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I recently finished the game Esoteric Ebb and think it is fantastic. For those unfamiliar, think Disco Elysium meets Dungeons and Dragons meets competence. It is the game that Disco Elysium was meant to be.
You play as an Arcane Cleric (meaning you can cast every type of spell, not just divine) sent by your order to investigate a Tea Shop explosion in the city of Tolstad. You’re there to investigate the explosion and bring any possible perpetrators to justice, and also talk about politics with everyone, because Tolstad is about to have their first ever Democratic Election in five days! Democracy, in my fantasy setting? Well yes, the people are intrigued by this new concept, having previously been ruled by Wizard Kings in the days of old, and then by aristocrats after magic began to weaken and the Wizard Kings lost their power. But now it’s time to have an election, and everyone has a say on how they want the new government to be run, including your brain and its six aspects.
Much like Disco Elysium, the actual gameplay consists of you talking to people and looking at objects, and doing skill checks which you pass or fail based on a die roll and modifiers. Oh and you might be crazy because your brain is constantly babbling at you with different perspectives, personified by your six main stats. Each has their own personality, and they argue with each other frequently. Some of what they talk about is personality stuff, a lot of it is politics. Coming from a Swedish indie developer, I think they did a very good job of giving a good and balanced perspective on most of the issues by using this mechanic. Each attribute takes on a different perspective and steelmans that perspective, while the others argue against it in your mind, and you get to choose which (if any) you want to favor. Simultaneously, factions in the actual world represent these ideas and you can choose to favor them or not during quests.
-Your Strength wants you to support the Nationalists, who believe humans are superior to other races like Dwarves or Goblins. It also wants you to act like a MAN and put women in their place.
-Your Constitution is obnoxiously apolitical, thinking you’re above all this politics stuff and should focus on things that matter like eating food and enjoying yourself. Or something, I had a low Constitution score and didn’t make many choices that lined up with this, so I didn’t hear from it as much and didn't get as good of an understanding of its nuances.
-Your Dexterity wants you to support the free trade capitalist party. Improve society by increasing material wealth for everyone, but especially yourself. Also steal everything. Greed is good.
-Your Intelligence thinks that the Wizard Kings were right, things were better back when they were in charge. Instead of having constant political in-fighting, have one person in charge who can do things in a coherent and unified way, and use their arcane powers to protect and feed the masses. You literally have spells that can summon food out of thin air. Not only this, but YOU should be this wizard king. Despite being a newcomer to this city and a bit of a bumbling fool, and there not actually being a proper Arcanist party in the election, and you having no realistic chance of winning, you can (and I did) go around insisting that everyone ought to vote for you as a write in.
-Your Wisdom wants you to support the socialists. Empower the oppressed minorities, bring down the patriarchy. Almost typical leftism, blah blah blah, though refreshingly devoid of any stuff about sexual orientation or transgenderism. They actually make a stronger case for this than you would see in real life due to the focus on real oppression. The minorities are actually different races, and have actually been near-genocided by the humans in the recent past, not hundreds of years ago.
-Your Charisma doesn’t seem to take a proper stance on politics, but mostly wants you to fit in socially and flatter the ego of whoever you happen to be talking to at the moment. A social chameleon. It’s less concerned with having principles and trying to use them to build a better society, and more concerned about making sure you ally yourself with the winning side. Or every side.
I want to give props to the developer for trying to balance all of these and make all of them display both their good sides and their bad sides, not just having some be obviously good and some be obviously evil and horrible. I’m pretty sure they are left-leaning, as they seem to be overly generous to the socialists by making them actually oppressed and making their primary flaw be “unrealistic idealism that won’t be strong enough to enact the change they desire” rather than “likely to starve everyone” or “soft on crime” or other flaws that leftism has. And in this world the Wizard Kings don’t even have a party because they objectively failed in the past. But he’s clearly trying to keep things balanced, and I appreciate it.
