Platform: PC
Genre: Role-Playing Game, Disco Elysium-like, Fantasy

I do feel it’s pretty strange that a 2019 computer role-playing game can be so culturally significant that it spawns its own term: Disco Elysium-like. While Disco Elysium’s developer ZA-UM may arguably be a shadow of its former self, ironically due to the ideals it challenges in-game, it did inspire a TON of indie role-playing game makers to up their narrative and choice/consequence design ante and stand out.

Esoteric Ebb, made by one Christoffer Bodegard and published by Raw Fury, may be similar in structure to Disco Elysium. But really, it’s just a more thorough deconstruction and love letter to Dungeons & Dragons while telling its own story and making its own gaming experience that’s unique. It’s sure as hell enough to stand out in 2026, at least for a CRPG-loving freak like me.

Tide After Time

In Esoteric Ebb, you play as a cleric who woke up from the dead after an explosion in a tea shop you were in. After exploring-slash-getting out of the morgue Planescape: Torment-style, you are given five days to find out the culprit while also working with some unique allies. Oh, and also sort out who you’re voting in the country’s political race. The region you’re in is straight out of a fantasy campaign, with magic, swords, and dragons ruling the roost. Think Baldur’s Gate series, but a tad more colourful, a bit less vanilla (hence the Planescape mention), and with a bit more legally-distinct dice-rolling mechanics & actions. Even the game’s spellcasting mechanics are of the 5th Edition kind: long and short rests, memorize spells, and so forth.

You can play any type of cleric before you start the game, be it a womanizing one, a job-obsessed tryhard, or just a vain one who has high charisma and would rather just vote himself to be in the running instead of deciding which party to support. Regardless, you solve your problems through dialogue and prompts, usually siding with whichever attribute speaks to you the clearest and with the most rational answer. Yes, much like Disco Elysium, your attributes and stats speak to you and suggest the “best” and “plausible” outcome; it’s up to you if you want to follow through it. Whether the results are catastrophic and/or hilarious, or even in your favour, everything around you is reactive to you and will just pile on more to your narrative up to the very end.

Every fantasy trope here is streamlined just to focus more on Esoteric Ebb’s premise, where all your situational and difficulty checks are fighting against your raw ability bonuses. This makes it a more versatile experience than Disco Elysium, where you can have a high Constitution stat perform successful checks in not one but three different situations that makes sense to your predicament’s solution in the long run. A high Strength check means you become a bit more stubborn in your approach, taking on quests no matter what but also figuratively and literally brute-forcing through most problems. And from the text and writing, you can tell whether one attribute is appropriate in a situation or not; if your Strength speaks more like a bootlicker who follows orders, you may not want to use that attribute to get through a check. Conversely, if your Intelligence attribute speaks more like a mad wizard king and seems to be confident with its responses, you know that’s the right skill to min/max and use in that situation.

With its simple-yet-effective isometric perspective and easy controls, you’ll get into Esoteric Ebb in no time, but you’ll be drawn in further with its dialogue and writing. Suffice to say, the game’s narrative, responses, and situation are on the level as last year’s Outer Worlds 2 or even any Obsidian game. Hell, if Bethesda open world games had this kind of writing, I’d actually be paying attention to their NPCs instead of just gunning them down. What I’m trying to say is that Esoteric Ebb is fully carried by its oodles of dialogue, ramblings, and narrative much like a multispanning novel. I do wish the game fixes its user interface because it can get cluttered and tough to navigate through at times.

Preacher

It’s insane to think that of all the computer role-playing games that attempt to emulate 2019’s Disco Elysium in style and substance, it’s the one that follows the “tried-and-true fantasy tropes” that end up getting the proverbial crown for that genre. Make no mistake: Esoteric Ebb is just what the doctor ordered for a quick-witted, choice-heavy, path-altering, and experience-defining RPG title that knows how to tinker with your cerebral mentionables. Just temper your expectations: you are jumping into a dialogue-heavy indie graphic-filled tribute to Dungeons & Dragons after all, with a tinge of a detective story tucked within the madness. The fact that it costs RM61 means that you’ll get your money’s worth for a 20+ hour RPGing experience unlike any other.

Final Score: 90/100

Review code provided by publisher.