Dice checks, branching conversations and a political-conspiracy investigation give Esoteric Ebb a distinct appeal for players who enjoy shaping outcomes. At its tracked low, it costs $12.72 at Eneba, a timely entry point if you want a single-player CRPG and are comfortable with English subtitles. Full controller support is listed for Steam on PC. The experience centers on dialogue and dice rather than cooperative play, so its fit depends on whether that solo adventure is what you want.At $18.74 from Eneba, the price matches this site's tracked low, making it a fitting pick if English subtitles and a solo CRPG suit you.
GamesPlanet UK·Platform:Steam·~ $27.83-10%~ $25.04Buy now
GamesPlanet DE·Platform:Steam·~ $27.99-10%~ $25.19Buy now
GamesPlanet FR·Platform:Steam·~ $27.99-10%~ $25.19Buy now
All-time low ~ $15.74across Steam & third-party storesat the recorded all-time low
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Price History
Past 36 months · Updated daily
Historical Low~ $15.562026-07Current Low Across Stores~ $12.72EnebaAt its historical low now
Prices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.
01About Esoteric Ebb
Investigate a political conspiracy as a cleric in an offbeat fantasy city, where branching dialogue, dice rolls and conflicting inner voices shape your choices.Steam players rate Esoteric Ebb 95%% positive across 9,089 reviews.The listed interface language is English.
$15.562026-07-30 · KKinguinBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.
Language support
Language
Interface
Subtitles
Audio
English
Yes
Yes
—
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-20
02Before you buy
Play mode and controls
Esoteric Ebb is a single-player CRPG with full controller support on Steam for PC.
Language
English is listed with subtitles; full audio is not specified.
03Frequently asked questions
What is Esoteric Ebb about?
You play a cleric investigating a conspiracy in a fantasy city, with dice-based encounters and branching dialogue.
Does it have co-op?
No. The listed game data identifies it as single-player.
How does magic work?
The cleric's powers offer distinctive narrative choices, including controlling minds and detecting secrets.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviews
Selected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
RecommendedSteam player
It's not disco, it's disc.
While I definitely saw the influences of Disco Elysium and Planescape Torment, I kept feeling another even stronger influence that it took me a while to figure out. I think I finally did.
At it's core, this game isn't Disco. It's Disc. As in Discworld.
Esoteric Ebb approaches D&D like Terry Pratchett approaches fantasy literature - with pointy sticks, a lot of suspicions and sarcasm, and sometimes, a literal lawyer.
Esoteric Ebb's city, Norvik, for example, isn't giving DE's bleak class warfare - It's giving "Guards Guards", "The Color of Magic" and even "Soul Music". It's giving food-for-thought absurd. It's giving Ankh Morpork.
It puts the absurdity of the D&D system on the main stage, and surrounds it with characters that are all too aware of the flaws and conflicts of the world they live in, yet each of them finds a way to just get on with it. Because that's their world. And that just leaves us, the player, feel like we're slightly the mad ones, the only ones, that are looking at this crazy world and asking - WHY IS IT LIKE THIS. And trying to find a way to make sense of it.
And it's so gratifying to experience that as an RPG player, and Esoteric Ebb makes it work.Show moreShow less
10.1 hours at review878 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game's description directly states that it's inspired by Disco Elysium, so I will not hold back on comparing them. Unfortunately, it's exactly this perspective that makes its inferiority blatantly clear. Very light spoilers for both games ahead, but I'll try to be as vague as possible to not give away anything directly.
I will use my personal example of the type of character I enjoy playing in these kinds of games to put in perspective how each game facilitates this. It's the role of a competent man committed to helping people and doing his job the best way he can, working within the boundaries of a deeply flawed system to do as much good as possible. Roleplaying an extremist revolutionary is not my thing.
The role of an investigator doing his best
In Disco Elysium:
- You take the role of a complete disaster of a man who is also an exceptional police detective. Trying to stay away from alcohol while being a competent detective takes consistent effort. But, if you keep at it, the game rewards you narratively.
