Playing Esoteric Ebb is like rolling the dice with a great DM

It took me a while to get into Esoteric Ebb , a new CRPG from developer Christoffer Bodegård. The elevator pitch is basically Disco Elysium , but in the fantasy style of Dungeons & Dragons : You play as a cleric wandering around a small town who’s trying to figure out, among other things, the mystery of why a tea shop in town exploded, and all the while, you’re having conversations with different character traits in your head. Like Disco Elysium , you see the world from an isometric, top-down perspective. Also like Disco Elysium , Esoteric Ebb requires a lot of reading, weighing the opinions of your competing voices, and making some bold dice rolls that don’t always work out. The first few days I played the game, I felt like I was slowly and aimlessly mucking through. But by the end, I found myself engrossed — and laughing out loud more than I have with any game in recent memory. When you start Esoteric Ebb , you build your cleric by assigning out different ability scores — the traditional D&D ones like strength, wisdom, and charisma — and a background focus to give your character some history. There are also a handful of prebuilt characters if you don’t want to spend too much time tinkering, and I picked the one with the highest charisma stat, “Unstable Cleric,” because I like having persuasive conversations in these types of games. …