Esoteric Ebb Took 8 Years, 4 Attempts, And 1 Disco Elysium

This post originally appeared on 3/30/26 at Post Games, a weekly podcast by Chris Plante about why and how we love video games. You can support Post Games on Patreon.

I’m going to say a word, and I will ask you not to roll your eyes. Ready? “Disco-like.” Let’s use it in a sentence. The 2026 fantasy game Esoteric Ebb is the best Disco-like game since Disco Elysium. I know. I feel it, too. Something’s a bit off.

As you, a gamer with refined taste, know, Disco Elysium’s creators released their unique twist on role-playing games in 2019. Its emphasis on conversation over combat, along with timely progressive politics, inspired a variety of copycats and homages. But nothing – including projects from the original game developers – has recreated the original’s magic. Can Disco-likes exist if nothing is quite Disco-like?

This post originally appeared 3/30/26 on Post Games, a weekly podcast about why and how we love video games, each episode digging into an important, surprising, or underreported topic. If you like what you hear, consider subscribing.

Obviously, I’m here to tell you, definitively, yes. Esoteric Ebb is a game that proves just that, and its creator accomplished the feat not by accident but with a scientific method-esque rigour. But I’m also here to serve as a verbal antacid for the nausea that comes when I say that word. “Disco-like.” Yuck.

Every new video game genre comes with skepticism.

Plastic instruments proved to be a landfill-filling fad. Hero shooters, extraction shooters, and battle royale convinced gullible executives to redirect a generation of talented game designers onto projects that would take years to make and weeks to shut down. I’ve lived through booms and busts for MMOs, FPS UGC, and MOBAs.

But the thing about new genres is that eventually they become old genres. Consider the Souls-like, a genre that for a time belonged exclusively to a single developer, then infected every corner of games, and now is just another type of game to choose from.

A new genre is like an active volcano.

One moment, the status quo. Then, boom, the New spews onto the surface. First, spectacular! Then, destabilizing. Decades-old structures collapse. Its plume blocks out the sun and everything else. Its lava oozes across the earth, incinerating all it touches.

The volcano can’t be controlled, and those who try get burned. But over the years, the lava cools into rock. New structures are built. The air clears, and the volcano becomes just another cool mountain. Just another part of the landscape.

New genres, led by a standard bearer or two, redirect rivers of players from one trend to the next. And following that player base comes a mix of inspired game developers and cynical publishers, chasing the new and the profitable. More often than not, their money combusts into flames.

It takes time for genres to cool, for them to be understood, for them to become something not to be imitated but built upon. Today’s guest, Christoffer Bodegard, is the first game developer I’ve ever spoken with who has a graduate and master’s degree in player agency, who has had the gumption to spend years reverse engineering a single game, and for years after, constructing something new upon that foundation.

These days, people say rogue-like without having played Rogue – or even knowing Rogue exists. But it takes decades for genres to become so familiar, so diverse, so rock-solid that they blend into the background. At first, they’re awkward. “Disco-like.”

It’s growing on me.

This week on Post Games, I talk with the person who cracked the Disco-like subgenre, Christoffer Bodegard, about his brilliant new fantasy game Esoteric Ebb.