- You can reconstruct crime scenes mentally and reach conclusions likely nobody else could. This competence is presented in a visually striking and intelligent way.
- Your partner will start to respect you as you keep showing your competence through good police work and trustworthiness. If you make him really trust you, he would take a bullet for you. Him being there for you and supporting you feels earned and is one of the best parts of the game.
- While the RCM (the police force you work for) is deeply flawed, and those faults are highlighted and challenged throughout the game, you are never made to feel personally guilty for sticking with them. You are allowed to have fun if you want to support the crumbling status quo. No choice is perfect, and this is one path where you can try your best to do some good.
- The investigation takes center stage in the story. Politics are a huge part of the game, and sure, the investigation's real narrative purpose is to serve as a vessel for political discourse, but you still are, first and foremost, a murder investigator. This way, the political commentary feels natural.
In Esoteric Ebb:
- You are a faceless cleric with a singular special talent, but otherwise, arguably no interesting characteristics or motivations.
- No matter how good and competent you try to be, you will fumble through everything, even if you succeed. It rarely, if ever, feels like you are actually good at what you do.
- Your partner is someone from a vastly different background who at one point tries to make you personally feel guilty for atrocities your ancestors committed against his people before you were even born. This character is supposed to be your closest companion, but after this point, at least to me, he couldn't do anything to be likable. I still tried to give him a chance, but there's just not enough to him.
- If you simply want to focus on doing a good job as a city cleric, you will be made to feel guilty about it, because your employers are written to be one-dimensional fascists. You are constantly reminded that you work for evil people. It will not feel satisfying if you simply want to focus on being good at your job.
- The incident you are here to investigate is not the central point of the story at all. It doesn't even really matter. The main focus is the upcoming election and that you should argue about politics with literally everyone you meet. You barely investigate anything. This makes the political commentary feel especially forced.
Political nuance
In Disco Elysium:
- Your morality is NOT inherently tied to a political affiliation. If you want to be a good person, you have several political ideologies you can choose. Your willingness to do good can still shine through.
- The voices in your head represent varied and fun mental aspects, and are not inherently tied to political affiliations. They explore deeply meaningful ideas.
- Your choice in your affiliation is both supported and challenged throughout the game, no matter which path you take. It's done in a way that makes you think, and not in a way that preaches to you or berates you.
- The political ideologies present are the counterparts of the usual real-world ones, but they are interesting and nuanced. All of them have both their merits and faults highlighted and explored.
- The game lets you commit to your path and doesn't actively berate you for it. Except if you try to be a centrist, but it's done in jest, and it works because it's an entertaining way to present that path.
- In my case, while it was clear that I was sticking with a crumbling, corrupt, and ineffective system, the game did not discourage me from doing it and guided me through a very meaningful and satisfying journey.
- It is well documented that the development team had a clear political stance. Everyone has a bias, and their political perspective drives the story. But, even despite that, they gave the same amount of respect and attention to political paths that are clearly different from their own. Also, they are refreshingly critical of their own political ideology.
In Esoteric Ebb:
- Your morality IS inherently tied to a political affiliation.
- The voices in your head are your attributes. They are bland, annoying, and fully tied to political affiliations. It's like having mentally stunted political activists constantly bickering inside your head.
- If you want to be a good person, you are railroaded into being a communist, because that is the only morally good choice presented. The game constantly preaches to you and berates you if you do not take this path.
- Compassion equals communism. Wisdom equals communism. Not being racist equals communism. Not being an actual sociopath equals communism.
- If you are a nationalist, which is also the ideology of the faction employing you, you are actually a fascist. There is an actual lore entry that basically states nationalism is fascism. It's blatantly malicious and/or ignorant for a writer not to differentiate between nationalism and fascism, but let's just move on for the sake of brevity.
- There are also the democratic revolutionaries. This faction is a shallow representation of evil, greedy capitalists. Sure, I get that sentiment, but it's presented at such a surface level that they are not even worth considering as an option if you have a conscience.
- And that's it. These are the 3 major political parties. There are some others mentioned, but they don't play a meaningful role, because the election's importance is emphasized way too much. No room to consider the minor players. You can clearly see that you are railroaded into being a communist if you want to be a decent person trying to make a difference.
