Esoteric Ebb is an isometric CRPG born from tabletop roleplaying sensibilities, set in a fantasy metropolis where mythological creatures sell newspapers at corner shops. You play as The Cleric, an expert in esoteric events who also happens to be a glorified government goon. Five days before the city's first-ever election, a tea shop explodes in the heart of Norvik. They send you to deal with the mess. You wake up in a morgue surrounded by rotting apples, several corpses, and one zombie.
From that opening alone, the tone declares itself. Developed by Christoffer Bodegård and published by Raw Fury, this is a game that describes its own setting as post-Arcanepunk and leans hard into the absurd. Norvik is a fantasy city where you'll debate devils, drunk sphinxes, and all manner of fantastical fools while trying to investigate an impossible mystery that no one wants you to solve. You have no official backup. You are out of your depth. The game seems perfectly comfortable with that.
Dialogue sits at the centre of everything. Esoteric Ebb features deep branching conversations with what the developers describe as a staggering amount of choices. Those choices ripple outward through shifting alliances and open-ended quests that span the streets, towers, and dark tunnels of Norvik. You can juggle factions and play them against each other, or simply bumble your way into absolute power. Threading through all of it is the looming election, a question the game keeps circling back to: what are you voting for?
The tabletop DNA runs deeper than flavour. Dice rolls govern tense encounters throughout the game, from wrestling dwarves to stealing anything in sight to simply keeping yourself from looking like a complete fool. True to TTRPG tradition, failure is treated not as a dead end but as something potentially more interesting than success. Rolling that natural 20 at the perfect moment matters, but so does the chaos that follows when you don't. Turn-based encounters handle the rare moments when violence becomes unavoidable, and when the need does arise a roll of the dice determines life or death.
Your own mind is a battleground. Each of The Cleric's ability stats carries a conflicting viewpoint, chiming in during important conversations to pull you in different directions. This internal tug of war feeds into The Questing Tree, a system that functions as quest log, skill tree, and mind map all at once. Each quest branch can take root in The Cleric's mind and alter your playstyle through game-changing feats, meaning the investigations you pursue reshape the kind of cleric you become.
Reality-shaping magic rounds out The Cleric's toolkit. You can control minds, detect secrets hidden in the tunnels below or buried in the thoughts of your enemies, and speak with anyone living or dead. The game frames these powers less as combat tools and more as narrative keys, opening unique choices depending on how you wield them. A goblin sidekick accompanies you through it all.
Esoteric Ebb is still in development. What's visible so far suggests a game that wants to capture the feeling of sitting at a tabletop with a dungeon master whose carefully planned campaign you are absolutely determined to derail.