After wrapping my Belgium campaign in Victoria 3, I'd planned to jump into Dark Souls 3, but ended up deciding to play Esoteric Ebb instead. It's pretty rare for me to actually buy a game in the year it releases, especially one that isn't a sequel to a franchise I already like. I'd been hearing a lot of good things about EE through a variety of sources, and since it sounded like a narrative-heavy RPG I thought it could be good to play through it before getting exposed to spoilers.
It is a really great game. I just beat it, and at the very end the creator thanks the makers of Disco Elysium, Planescape: Torment and The Secret of Monkey Island. If you can picture a Venn diagram of those three games, Esoteric Ebb would be smack dab in the middle. It has Disco's delightfully broken protagonist, a cacophony of interior voices chiming in on your situation, skill-check-centric gameplay, wide array of stat-modifying equipment, and steely-eyed view of political ideologies. It has Planescape's D&D rules, fantasy races, sense of longing, metaphysical and philosophical interests. And it has Monkey Island's zany humor, lovably inept hero, forgiving gameplay, colorful setting and outrageous characters.
MINI SPOILERS
While built on D&D rules, this game has a completely original setting, which I think is called "The Esoteric Coast" or something similar. I don't know if I 100% follow it, but in the history of this world, there have been various ages with different regimes, including a period when powerful magicians named Arcanists controlled everything. The world itself was created by a being named Jor, himself a powerful wizard, and everything that happens in there is ultimately attributable to him; there are occasional references to "Jor's Strings", essentially fate.
After the Arcanists were overthrown, human beings were hunted nearly to extinction. This game takes place in the coastal city-state of Norvik, one of the few places that still have a significant human population. The city was founded long ago by the god Urth, who brought the surviving humans and a large contingent of laboring dwarves together.
Fast-forward many generations, and Norvik is on the precipice of a new age: its first-ever election. This has been primarily instigated by a group known as the Freestriders, a coalition of democratic mercantilist states from a nearby area known as Reeds. The dawn of democracy heralds a transition from the aristrocratic and hereditary rule of Norvik; but it's also complicates, as the Freestriders are full-throated free-trade capitalists, and they stand to significantly dominate business and ultimately daily life in Norvik.
The election is a major side-plot to the game; you can ask pretty much anyone you meet (including enemies and animals) what party they are planning to vote for, and can also announce your own intention. There are three major parties contending. The Nationalist Party is the traditional party, upholding the religion of Urth, and aligned with the aristocrats and with humans; they are widely favored to win a majority of votes, with the real competition for second place. The Freestriders are a classical-liberal-democratic free-trade party, with its power base in the business owners, merchants and traders in the city, also appealing to people from cosmopolitan backgrounds. And the Azgalist Worker's Party is aligned with the Dwarven guilds, and are concerned with basic economic issues such as rent prices, as well as generally supporting the workers. Smaller parties include an Agriculturalist farmer's party and a rump Arcanist party. You as the player character can announce what faction you support, or can declare that you will be voting for yourself as the supreme leader, or can annoyingly say that you are far too intelligent to support any political party: you see, you are apolitical.
It takes some time for you to get a handle on your character; like Disco and Planescape, you have a very specific story background, but you can also go through a regular character creation process to customize your stats. You are canonically a Cleric, which in D&D tends to be a high-Wisdom character; but you are specifically an Arcane Cleric, who has a spellbook and can memorize mage spells. You can take your character in any direction you want: you could be high Strength and Constitution and very low Wisdom if you wanted a beefy brawler. And, in addition to the mechanics of your stat allocation, you can also declare your class to people you meet, and it doesn't have to make sense: you could insist that you are a Rogue despite having very low Dexterity, or say you are a Barbarian while only having 6 STR. (Which, again, feels very Disco.)
There is combat in this game, but even combat happens entirely through the dialogue interface and skill checks, not traditional attack rolls. It feels a lot like a pen-and-paper D&D table experience: the narrator will describe what you are facing, you may roll to notice certain things, then you are asked what to do. You might, say, roll WIS to try and understand what your opponent is doing; or roll DEX to rush towards them; or roll CON to weather their blows. You take HP damage in combat rounds, but defeating an enemy happens through the story: typically you will advance through rounds, then need to succeed in a roll (typically one of several choices) to defeat them or otherwise end the fight. All that being said, there isn't a strong mechanical necessity to either follow or avoid any particular stat allocation.
