Do you like Disco Elysium? Do you like tabletop RPGs? If the answer to either question was “yes,” then I’m going to save you a lot of reading and say that the recently released PC RPG Esoteric Ebb is entirely worth your time. Indeed, I’d say that it is the game to beat for my personal Game of the Year for 2026, although as you’ll see in my full review, that’s not without some significant qualifiers.
The Setup
In Esoteric Ebb, you play a cleric. Or maybe The Cleric. Or maybe a wizard, actually. However you think of yourself, you cast spells because you get them from your god, Urth, and your order has dispatched you to investigate a tea shop that has blown up in the Tolstad district of the city-state of Norvik. Norvik will soon have its first ever election, and you have until Election Day, five days from the start of the game, to solve the case. Needless to say, the case is less straightforward than you might think, and the political situation less tangential to the case than it first appears.
The Mechanics
I mentioned Disco Elysium because Esoteric Ebb plays almost exactly like it, from character creation to the UI. If you haven’t played Disco Elysium, than Esoteric Ebb is an RPG in which your stats speak to you and act as your de facto party members in addition to the mathematical basis for whether you succeed or fail at a skill check. You may greet a new NPC only for Dexterity to urge you to swipe their wallet or for Strength to demand you impress upon them your masculinity. This is the central gimmick of the game, and essentially all interactions within the game are structured as conversations between the Cleric, their stats, and whoever or whatever the Cleric is currently dealing with. So as you walk around Tolstad, examining items or speaking with NPCs or finding yourself dealing with monsters down in the catacombs below the district, you’ll be navigating labyrinthine conversation trees that can lead to a wide array of outcomes, which of course ripple down into greatly divergent situations down the line.
This is all very good role-playing, and if you’ve ever played Dungeons & Dragons, you’ll find yourself right at home. Skill checks are made with a twenty-sided die, and you can always attempt a check no matter how unlikely you are to pass it. A natural 20 is a critical success, succeeding even if the skill check demands greater than 20 to pass, and a natural one is a critical failure, failing even if you have enough stat modifiers to otherwise succeed. As a cleric, you have a limited number of spell slots and must prepare your spells at an alter before being able to cast them. This is probably the least-intuitive part of the game, as if you are unfamiliar with this system it will take some getting used to, and even if you are familiar with it there are a lot of odd restrictions and possibly even bugs impacting when and where you can cast which spells. If you want to cast Speak to Animals so you can talk with a cat, for example, you can’t cast the spell until you initiate conversation with said cat, which is unintuitive. But then other spells simply were never castable for me. I was never able to cast Crusader’s Mantle, and I have no idea why.
Questing is a bit different from traditional RPGs, as your quests are not tracked in a journal but rather the Questing Tree. This displays all of your quests as nodes in a branching, interconnected tree structure. It’s a touch harder to grasp at first, but the intent is to help organize your quests based around the issues that they are broadly related to. I’m not entirely convinced it works very well at this, but it’s a visually pleasant thing to see, at least. When you complete some of the larger quests, their nodes will glow and allow you to select a Feat that delves deep into a broader topic, like gender relations or immigration, and can provide significant benefits for you in the game.
Ultimately, Esoteric Ebb, like Disco Elysium before it, is a game that really wants to get out of the player’s way and let them explore and figure things out for themselves at both the story and mechanical level, and so I won’t spoil that experience by going much deeper than I have. You click on things and then do a lot of reading, and your stats will frequently be called upon to see if you succeed or fail. That’s really the crux of it, and if you’ve been intimidated by RPGs before, I assure you that this is as welcoming a system as you’ll ever find.
The Praise
I keep mentioning Disco Elysium, and that’s because Esoteric Ebb really is flagrantly copying it in most ways. This is not some great secret; the end credits even mention Disco Elysium as an inspiration (along with Dungeons & Dragons, Secret of Monkey Island, and Planescape: Torment, if you’re curious) by name. But it’s important to bear this in mind because the game comes surprisingly close to being as good as that modern classic, but also distinguishes itself in some important ways.
Esoteric Ebb takes place in a very traditional, D&D-style fantasy setting. Disco Elysium was also a fantasy setting that had outright supernatural elements, but it was a spin on real world history and aesthetics. Esoteric Ebb takes place in a world literally created by a wizard (named Jor) who populated it with races pulled from other universes. Gods are objectively real (and also dead, but not really, it’s kind of complicated) and there are all sorts of non-human species living together, sometimes in harmony and sometimes very much not. This has a sweeping effect on many topics, as now it’s never as simple as Communism versus Liberalism, as even topics that exist in our world are here deeply enmeshed with a long and very different history. This isn’t always to the game’s benefit (I’ll talk about that later), but it does mean that, like, say, Fallout: New Vegas, the political situation can look a bit different given these wildly different circumstances, and that can pleasingly poke at and test your own beliefs in ways that the actual issue doesn’t.
Visually, the game uses a colorful style that I think is trying to emulate the old, hand-drawn look of pen-and-paper materials. It isn’t striving for realism, but instead a chunky, ink-lined, at times almost cel-shaded look. It’s not the most striking or impressive game I’ve seen in awhile, and some of the NPCs look a little more amateurish than I’d prefer, honestly, but it generally looks nice and is consistent and pleasant.
