Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. In the world of games, it doesn't take very long for a hit game to be followed up by a slew of others trying to put their spin on the hot new formula. Disco Elysium is no exception, but the number of games that have been inspired by that RPG have taken longer than usual to appear. We've seen a few, like Rue Valley, that look like it can fit the bill but fall short in a number of key areas. Esoteric Ebb is different in that it takes on the spirit of the hit RPG and succeeds in pulling it off quite well.

Esoteric Ebb is set in a medieval land full of various sentient creatures. More importantly, the land's first-ever election is being held in a few days, with various parties campaigning to ultimately rule the land. However, a tea shop has exploded, and while the authorities are quick to sweep the incident aside, there is a desire to at least try and investigate what happened. To do that, they've sent over a cleric, though it's not the best cleric. Players take on the role of the cleric, and you wake up in a morgue after being fished out of a river and presumed dead. While there is the mystery of how you ended up almost dead, the main thing that needs to be solved is the motive behind the tea shop blowing up and whether or not that will impact the upcoming election.

You start off the game by making your character just like you would in a tabletop RPG, and while you'll always be a cleric, you can change just about every stat possible. It can be a little daunting, since you have plenty of points at your disposal, but in case you have choice paralysis, you can randomize your character stats or select from a good number of presets. You can also choose your backstory, and there are plenty to choose from. It's a fairly deep character system, but you can't choose your clothes or your name before starting the adventure proper.

Once you start the game, you'll find that everything will be familiar if you've played Disco Elysium. That starts with the characters. There's a whole host of major and minor people you'll encounter, and perhaps the most striking thing is that almost everyone you meet is pretty normal. They belong to different races, but there's nothing eccentric about them. The environment also becomes a character in a way. The game takes place in what is considered a relatively small area but is densely packed with various things like crypts, underground cities, and areas that all feel very different from one another. There are pipes that lead to mystery areas, walls with graffiti that speak to you, and small totems in large places. The world has a mix of modern and medieval elements like bicycles and griffons, respectively; it feels lived in.

Your own character, the cleric, is perhaps the most interesting for several reasons. All of his major stats are speaking in his head, as if they were actual characters in a party. Their personalities are firmly set; Strength always references respect and being manly, while Constitution always reminds you of your fragility. Because they're governed by your stats, their depth comes from how high those numbers are, and the variety of their responses from those stats overcomes their potential to be one-note characters. The cleric is also interesting because he's not the best in his field. Depending on your dice rolls in certain situations, he's played off as a bumbling hero who sometimes stumbles onto the best solution but has the potential to get hurt in the silliest of ways. It helps that your companions don't see you as dumb, but you get into some silly situations. The game can fall into some of the expected comedic tropes while subverting a few others.

When it comes to the gameplay mechanics, they are extremely dialogue focused. You're going to go through loads of dialogue, and there's enough that you'll find a glossary to explain the more important names and locations. The game gives you plenty of dialogue choices at every opportunity, and the system is so critical to the game that it becomes the main way you earn XP and level up throughout the journey. Major dialogue and action choices are combined with dice rolls to determine success or failure, and a good chunk of them steer the journey into wildly different directions. This isn't a visual novel taken from a different camera perspective, but expect to talk more than anything else.

There is one thing you can do in Esoteric Ebb that you couldn't do in Disco Elysium: get into a proper fight. The fights aren't plentiful, and you won't get into too many random battles. Each skirmish yields XP, but don't expect to level up greatly from them compared to just going through conversations. You first roll for initiative, and from there, the rest of the fight occurs as if it were dialogue with several choices present and information about whether you'll get any advantages or disadvantages. The fighting system isn't revolutionary, but it works, and it's worthwhile because it can have some silly combat choices, like hugging a skeleton.

What unites everything so well is the writing. Every character feels grounded, and the dialogue aims to be normal instead of trying (and failing) to be witty. Your stats come up with some ridiculous lines and suggestions that don't seem out of place in this world, such as deciding that waking up a sleeping gryffon is somehow a good idea despite others telling you otherwise. Even if you play out the cleric as some "holier than thou" voice of authority, there's still a sense of sincerity to his actions. The writing works for its simplicity and commitment to dry comedy. Every failure is as enjoyable as every success because the writing makes you excited to see all possible outcomes.

This all creates an adventure that can feel grand without actually being grand. There's never a feeling of trying to stop a great evil from destroying the world. You never face off against an impossible foe, and you don't upend the land. The main quest from beginning to end is to find the culprit who blew up a tea shop, and all of the other quests are entertaining ways to flesh out the lore of the world. It's pretty refreshing to see an RPG go for some fairly low stakes, when almost everything else in the genre gravitates toward that one big, globally life-changing goal.

The flaws are relatively few. Aside from a few grammatical errors, the most notable flaw is in the highlight system, which sometimes fails to highlight anything when you're near it. For example, you can reach a door and think it isn't interactive because of the lack of a highlight, but the press of a button informs you that you can interact with the door. This occurs enough that you'll get into a habit of hitting a button almost all the time to ensure you don't miss anything. Another flaw is that the game will sometimes advance through two sections of dialogue at a time instead of one, but you can always scroll backward through dialogue sections to see what you've missed.

From a presentation standpoint, Esoteric Ebb does a good job. Graphically, the game goes with a European comic-inspired style due to the use of lighter colors and visible (but not so thick) black outlines. The style is similar to comics like Tintin or games like Chants of Sennaar. The character designs are nice, and the same goes for the animations, while the lack of camera rotation isn't a problem since the game doesn't hide anything important behind the environment. As for the sound, the music is good, but the game's lack of voices might throw off some people, especially those who were only exposed to Disco Elysium months after it launched. As mentioned before, the dialogue is so good that missing out on voices is fine, but it would've been nice if there were some speech present, even if it was little blurbs that have nothing to do with the text on-screen.

Linux users will have no issues with this game. It runs right out of the game with the latest version of Proton, and there's no need to do any further tweaking after that. The same holds true for running the game on the Steam Deck, and the performance there is excellent. Running at a full 1280x800 resolution, the game hits 60fps with relative ease and no tweaking needed for any of the graphical settings. The battery life is around three-and-a-half hours at a full charge, making this game great for playing on the go.

Esoteric Ebb is a multitude of things: a low-stakes political mystery, a comedy with solid writing and fleshed-out characters that have personalities even if there are no vocal performances to go with them, and it's a good-looking game that feels like the spirit of Disco Elysium. Most of all, it's an enjoyable experience that begs for multiple playthroughs to see all of the different scenarios and personalities. This is a pleasant surprise of a title, and those who value good dialogue above all else will be very happy with Esoteric Ebb.

Score: 8.5/10