Like Disco, your character's stats also have a profound impact on the experience of the game: each of the six classic D&D stats has an associated persona that you'll hear from frequently. When facing a choice, they'll weigh in on which you should choose; when learning information, they'll react and process. The character creator does a good job at explaining them, but I'll go ahead and summarize as well:
STRENGTH is very masculine, dominating, commanding, self-controlling. Strongly associated with the Nationalist party and the Fascist ideology.
DEXTERITY is humorous, greedy, interested in money whether it comes from thieving or business, pleasure-seeking. Associated with the Freestrider party and free-trade ideology.
CONSTITUTION is quiet, stolid, reserved, blunt, self-aware. Slight association with the Agrarian party.
WISDOM is feminine, empathetic, insightful, self-effacing. Strongly associated with the Azgalist party and a de-facto socialist ideology.
INTELLIGENCE is arrogant, opinionated, self-promoting. Associated with magic and the Arcanist party.
CHARISMA is manipulative, perceptive, scheming, sensual.
My Cleric was very high WIS and high CHA, and dumped CON.
If you were to munchkin the game, a few things to consider: DEX is used for pickpocketing ("trifling"). I avoided it early on, but if you can get away with it (including save-scumming if you aren't averse), it doesn't have any downsides: there is no "karma" or hidden consequences. Pickpocketing is especially useful because quite a few characters have potions that will permanently boost a main attribute by 1 point, which in turn will help all dice rolls associated with that stat. Characters also have equipment that you can pickpocket; most pieces will lower one stat and boost one or two other stats, and you can freely swap equipment outside of dialogue, so, say, stealing some DEX-boosting gear will let you swap into a pickpocketing outfit that will help you steal even more stuff.
The other thing to be aware of: equipment slots are a bit different in this game. There are just a handful of designated slots: one helmet, one weapon, one book. Then there are multiple "trinket" slots. A "trinket" is anything else, which might be a shield, an ioun stone, boots, a Bag of Holding, etc. Trinkets have the biggest overall effect on your stat modifications. You gain one additional ability point each time you level up. Whenever a main stat hits 20 without any modifications (no equipment, no potions), you can an additional equipment slot. I was... hm, I think maybe level 6 at the end of the game. All that being said, if you want to munchkin your build, you might want to push one or two stats high during chargen, and focus on boosting your highest stat to 20 while leveling up, as adding a new equipment slot is much more powerful and flexible than a static point allocation.
You can pick different backgrounds for your character during chargen that come with their own stat boosts (like +1 STR and +2 WIS); as you eventually learn over the course of the game, all of the background descriptions canonically apply to your character, so this choice is more about what you focused on and what is most meaningful to you.
Once the game itself starts, it plays very much like Disco, with almost everything happening through the dialogue interface. You can walk around and explore as much as you like; time only advances during conversations. You have a time limit in the game, as the election is coming up in five days and you are supposed to wrap up your main quest by then. I think this is mostly for narrative urgency; I followed a very completionist path, doing nearly every side-quest and exhausting every dialogue tree I could find, and still had most of a day left by the end of the game. The main constraint is resting. A Long Rest lasts 8 hours and completely heals your character, removes all Exhaustion, and refills all your spell slots. A Short Rest lasts 1 hour and returns 1 random spell slot; I think it also removes 1 Exhaustion and gives a good chunk of health. I eventually found myself very grateful for the consumable items you come across. For health in particular, there are tons of food items and potions that can heal you up between encounters. A little more rare, but still widely available, are consumables that refresh spell slots. In terms of time management, I think it's best to use consumables to keep your character going as long as they can; after they've been awake for too long, they start getting massive Exhaustion, and that's the cue to take a Long Rest.