Beyond all this, it captures my favorite feature of (the first half of) Disco Elysium, in that you are (or at least can choose to be) a bumbling idiot and it’s hilarious. I went all in on Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma, which ought to make me intelligent and socially competent, but it mostly just let me get away with my bumbling idiocy, which I played into on purpose. I walked into a secret socialist printing press and insulted everyone there before proceeding to help them with their quest, I pickpocketed most people (especially after getting a perk that gave me advantage on pickpocket rolls), and even had someone get mildly annoyed after they attempted to reward me with an item for helping them only to notice that I had already taken it from them. And I flirted with pretty much every female in the game, including a Sphinx and an Angel. I cannot overstate how good the writing is. Your character has all sorts of hangups about women (at least mine did, I’m not sure how much this is just because my Strength was a dump stat), and sufficient embarrassment causes damage. My favorite moment in the game was when I decided to flirt with an Orc lady and rolled really poorly (also it was a really difficult check because she had no reason to like me yet and I just started flirting for no reason). My character stammers out “D…D….DATE!” That’s it. He just yells the word date out of nowhere and all of my internal voices start freaking out about what a failure I am and I took 1d8 damage out of sheer embarrassment. Which rolled an 8, taking out half of my 16 health (since Constitution was another dump stat). Luckily as a Cleric, I can just cast a healing spell and move on, though at some cost to my limited reserves. You're also very incompetent during combat since you can't equip a real weapon, and most of my time was spent dodging with my high dexterity and desperately healing myself while my companions did the real fighting. Again, I'm not sure how much of this was me making Strength and Constitution dump stats, but I very much appreciated the consistency of the proud but bumbling fool.
And UNLIKE Disco Elysium, it doesn’t rug pull and punish you for this. I never finished Disco Elysium because halfway through the game there’s a big Event and because I was having fun goofing off and not taking it seriously, bad things happened and everything was awful and things turned from comedic to depressing real fast. Realistic? Sure. Fun? No. Meanwhile, I played Esoteric Ebb as an arrogant kleptomaniac wannabe wizard king (who’s still trying in their own sort of way) the whole way through and things turned out great. Maybe I just got lucky, or maybe the game just gave me more agency. There were some darker dialogue choices I could have made if I wanted to be evil, but unlike Disco Elysium it never punished me for being a goof.
I didn’t mean to write so much, this has turned into a whole game review at this point. But it’s fantastic. It’s barely an actual “game”, in that you mostly read text and wander around point and click mysterying. Even combat is reduced to unique scenarios in which things are attacking you and you have to click on predetermined options for how to handle that scenario. There’s a whole array of spells you can unlock and cast, most of which do nothing most of the time but sometimes offer up unique opportunities or just big heals to recover from failed checks. Also it’s not especially difficult, since there are a large array of healing items, multiple ways to solve most objectives (or just a lot of optional objectives), items you can use to re-attempt many checks, and if you really need to you can savescum failed rolls when re-attempts aren’t an option. I really like how most quests or even actions within quests are optional but completing them unlocks perks and bonuses to future stuff. Supposedly there’s a time limit, but I finished at the very beginning of the 5th day instead of the end, and people on the internet say that you can actually keep doing stuff even if you go over time and then at the end it rewinds the clock to the time when the game is supposed to end. So quite forgiving. But I found it to be an interesting and compelling narrative, and thought it was worth exemplifying as a game that is very much about politics, but fair and nuanced in its handling of it instead of beating you over the head with it. And more importantly is just a good game. If you like dialogue heavy RPGs I recommend playing it.
I gotta try this one, thanks.
My copotype was "boring", so I didn't get the worst result at the big event, but I think DE isn't this bleak. To me, the moral of its story is "you can't save the whole world, so choose your battles to make a difference". It means both letting go of your past mistakes, because even the figurines won't win her back, and understanding that things won't always go your way even if you do your best, but you can still do something that matters, you are not defined by what you haven't achieved, but by what you have.
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