splitting the vote: Esoteric Ebb (2026)

17 Aug, 2026

Post-reviewing Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, I have acquired a BG3-style brain tadpole that is making me play as many Discolikes [crowd boos loudly] as I am physically capable of before getting bored. I am interested in what is happening in this genre and it has been busy! First on the table was Esoteric Ebb, the widely praised D&D Discolike that made a big splash earlier this year, which I had been meaning to pick up anyway before this specific psychological malady hit.

I liked Esoteric Ebb a lot! It's a shiny little game. It plays very well. Gorgeous visuals, satisfying UI (with the exception of the hard-to-navigate mind map), a general coherent conveyance of vibe and tone through its overall appearance. It's lighthearted and comes off as such. I would have spent a lot more time in a world this cleverly crafted, and I found myself bummed when I realized I was approaching the ending because I was enjoying the sense of discovery and poking around the corners of its spaces.

I specifically was totally delighted by how it does combat. Combat is all in dialogue, with skill checks in your responses, as well as spells displayed to the side which can be used when they're relevant. (This is often a bit of a spoiler, as the spell will start flashing when you can use it, and the part of me that is a pain in the ass at the D&D table made me grumpy you can't throw non-relevant spells at a wall to see what sticks, but I understand why they don't allow you to do that. That would be so much extra work for no reward at all.) This combat-as-unfolding-conversation feels so extremely close to actual tabletop gaming! It's really cool! It's dense and internal, and a long dialogue becomes just as psychologically stressful as a long battle scene would be, but it doesn't bog you down with trying to implement some sort of entirely different combat mechanic for what can end up, depending on playstyle, being only a handful of fights.

I was less enamored with the hybrid nature of its story. It seemed to me to be trying to reconcile three fairly disparate inspirations: traditional D&D campaigns, Disco Elysium (by which I mean the DE gameplay structure and basic vibes of its protagonist), and a general cozy fantasy sensibility, ie. low on bloodletting, high on good humor and bureaucracy. This is one of these things that I feel works without close scrutiny and fractures after a closer look. On one hand we've got Lord of the Rings does Parks & Recreation, a world full of orcs and elves where papers need only be submitted to the proper superior before the cogs of justice, operating within an unseen but assumed functional and orderly political machine, can continue to grind. On a second hand, we've got a pluralist city (humans and goblins and dwarves, frolicking about, all friendship and kindness, kinda, mostly!) that still somehow exists within a strictly racially demarcated world (the goblins live in a goblin ghetto, maybe? except the one you hang out with, who has an apartment in a conveniently class-ambiguous neighborhood…. there is a goblin genocide background plotline that is fairly easy to miss and a troll encounter that unavoidably resurrects the topic of "evil" races.) On a third, anatomically impossible hand, we've got a debatably convincing amnesiac (not amnesiac, just not particularly internally forthcoming) protagonist with extremely loud voices in his head that are concerned mostly with political factions and binary relations of the sexes.

This all ends up feeling a bit dissonant. I never felt like Christoffer Bodegård's admittedly extremely earnest goodwill-amongst-men personal philosophy ended up outweighing the fact that the D&D approach to race and inherited morality is a little bit fashy, or that having a skill occasionally go off on MRA tangents might disrupt the general tone of optimistic liberalism.¹ This didn't impact my enjoyment of the game as a whole, but it did make me skeptical and a bit removed from its world, which, in true D&D fashion, noted my skepticism not a whit and continued to impose itself, floridly and flagrantly, upon every aspect of the game.

I did mostly like Esoteric Ebb's glossary! I think it was well-implemented, easy to access, and, with only occasional exceptions, not overwritten. It's just that proper noun-triggered glossaries overexpose their concepts so easily. Every player reflexively clicks a highlight. It's a fact of the world along with death and taxes. Any glossary, especially when included in a flow of continuous dialogue (as opposed to, say, a highlight, like in Sovereign Syndicate: related, watch this space) has to walk the line between informative and interruptive.² If you're playing a character like The Cleric that possesses information about the world that the player doesn't have, you have to convey it to them somehow! However, every glossary trigger is also a potential disruption to the flow of dialogue — which, in a Discolike, is the flow of the game. Even a paragraph's worth of visual space between one line of a important conversation and the next can break tension, and that auto-click can facilitate one of the worst habits of the player-reader, which is progress without comprehension. Once the player begins to glaze over something they think they've seen before, they've been pulled from the pilot's seat, and it takes effort to lock back in. The end of a conversation and the return to a different mechanical setup can serve as a reset, but in a text-heavy, dialogue forward game like Esoteric Ebb, you can't always afford that loss.

I digress. I had a lot of other thoughts about this game that I've lost to the sands of time and not writing things down quickly enough after completing a session. I thought the way it handled spellcasting was absolutely gorgeous and suited to a much more complicated game. I thought Urth "seeing the probabilities" was an excellent bit of metanarrative that gave a very interesting twist to the parts of the game that were soberly thinking about the impact of individual political actions while kinda being extremely dismissive of the parts of the game that were background genocide not really paid much attention to. I though the hot second mention of Gorm functioning as the paladin of a party as opposed to a god was fucking sick and I need more of that right now immediately. I thought literally literal God telling me to vote for the democratic socialists was ridiculous in a way that was almost charming. Like, if I had made different choices, would God have told me to vote for the capitalist expansionists, or the desiccated agricultural party, or the mageocracy? Or does God in this universe always know the morally correct future positive choice on the ballot and impose it upon you regardless of individual player expression? Video games are so weird.

I would recommend Esoteric Ebb! I would recommend it especially to people who really like D&D, and who are interested in varied, low stakes campaigning. I would recommend it a bit less to people like myself who have extremely strong opinions about electoralism and local bureaucracy and are going to be nitpicky about that kind of stuff. I think it's an interesting Discolike thematically and aesthetically but could have suffered, as I am finding is my continuous gripe, to move a bit further from Disco's protagonist archetype and the specific joke format of its chatty skills. I would have played a lot more of this game!

#discolikes #games