Exhaustion seems to be a new mechanic for this game (though I'm not super-familiar with current D&D rules). Any time your Health drops to 0, you start rolling dice to save against Death. I think that a 10+ succeeds and 9- fails. If you fail three times, you die and the game ends. If you succeed three times, you get back 1 HP and also 1 point of Exhaustion. Each point of Exhaustion lowers your Max HP by 1, and more troublingly, adds a -1 malus to every single die roll you take. Even a single point is painful, and it can get crippling once you get too high. Unlike HP and spells, there don't seem to be any consumables to remove Exhaustion, so you'll need to do a Long Rest; it's very much worthwhile to stay topped up on HP at all times to avoid getting any Exhaustion.
Damage can come from a variety of sources: combat and traps, but also failed skill checks (falling from a tree, stubbing your toe) and, especially in the early points in the game, psychic damage from embarrassing situations, admissions and confronting painful memories. You can literally die of embarrassment in this game, which again feels very Disco.
In my playthough I mostly avoided skill checks that seemed challenging, either opting for alternate checks or skipping those branches altogether. In retrospect I should have done more of these. I think that in many cases you can "fail forward": failing a check might cause some minor damage, but will still allow you to progress a plotline. In other cases, the check will lock after you fail; but you can retry these checks after leveling up, and you can also spend a consumable "Shard of Jor" item to retry any check. These shards turn out to be plentiful, I had dozens by the end of the game. I was somewhat chagrined to realize that, by avoiding a Challenging Strength dialogue choice early on, I missed out on recruiting an optional companion who could have helped quite a deal during some combat-oriented parts of the game.
One other mechanics note: there are so-called "Feats" in this game, which work very differently from the D&D flavor. They aren't tied to your level progression: instead, whenever you finish a major quest, you can allow that quest to "Take Root" in your mind. This will kick off an interior dialogue between the various attribute-personas in your mind, as they debate the implications of what you learned from the quest and your choices in it. This will conclude with the option to pick one of several mutually-exclusive feats. For example, you could choose between one that gives a +50% bonus to any coins you pick up, and one that automatically regenerates some HP every hour. Or you could choose between gaining Advantage in skill checks with dialogue with male characters, or Advantage in skill checks with dialogue with female characters. These choices sound like they make strong judgments about your character, but as far as I can tell they are strictly mechanical, and your choice won't affect the story or other characters' reactions at all.
You have a maximum of 4 Feats. The first 4 times you let an idea Take Root you will automatically pick up the corresponding Feat; starting with your fifth, you would need to unselect one Feat before you can pick the next. You can re-select a feat again, though the interface says you can only do so after sleeping. You cannot switch your choice between feat options once one has Taken Root (that is, if you opted for Advantage with Male Characters, you can't later swap that for Advantage with Female Characters).
The economy is actually pretty good in the game. Coins feel precious early on, you'll want to spend some for advancing quests but may need to be cautious in buying items. I think all shops can be found relatively soon, so once you know what all is available it becomes easier to make purchasing decisions. Again, I would personally prioritize buying stat-boosting Potions before pretty much anything else. Also note that some (not all) merchants can be pickpocketed from, with no in-game negative repercussions from successful thefts. Later in the game there are some possibilities to get large amounts of money, which would free you up to buy everything if you wanted.
Oh, some more on spells: I think all the spells in this game are D&D spells, and work like you'd expect. You start with very few and can pick up a ton over the course of the game. You instantly memorize any scrolls you find without needing to roll or take time. You are limited to Level 3 spells; this is tied in to the setting of the game, as magic has become less potent and common in the world since the passing of the Arcanists (the "Esoteric Ebb" of the title). You can change your memorized spells pretty easily by visiting an Altar. You cast Sorcerer-style, so if you have, say, 3 Level 1 spell slots and have memorized Charm and Heal Wounds, you could cast either spell three times or one spell once and the other one twice. There's no limit to the number of spells you can learn, but the number you can prepare is determined by your level and your Intelligence.
Spells can be very effective in this game so they are a great resource. I tended to avoid healing spells, as you can easily heal out of combat. Grease is shockingly effective: it can shut down opponents in a fight, and could also help you get past an iron door. Some spells like Comprehend Language and Speak with Animals unlock huge chunks of content, granting access to large dialogue trees you wouldn't otherwise get to see. There are quite a few Concentration spells, and personally I think the best one is Enhance Abilities, which lasts for hours and gives a bonus to every single die roll you take regardless of the stat.
