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

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Follow Follow See All Games Review Playing Esoteric Ebb is like rolling the dice with a great DM The game is basically Disco Elysium but inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s a lot of fun. The game is basically Disco Elysium but inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, and it’s a lot of fun. by Jay Peters Close Jay Peters Senior Reporter Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed.

Technical Details

Follow Follow See All by Jay Peters May 2, 2026, 12:00 PM UTC Link Share Gift Image: Raw Fury Part Of The best indie games we’re playing right now see all updates Jay Peters Close Jay Peters Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Jay Peters is a senior reporter covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.

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.

Industry Implications

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. (This option also has a high dexterity score, which was great for pickpocketing things off of people.

) After I set my character, the game’s intro said I was the “dumbest cleric imaginable.

This advance offers important signals about the future of the sector, and the tech world is watching closely.