- You can also be a megalomaniacal wizard who wants to be a godlike dictator and will vote for himself. However, the game never attempted to make this anything other than a joke, at least at the point I got to.
- You can also be apolitical, but you cannot do good at the same time. You can only be passive. If you want to do good and care for other people, you are expected to accept that you are a communist.
- The clear political bias is jarring. The morally good choices are communist choices, without exception. The nationalists are repeatedly called fascists, and while the blatantly evil way they are presented makes them deserve it, this just shows how they refused to give the faction any nuance. Interestingly, however, the communists are never actually called communists. Funny how that works.
Conclusion
I regret deluding myself into thinking that in this day and age any Disco-like game could have a nuanced approach to politics. I hope this review is helpful to anyone who doesn't want to be forced to roleplay as a communist revolutionary if they want to make morally good choices.Show moreShow less
14.3 hours at review159 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Beautiful game. Great art, great soundtrack, great writing. Despite having learned from the genre’s greatest, it’s not derivative but stands on its own legs.
For years, the answer to "I finished Disco Elysium, what do I play now?" was to look them straight in the eye and slowly shake your head. Now I can tell them to play Esoteric Ebb.Show moreShow less
0.2 hours at review795 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
TL;DR: If you liked Disco Elysium just for the writing and weren't a CRPG fan going in, this game is probably not what you were hoping for. The strong reception likely reflects the enthusiasm of CRPG fans as opposed to the crossover literary appeal only Disco had.
I loved DE despite zero experience with or interest in CRPGs generally. It's the one and only video game that I thought was well-written at the level of literary fiction, so I was eager to try Esoteric Ebb as the first "disco-like" to receive a lot of praise. I wasn't expecting it to match DE's specific postmodern melancholy; just looking for writing that felt real, not like genre fiction or a typical video game.
After almost two hours, none of the writing in Esoteric Ebb grabbed me the way DE's writing did in the same timeframe. My main problems are lore-dumping and a lack of nuanced characterization. There is so much context-free detail about the world piled into Ebb's early dialogue that it becomes noise. DE hooked me from the jump because the writing was in service of character and situation first, like the opening and the first conversation with Cuno. Those moments felt literary because they did something specific and emotionally real, and the worldbuilding/politics came through slowly as subtext. I was properly prepared for and eager to get the lore-dump I requested from Joyce by the time I got there. Ebb instead front-loads exposition, puts politics at the foreground instead of characters, and leans on a Discworld-style quirky spin on fantasy tropes to try to make it interesting. The quirk felt like a poor substitute for the acerbic wit that made DE's writing actually good. Ebb felt like Reddit humor in contrast ("does anyone else think lawyers and bankers are devils?").
The political system also lacked nuance in my playtime. Each skill maps transparently to a political alignment: Wisdom is socialism (can you get any more on the nose?), Intelligence is self-aggrandizing authoritarianism, Charisma is apolitical manipulation, Strength is theocratic nationalism, etc. Unlike the ideological valences of DE's skills that this is mimicking, though, these are presented as explicit allegiances; they don't at all feel like natural intrinsic sympathies of the skills. Ebb literally presented the skills as political alignment choices during character creation before I had any opportunity to learn or care about the world's politics. It turned what should be a process of discovery into a personality quiz with only one correct answer: socialism. DE's viewpoint was explicitly left-wing too, which is totally fine, but it presented a variety of viewpoint choices as valid and was fair-mindedly willing to poke fun at its own as well. Maybe there's more political nuance later, but I should have gotten it within the first two hours for a game that devotes a lot more text to it upfront than DE did.
Overall, I'm just not in the target audience for this game. I had no experience with or interest in D&D going in, either. I don't think I'll ever see a game like Disco Elysium again.Show moreShow less
1.5 hours at review123 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Many games have tried to be a successor to Planescape Torment.
Many games have tried to be a successor to Disco Elysium.