You can also learn some Cantrips over the course of the game. While D&D cantrips include one-shot abilities, all of the Esoteric Ebb cantrips are essentially toggleable modes for exploration. "Dancing Lights" will illuminate the area around you; in dungeons, this might cause your character to notice some things that would otherwise be hidden. "Druidcraft" reveals some minor earth spirits who usually have consumable items to offer. "Thaumaturgy" shows secret information points that explain the history or magical influence of an area, and give you buffs (healing, spell slots, curing exhaustion) when clicking on them.
A few technical notes before dipping into the story:
The UI is very well designed and feels very personal. I especially loved the notes from the game designer that appear when continuing a saved game, summarizing your progress thus far in an authorial voice. It's one of many touches that makes this feel like a D&D campaign played at a table.
The in-game artwork feels amateurish; not offputting or ugly, but like it was drawn by a talented child. It's visually creative and interesting. I was a bit nonplussed at first but warmed to it over the course of the game.
The music is really nice, with a few simple character-driven themes that repeat over the course of the game. It's a bit soft and pleasant, a nice accompaniment that adds texture to your adventures without distracting from them.
Okay, finally on to some story:
You are Ragn, a Cleric of Urth employed by the city of Norvik. You are an only child, a man of twenty-seven years old; as you will eventually learn, you still live with your mom (and admitting this deals 2D4 of psychic damage). You have been tasked by the city with investigating a tea shop that exploded a day before the game starts. As it is Election Week, the city leaders want to make sure there are no threats that would interfere with the process.
Immediately before the game starts, you die: you are pushed into the river, then are fished out and sent to the morgue, where the mortician is able to revive you. You've lost some short-term memories, and I think this caesura helps justify why you the player need to have so many in-world basic concepts explained to you (again, much like Disco).
Pretty early on, you meet your first and main companion, the goblin Snell. He somewhat plays the role of Kim in Disco, although they have different personalities. Snell is opinionated but reserved, very loyal to his goblin clan and a realist about how power works in the city. In fights, Snell attacks with a sling, and has pretty good aim.
There's a slight tension in your loyalties. Your superior for this operation is Coinlord Darrow, one of the Magistrates who administers the city. But authority is being shared with the Halfway Bridge (Goblin) Tribe, who own the tea shop property. Lady Sageleaf is also very interested in this case, and wants to make sure that no blow-back impacts her concerns.
Much like Disco, you can proceed with investigating the main mystery, but there is also a ton of other stuff to do, and you can easily spend multiple in-game days exploring the city, chatting with people, learning about history and having political discussions, dungeon-crawling and so on. As noted above, the main other part of the plot is the incipient election, and probably more than half of the quests are in some way related to that: various factions vying for influence or agents of the factions trying to promote their own agendas.
You can very roughly divide the game map into half, with the town above and the dungeon below. Again, there is a lot of content, so you could spend days in the town without ever dipping your toe into the dungeon. The dungeon is more dangerous, as there are traps and monsters down there; but there are also some really great rewards. In general, most of the early items you find tend to be nearly net-zero: maybe +1 or +2 to one stat and -1 to another stat. Later in the game you can find more items that are more like a straight +3 or a +1/+2 to multiple stats. I'm not sure what the best overall progression is, but I think if I had done some dungeon-diving on the earlier side the gear I found could have helped with city stuff.
There isn't a ton of actual choice-and-consequences roleplay in the game. You do get a good variety of options in reacting to people, a lot of which are very funny. For example, your character is canonically unsuccessful with the ladies. When someone inquires about your lovelife, you might have choices between changing the subject, stammering awkwardly, making up an outrageous lie, or staying silent and breathing heavily. There won't be any option to be a cool person (though your STR and CHA will encourage you to be cool!). There are a few places where you can make impactful decisions, such as deciding whether to let a witness leave town or force them to stay. The biggest ongoing opportunity for roleplaying comes with the repeated opportunities to align with one of the major political parties, or announce that You Are Apolitical. This strongly reminded me of the Disco ideological alignment storylines.
