About eight years ago, indie developer Christoffer Bodegård began roughing out what would eventually become Esoteric Ebb, an ambitious single-player CRPG inspired by the likes of D&D, Disco Elysium, and Planescape: Torment. The project, Bodegård writes in a "pre-mortem" post ahead of the game's launch on March 3, nearly drove him to bankruptcy before he was saved by its now-publisher, Raw Fury. And boy, does this RPG sound good.
Esoteric Ebb, which has a Steam demo you can try for yourself, is an "isometric, Disco-like, TTRPG-turned-CRPG set in a bizarre post-Arcanepunk fantasy setting" and stars perhaps the worst cleric known to man. Promising "staggering" depth in choice and consequence, the game invites you to "become the most interesting player at the table and completely ruin your DM's day." It looks like a ball of RPG yarn that will be very fun to untangle, and it's come a long way in nearly a decade of development.
With "basically no studios working on narrative RPGs" in Sweden, Bodegård says, he pretty much had to make one himself. So, "I tried making Planescape: Torment + Disco Elysium by myself."
"Not the greatest idea," he reflects.
"I spent four years on it, to start off, without ever getting anywhere of note," he explains. He scrapped the whole thing in 2019 after struggling to marry combat and branching narrative, but then inspiration struck like a meteor with the release of Disco Elysium.
"The next month and a half I spent playing the game and researching," Bodegård says. "Just diving in, trying to learn how and why they managed to create this genius design. Immediately I started to understand that the one thing that really made the game so good wasn't just the writing, even if that's what you'd naturally focus on. The non-linear design itself was the thing that (in my subjective opinion of course) really made the game pop."
More prototypes of Esoteric Ebb followed, but "prototype 2 and 3 were complete shit" as well, Bodegård says. But in 2020 and 2021, "something changed" and the RPG began to come together.
"I might have gone insane from sitting inside for weeks at a time. Or maybe it was the lack of sunlight during those long Swedish winter months. But I felt like I'd found some type of clarity," the dev remembers.
With a boost from a PC Gamer article praising the demo, Esoteric Ebb began to find traction, and was ultimately able to find a publisher in Raw Fury. This couldn't have come at a better time for Bodegård. "I had been burning money since 2022," he says. "Just before the first advance payout arrived, I did not have enough money on my account to pay rent – something that is embarrassing to admit but also, it didn't matter! Ebb was happening, for real! And I finally had money to hire all the freelancing artists I needed, as well as throw cash on my sound designer and my composers."
In the past four years, Bodegård says he's written roughly 1.25 million words for Esoteric Ebb, growing the RPG from the 300,000-word pitch to a stonking 700,000-word script today. Raw Fury "got a bit more than they expected," he jokes.
The tale is a cautionary one, Bodegård stresses: "I’m mainly writing this to share the journey that led to Esoteric Ebb, no matter how well it actually turns out. While also making it clear that I took a ridiculously stupid path. I kept full control of the project throughout it all, refusing to bring on other writers and designers. I burnt all my resources in a reckless way that I would strongly dissuade ANYONE for ever replicating. And I did it all for a game that was entirely sold on 'aesthetic', i.e. if the story sucks – which is very subjective – it won't sell."
There are a few auspicious stars in the sky for Esoteric Ebb's sales: it's among the top-rated RPG demos in this week's Steam Next Fest, and while it's not dominating the wishlist charts, Bodegård says it's gotten quite a following. It's certainly on my radar, and not just because it's clearly a labor of love.
