Esoteric Ebb was provided by Raw Fury for review. Thank you!
Esoteric Ebb is one of the most unique games I've had the chance to play in recent times. With mechanics drawn from traditional CRPGs, mixed with a narrative-heavy story, it piqued my curiosity and succeeded exactly where it needed to.
The story is largely political in nature, although it does not directly compare itself to real-world politics. An explosion has occurred at a shop in the city during election week, and it's your job as "The Cleric" to investigate the cause and culprit. Is it someone with political motivations? Perhaps a terrorist attack? What ensues is an investigation across the city to track down the instigator while navigating the tense political landscape, with "fanatics" on both sides.
Esoteric Ebb is heavily dialogue-based. In fact, pretty much any interaction you have with the NPCs and the environment itself will be through dialogue windows, including the occasional "fight" you'll find yourself in.
Fortunately, this is the game's strongest point. The game has a unique approach to dialogue: each of your Dungeons & Dragons (D&D)-inspired abilities (such as Strength, Charisma, Wisdom, etc.) has its own personality in your head and will chip in with its own thoughts as you encounter situations and characters. This leads to humorous back-and-forth conversations between, for example, Strength and Intelligence, who are often at odds. The game, much like D&D, is heavily based on having enough points in order to discern how to approach a situation, which in turn unlocks additional dialogue options.
It's a very unique way of approaching the D&D ability system, and I love how it's done here, adding the potential for witty dialogue between the abilities, and also very clearly showing how your abilities are affecting your choices in the game.
Although Esoteric Ebb is a bit shorter than your typical CRPG (but still lengthy), it has a good deal of replayability, as you could focus on different abilities the next time, making your internal monologue change and opening up a host of other paths to follow.
The solid writing also carries through to the rest of the characters that you'll meet on your journey. The game doesn't have too many interactive NPCs, but they are well-written, and I enjoyed getting to know them. Most NPCs also have background information, enriching the lore further.
There aren't many downsides here, but as the game is based on the D&D ruleset, a lot of decisions do come down to a dice roll, something I'm not particularly a fan of. It takes one string of bad luck and failing a so-called "easy" dice roll that results in your untimely demise.
All of this is not aided by the fact that you are merely a Cleric, not someone designed for combat, which makes the combat feel weighted against us. They are mostly based on the premise of "surviving". While that's understandable, it can be frustrating to succeed several skill checks in a row, only to still die due to taking excessively large amounts of damage, which again, is determined by a dice roll. Rolling a natural 1 and instantly being killed also isn't a great feeling. This happened 3 times in a row against the same monster, forcing me to reload my save over and over.
I think what Esoteric Ebb is missing the most is difficulty settings, something to temper the challenging combat. Even if you die, whether you truly die or not is determined, again, by dice rolls, and if your luck is good, you can take incredible amounts of damage and still live if you roll good death saving throws, which feels rather strange.
Esoteric Ebb was Verified on Steam Deck before its launch, and it's easy to see why. The game supports controllers and 1280x800 resolution, while including accessibility options that enhance gameplay on the go.
As for performance, the game has a simple toggle between Low and High quality Shadows. Selecting High does cause somewhat frequent dips below 60, so I went with the Low option. It doesn't look too different, and while we still get some dips below 60 in very specific areas, it largely remains at 60 FPS.
Power draw tends to be fairly low, around 12-15W, but can drop even lower at points. Temperatures were also fairly low, around 65C. You can expect about 3.5-4 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 2.5-3 hours from a Steam Deck LCD.
I had an issue with the game resetting the quality to "High" each time I played. Hopefully, this gets fixed for launch, but you may wish to switch to "Low" if performance starts to suffer.
Esoteric Ebb features text and UI size adjustment, allowing you to easily read the UI on the Steam Deck when the UI Size is set to "Huge" (it is by default), and the text can reach incredibly large sizes, meaning even those with vision difficulties shouldn't have trouble reading.
There is also the ability to choose from several fonts and a colorblind mode to add text next to abilities that are usually only marked by color.
Esoteric Ebb is a tough game to pin down, but the closest I could describe it as is a CRPG with Visual Novel elements. A lot of burden is placed on the writing, and fortunately, the writing is really good. Almost all action is handled through the dialogue system, and the traditional CRPG mechanics work really well for conversations. As long as you can cope with the somewhat irritating combat mechanics and RNG, Esoteric Ebb is a fun time.
The game is also fantastic to play on the Steam Deck. We can't quite manage a fully stable 60 FPS, but given the game's nature, that's completely fine. The controls, UI, and text all work and display perfectly well on the Steam Deck.
Our review is based on the PC version of this game.
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Esoteric Ebb is a solid narrative-based CRPG that has some great writing, but could really do with some difficulty options. It plays fantastically well on the Steam Deck.