Most significantly, Esoteric Ebb just has a very different vibe than Disco Elysium. Disco Elysium is a melancholy game about a dysfunctional middle-aged man wracked with regret and shame. He grapples with the failures of Communism and Liberalism (or Centrism, or Neoliberalism, or whatever you want to call the Moralintern), and his own failures as a person. It’s a game about sadness, and where to go from sadness, or if there’s anything past sadness to aim for in the first place. Esoteric Ebb, on the other hand, is about a young man in a time of change, where the past is a churning sea of great changes and the future may be just as tumultuous. It’s about the trepidation and excitement of that change, even in moments when it is clear that what is coming is not something that anybody can alter. It’s a game that says that your one vote doesn’t matter, but you still need to participate in the election because politics is everywhere and even if you can’t get what you want it matters that you know what’s going on and have an opinion.
I think the element that most stood out to me was the way the game kept returning to the idea of what a man is. It has a great concern with disaffected young men and what to do with/for them. Are they stupid? Lazy? Entitled? Do they need to be “strong?” Get in touch with their feminine side? Why does fascism appeal to them? I think if you gave this game to the right boy at the right time, he’d walk away saying, “This game just gets me,” and I mean that as a compliment.
The Gripes
Unfortunately, I don’t think that Esoteric Ebb is perfect, nor do I think it is quite as coherent as its inspirations. In particular, I found some of its political thoughts, specifically on immigration, rather shallow and even eyebrow raising. This section won’t have any spoilers, but it will delve into some political topics, so consider yourself warned.
The key thing here is the Freestriders, a political party that is locked in to win the election. The Freestriders espouse freedom, especially freedom of movement and open borders, but they do so exclusively to advance economic prosperity. They are, essentially, an entire party of Matthew Yglesias-style Neoliberals who don’t give a goddamn about any form of freedom except the freedom to make money, but if you play by their rules you absolutely can get rich. I don’t have a problem with this part. There are certainly people like that in real life, although they mostly seem to be limited to pundits like Yglesias and a segment of rich people who don’t have any particular moral values.
The issue I have with the Freestriders is that the game really does not have much to say at all about the idea that there might be anyone who supports immigration for non-economic reasons, or who might support (or oppose) other forms of freedom who find themselves absorbed by or in opposition to the Freestriders for those reasons. Just in the United States of America–not even discussing multiple nations–freedom of movement has always been a point of extreme contrition. Free states versus slave states. The Mason-Dixon Line and Jim Crow. Modern day abortion bounty laws and the invalidation of trans people’s driver’s licenses. Freedom of movement is about so much more than economic opportunity and impact, and reducing it down to “do you want a good economy for the rich or not” is extraordinarily off-base. Especially since, as real-world neoliberals are quick to point out, there is no strong evidence that immigration has anything but a positive effect for native-born populations. If you’re going to reduce the question of immigration to one of economics, then, yes, there is a right answer, and the game’s implication that low-income native populations are in any way economically hurt by an influx of immigrants is false and the Freestriders are objectively correct on that metric. We can even see this right now in the United States, where a brutal crackdown on immigrants has not led to an uptick in jobs or prosperity.
Really, the whole thing has a whiff of accepting as true a lot of common, right-wing canards, particularly those advanced by the European right and the American right when discussing Europe. Given that Esoteric Ebb seems to have been written by one Swedish man, I find myself wondering if this is the result of a writer not having any pushback on his own biases.
It’s frustrating because, on top of just being shallow and frankly wrong about a lot of immigration topics, it has the materials to do more on the topic already. One element in the game is the Golden Horde, an imperialist nation of divine angels who have, among other things, split the homeland of the halflings down the middle, leading to a situation that, depending on how you look at it, is reminiscent of East/West Berlin, the division of Ireland, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. Or the genocide of the goblins, which has cost them their culture and most of their population but which, maybe, set them up for success in a multiethnic society?
Perhaps I missed some things in the game (very possible, since it is truly sprawling and is stuffed with obscure details), but I just never saw anything to change my impression that, as far as Esoteric Ebb is concerned, immigration is just an economic issue and if you support immigration you’re basically just a capitalist, and that’s a disappointing takeaway for what is otherwise a game that at least tries to be nuanced and allow for a wide variety of player perspectives. If there is ever a Disco Elysium-style definitive update or a full-blown sequel/companion title, this is the area I most want to see improvement in.
The Takeaway
That might sound like I had a lot of complaints about the game, but that’s just because there’s no way to talk as much about what I liked without spoiling things. And I don’t mean “revealing plot points,” I mean “depriving players of fun things they might not expect.” I liked this game a lot. And I don’t think I would have enjoyed it quite so much if I had known all the wild things I’d encounter or the silly jokes that I’d chuckle at. It’s not an enormous or terribly long game, but neither is it very expensive. If you’ve got a Steam account, I think you should at least give the demo a shot. And if you don’t, well, the game has controller support, and I’ll be keeping my eye out for a console release so I can recommend it to all my console-locked friends. It’s been awhile since I so whole-heartedly enjoyed a game despite its flaws.