Some weeks feel like a decade. This one sure did! At least I made time for some games. Let's share some stories.
Although this weekend I anticipate that I’ll be trying out some Marathon with buddies, this week I took some time to try out Esoteric Ebb. It’s a game very clearly inspired by Disco Elysium, making it yet another successor to the influential socialist role playing game to throw on the pile.
What differentiates Esoteric Ebb from the other Disco successors is that it has no connection to the original developers of the game, and also takes more inspiration from the mechanics than the radical politics. That’s not to say that politics play no part in Esoteric Ebb—the main conceit of the game is that you have five days before the region's first election to finish a quest—just that they are not as immediately and overbearingly present in the game’s opening moments as they are in Disco.
Esoteric Ebb is a love letter to classic role playing games in general—Chris Person has likened it to Planescape: Torment, and yeah, the opening moments where you wake up on a slab seem like an obvious homage to that game. But it’s the way it folds in the narrative mechanic of Disco Elysium, where the various traits of your character argue with each other while your character makes decisions, that really excites me.
The strength of Disco’s narrative and politics sometimes takes precedence over the fact that the game was also so creative and interesting in its gameplay. I’ve been waiting for a game that made the smart move to adopt some of those flourishes, and I’m glad that Esoteric Ebb has taken those ideas and run with them.
Have any of you tried Esoteric Ebb? Is it a worthy successor to Disco Elysium? And what else have you all been playing this week?