This game is a successor to Planescape Torment and Disco Elysium.Show moreShow less
14.4 hours at review741 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
Something felt missing. Clearly so much work has been put in to get this amount of writing, the sheer breadth of lore, trait reactions, etc, and kudos for that. For me, though, by about day 3, it was just a tiringly massive wall after wall of text. It's hard to pinpoint exactly what made it just so frequently uninteresting. It could be that DnD is just so full of tropes that have been done so many times. Or that the premade boxes of political positions and class+ability choices became so predictable so quickly. Or that the XP correlation to sticking with just one of those boxes soft locks you into one track for a whole playthrough. Partly that by end game, getting even "super strong" magical items felt trivial & barely helpful. Or that a majority of the spells are useful about 1 time the whole game. Or that the background music is just ok. Or that the different areas weren't that distinct and didn't have any kind of distinguishing personality to them. Or that the setup of the whole map was confusing and required endless boring backtracking. Or that combat felt random, requiring reloading saves constantly due to wrong choices that had no indication of being wrong before. That there's so many consumables they're not exciting to ever find. The companions, well really just the one (since the second you only get for a small portion of the game) felt bland and disconnected. But overall, I think the real answer is the Cleric. His literal facelessness is a good image for him as a character, namely, that he lacks any distinguishable one. What made the two games that inspired this one so good, namely Disco Elysium and Planescape Torment, was that your character had an immediate mystery about themselves through their amnesia. You uncovers bits and pieces of yourself throughout each of those games even while having the freedom to make the character your own. Sure you get bits of backstory about the cleric's family, and occasionally he has some funny helplessness/incompetence, but overall I'm not going to remember the cleric. He, and the game, were just fine.Show moreShow less
45.7 hours at review100 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Made me desperately yearn for the one thing I never got to fully experience and will never get to experience in the future.
Democratic elections.Show moreShow less
38.1 hours at review521 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game stands on its own but since 60% of the other reviews are mentioning Disco Elysium I will too.
DE was able to write an intensely political game that strongly endorsed one side of the spectrum while still maintaining a cool detective story. The traits and skills that chimed in were their own characters before they were used in political dialogue, and overall, the writing and voice acting was excellent.
EE railroads you extremely hard. Most of the traits are centered around politics. I understand the game is trying to align with Dungeons and Dragons, but you immediately feel the lack of meaningful variety when this game has 6 skills compared to DE's 24, not to mention that 4 of the 6 are just strawman versions of the political groups that are already the focus of this game. Every time they say something, its about politics, and 90% of the time you know exactly what they are going to say. The plot tries to be about detective work, but just the simple step of trying to get into the crime scene without hyper focusing took 3 hours, most of which was politics. Your "Kim" adjacent companion in this game chides you about politics. Not only does the game center on politics, it also does not really entertain any other political stance as being feasible besides one, and although it sometimes tries to veil this approach to world building with quirk chungus comedy writing, you immediately get the feeling that the writers were not really trying to be funny.
There is nothing wrong with strong or biased politics in games, but the writing and nuance is just not good enough to keep me invested. It's a shame because a lot of aspects of EE, such as the art, are so well done.Show moreShow less
2.9 hours at review86 people found this helpful
RecommendedSteam player
Disco Elysium left a hole in my heart, but Esoteric Ebb filled a different hole that I forgot was even there.Show moreShow less
16.9 hours at review381 people found this helpful
Not recommendedSteam player
This game feels good on the surface, but it's so painfully obvious that the whole thing is just a lecture that it becomes unbearable to play. Every single "bad" choice you make comes with a lecture on why it's bad and you shouldn't do it. The point where I stopped playing was when you get a choice to take someone's travel documents away so that they can't leave the city (this is while you're doing an investigation for a building that exploded btw) and I got a lecture about freedom of movement and finally got called a moron by the game because I didn't agree with it? Honestly wish I could refund it, there is just zero nuance in a game that is literally all about story and choices. It's genuinely frustrating to see something that could have been great turn out to be a theatre kid's virtue signaling wet dream.Show moreShow less
11 hours at review80 people found this helpful
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.