MEGA SPOILERS
Ultimately, the two main plotlines do converge. Near the very end of the game you learn that the tea shop blew up due to the machinations of Lord Gorm, a Paladin of Urth. He became aware of a plot among the aristocrats to hobble the current leader of the city, casting a Feebleminded spell on him, once they learned that he intended to hold an election in Norvik, overseen by representatives from the clerics and from the Azgal trade unions. However, Gorm was unable to prove this, and despaired of being able to prevent it.
He hatched on an ambitious, terrible scheme: apparently a ritual exists that could resurrect the dead god Urth. The price: twenty-seven innocent lives. To accomplish this, he arranged to purchase a Necklace of Fireballs: a fairly commonplace item in, say, the Forgotten Realms, but almost unheard of in the relatively low-magic world of Esoteric Ebb. His scheme was to detonate it under the Temple of Urth on Election Day to claim the required lives, resurrect his god and restore the city.
The scheme went awry when his agent, an elf, arranged to meet early in the tea shop with a former friend of hers, a hagling. I forget the exact details of what went wrong: the necklace of fireballs exploded, but I don't recall now if it was just an accident or if something else provoked the explosion. In any case, the explosion killed the elf and destroyed the tea shop, though fortunately no other lives were claimed.
All of this is laid out when you meet up with Lord Gorm himself in the Beyond, a sort of afterlife that is also reachable by entering Jor's Pillar. He's surprisingly sympathetic in his description of his motives; following the example of all my favorite games, I talked him down and he offed himself rather than pursue his bloody path. After that, you get to chat with Urth himself, which is really cool: meet the man who became a god. He's really humble and wise and self-effacing; the game does a great job at challenging him, though, in particular letting Snell call him out on his genocide of the goblins and the near-erasure of their culture.
The game ends like how I want it to, with you getting to chat with most people you've met during the course of the game, get some closure or progression to their personal stories, and a few final words from the DM before the closing credits. In this he acknowledges the major decisions you made and the impact you created.
I completed virtually all of the quests. I deliberately didn't do the Freestrider pamphleting quest because I didn't want to give them an advantage in the election; the election results aren't part of the endgame, though, so I'm guessing this wouldn't make a difference. I never finished the quest related to the Halflings and their incipient slaughter at the hands of the Celestials; there are a few dialogue items related to this, but I must have missed some plot point to advance it.
As mentioned before, I resolutely advanced the Azgalist cause whenever possible, and talked them up whenever the opportunity arose. I had them publish the expose on Freestrider/Magistrate corruption, but also spread it to multiple papers to increase the impact for the election. I also had Modissa temper her message; I felt kind of bad doing that, as in real life I feel like the left is far too obsequious towards the supposed political center, but given the historical situation in Norvik I thought this approach would be more effective than vanguardism.
I was resolutely The Cleric. I do love that you can call yourself whatever you want, regardless of your actual stats, which again feels like a pen-and-paper quirk for A Certain Kind Of Player.
I became a demi-lich, mostly so I could stop needing sleep.
I was pretty friendly with the unspeakable nameless ancient horror at the bottom of the city, but rejected the opportunity to become a warlock with he/it as my patron. Oh! There is another interesting plot thread here - it turns out that creature is behind the plot to murder me, apparently due to some prophecy that I will play a part in returning higher-level magic to the world. Nothing in this game seems to directly address that, which makes this feel like a possible hook for a potential sequel.
I turned in the teenage assassin to her dad and didn't cut her any slack.
I was really friendly with Snell through the whole game, and we had some good interactions at the end.
I was able to get a sort-of date with Moongore, and also a potential date with Ettir. Way to go, Ragn!
I made the tea shop owner bird stay in town, and gave his papers to Lady Sageleaf. Overall I was much more aligned with Sageleaf than with Darrow. It was cool to learn that she's secretly a dragon; it might have landed even more emphatically if the HWBT had been kobolds instead of goblins.
END SPOILERS
I had a blast with this game. According to Steam my total playtime, on an almost-completionist playthrough, was a bit over 25 hours, which is a pretty sweet spot for RPGs. I think this game is a must-play for anyone who enjoyed Disco Elysium, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Disco but enjoys being in the Venn diagram of games that are narrative-driven, humorous, and use D&D rules. It's also really exciting to see that Disco wasn't just a one-off but has opened up a door for other games to come through.
