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Just so everyone knows, I’m writing this review with the credits still rolling, the music practically daring me not to feel something about it. The feeling I have right now? Something I haven’t had in years, the same thing I felt finishing Disco Elysium for the first time. That particular flavor of brain-emptiness that hits when a game occupies your skull so thoroughly that real life briefly feels like a loading screen. This kind of choice-based adventure scratches a very specific itch I always forget I have, right up until something comes along and reminds me. Loudly.
Esoteric Ebb will first seduce you with its imagery and character creation into thinking it’s a classic D&D-style RPG. The very first thing you do is allocate your base stats: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma. I’ve played these games before. Without a single worry, I dumped everything into intelligence and charisma, the two stats that, in any other RPG, would make me an unstoppable god of dialogue and good decisions. That’s when the game showed its hand. Esoteric Ebb is, at its heart, a comedy. Specifically, it uses your stat spread to tell you exactly what kind of catastrophe you are as a person. My cleric, the game’s one “forced” class, was described as a power-hungry, charisma-soaked egomaniac desperately starved for affection. Because in the city of Norvik, your ability scores dictate who you are, deep in the crawling dark of your own psyche. Your stats have personalities, and they talk to you. A low-Strength cleric will spend the entire game listening to their inner strength mutter about how everyone in the room is more masculine than them and that perhaps groveling would be a reasonable response. Meanwhile, a high-Intelligence voice will spend the same game whispering sweet, sweet confirmations of your inevitable ascension to God-Wizard-King of the Esoteric Coast.
Which brings me to the setting. You’re a cleric who wakes up with selective memory loss, though calling it the “amnesiac trope” would be generous, since you can effectively remember who you are within minutes if you feel like it. Your quest: find out who blew up the teahouse. Your deadline: five days, when your city holds its very first election. And this is where the game’s most persistent joke kicks in. Who will you vote for? Your cleric can interrogate literally everyone about their political affiliation, flip-flop between ideologies based on whoever they spoke to last, and generally conduct themselves like someone running a campaign they’re making up as they go. Which, to be fair, is exactly what’s happening.
My first dice roll came in a fight with an undead. Classic cleric fare. And that’s when I realized this wasn’t a normal RPG. When you can see HP and ability scores, your brain starts wiring up expectations. I do damage, they do damage, someone hits zero, roll credits. Not quite. Combat is more like three rounds of barely-controlled panic where you’re just trying not to die before the final, decisive roll. Your companions, and yes, you do get companions, primarily exist to tilt those odds in your favor for that last throw. It works, and the failures often produce genuinely hilarious outcomes, but it also produced something in me I’m not particularly proud of: save scumming. Because knowing a better resolution might have existed, just a dice roll away? I couldn’t let that go. I’m one of those people. You know the type.
The game is much closer to Disco Elysium than it is to Baldur’s Gate. It’s almost entirely dialogue. You make choices, annoy people to your heart’s content, and stress-test the patience of every living, and unliving, creature in the city. You also have spells, which are a genuine highlight. In most conversations, you can sidestep the dialogue options entirely and just… use magic. Why painstakingly investigate a corpse when you can cast Speak with Dead? You get five questions. You can make them count. Or, and this is a completely valid use of a divine necromancy spell, you can ask the deceased what they were planning to vote for before their untimely end. We honor the dead by honoring their civic duties.
Every “quest,” and yes, those quotation marks are load-bearing, can be resolved in an almost obscene number of ways. There’s no real failure state. Someone asks you to deliver milk? Take the milk, tell them you’ve reconsidered, and congratulations: completed. A band of revolutionaries want your help overthrowing the system? Convince them you’ll find them government jobs and watch the quest journal tick over. The quotation marks are also very much a deliberate in-game gag. The Cleric seems vaguely aware of the tropes surrounding him, and every time someone brings you a request, you have the option to lean in with barely contained excitement and ask: is this a quest? If they take pity on you and confirm that yes, fine, this is a quest, something just lights up.
The world-building is genuinely remarkable. The writer took every D&D system we’ve normalized over the years (leveling up, spell casting, resurrection) and asked: if these things were simply real, what would a functional society actually look like? Everyone levels up. High-level individuals can cast revive spells. Ideologies have inherited the rhetorical traditions of dead gods. And these people ride bikes. There’s something deliriously funny about a grimdark fantasy city operating on roughly inter-World-Wars-era technology, where a priest can take two crossbow bolts to the chest and probably still file a workers’ compensation claim.
The writing is, frankly, excellent. Which becomes almost offensive when you find out the entire game was written by a single person, across what reportedly clocks in at over a million words. One writer. One million words. And I completely understand how painstakingly hard that is as I have written around 300k words for a game myself… A cast of dozens of contradictory, fully-realized characters, a satirical political system, internal monologues for every ability score, and a spell that lets you interrogate the dead about their voting preferences. Let that sink in while you think about the last email you struggled to finish. I laughed out loud more times than I can catalog, and not politely. The dynamic where your Intelligence lays out the obviously smart play, you hear it out, nod along thoughtfully, and then choose the most catastrophically stupid option anyway? The reactions, both from inside your own skull and from everyone around you, are worth every failed Wisdom check that led you there.
Most of the characters feel genuinely alive. They’re contradictory, self-interested, capable of change, and deeply embedded in the world. You could ignore most of them and probably still finish the game. But you’d be worse off for it. Your primary companion, Snell the goblin, is the closest thing your barely-functional cleric has to a moral anchor. He’s sharp, pragmatic, frequently the voice of reason in the middle of whatever catastrophe you’ve engineered this time, and surprisingly layered once you bother to spend time with him. He has his own struggles, his own arc, and, if you manage not to drive him away entirely, some genuinely affecting moments toward the end. Right before you vote for yourself. For The Cleric.
My only real complaint, ignoring the combat, which is simply not designed for the part of my brain that demands complex RPG systems, yet still delivers plenty for fans of choose-your-own-adventure, is the ending. I always want an epilogue. After introducing me to a cast this good and letting me follow their stories all the way to election day, the game settles for a brief conversation, a vote, and a cut to black. I understand why, narratively. Everything was always going to happen after the election, which in story terms means off-screen, which in my terms means I simply don’t get to see it. A loss I will apparently be sitting with for some time.
For those wondering if this might be for them, a quick summary of my playthrough: woke up having survived a river, ate 37 apples, jumped back into the river to confirm the first time wasn’t a fluke, attempted to romance a sphinx, an orc, an angel, and a bugbear, secured an off-screen date with three out of four, informed 21 separate people they should vote for me in the upcoming election, saved the city, and then, finally, voted for myself. For The Cleric.
Probably one of the best games 2026 will have to offer.
Esoteric Ebb
Bottom Line
Esoteric Ebb is the rare game that makes you feel genuinely smarter and significantly stupider at the same time. A few rough edges here and there can't undo the fact that this is one of the most inventive, wickedly funny RPGs in years.
