options you can take. I went for a charismatic, intelligent Cleric on my first run, but was already theory-crafting a strong, wiser player character for my next run. It brilliantly encapsulates that addictive D&D bug in making you already think of your next campaign just as you're running through your current one.

There are some gripes with Esoteric Ebb, although I'd hesitate to say any of them are really major. The world is beautiful, with an art style and compactness that oozes a welcoming, inviting atmosphere. Some of the pathing isn't great in that world, though, and at times I found myself caught on odd bits of what looked like an open road or footpath. There are some minor, lingering bugs, too, which at times required a restart like the occasion I managed to persuade a griffon to get out of my way, only for him to sit back down as soon as I exited the dialogue. Some of those have also stopped me getting achievements on Steam, it seems, so if you're a collector of gold medals you might want to keep an eye out for that. My lingering thought on Esoteric Ebb, as I sit with the wonderful, tight, and deep RPG that it is, was that I found The Cleric - our main character - a tad imbalanced at times.

As I said, Esoteric Ebb is a balancing act, but perhaps where it faults its plate-spinning most is with The Cleric, or Ragn, as is his proper name. At times, he is pure blank slate, a character we can put ourselves into and play with. Then, later in the game we get more details about him, his family, and his backstory, and it comes across a bit like Esoteric Ebb is trying to have its cake and eat it. There's a clear vision for who this Ragn is, and yet unlike other RPG protagonists with defined characters like Commander Shepard or Andreas Mahler, Ragn's helmeted anonymousness leaves him as a bit immemorable, as if he should be like a Tav or Durge, and yet he's not.

I still loved playing as The Cleric, and tearing through Tolstad with my favourite finely dressed goblin at my side. Esoteric Ebb is simply a lovely RPG that puts player agency front and centre. Its world is fantastically immersive, deep, and invites you to stay a while with charming visuals, characters, and lore so detailed I'd gladly take another game or two set in this world. If you're looking to roll some dice, fight some skeletons, and try to flirt with every creature with a heartbeat, then you'll have a grand time with Esoteric Ebb. A tabletop player's video game delight.