Esoteric Ebb — new RPG inspired by Deus Ex and Disco Elysium

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Disk Cleanup

(Image credit: Future)

Christoffer Bodegård got into PC gaming via a DOS machine inherited from his father. "The Swedish state had a thing where basically everybody got a computer, especially state employees," says Bodegård. The first game he played on it was Disney's The Jungle book, which he recalls as being "pretty hard". But the most significant game from Bodegård's childhood was Dragon Age: Origins , which he played just before entering high school.

"I'd played roleplaying games before, but that was the game that made me go 'I love this genre,'" he says. "So doing the thing I always do, I did research on top 100 lists and just played everything … the last one I played was Planescape: Torment . That raised the bar for everything."

Bodegård's fascination with both D&D and CRPGs would ultimately lead him to create one of his own— Esoteric Ebb . Built over eight years and designed to replicate the unpredictability of tabletop RPGs, it sees you play as the world's worst cleric tasked with solving the mystery behind an exploding tea shop on the eve of a fantasy realm's first ever election.

Esoteric Ebb released in March to rave reviews and commercial success. Bodegård is currently exploring ideas for his next project, which he says will use "the technology that I made for Esoteric Ebb"—though it won't necessarily be a sequel. But he took a break from that to guide me through the many branching pathways of his Steam library.

What game are you currently playing?

(Image credit: Paradox Interactive) I'm currently playing the same game I've been playing since it launched, basically on and off, and that is Victoria 3 . I play all Paradox games and am a superfan, arguably, but I only have like 400 hours or so in Victoria, so I'm barely getting [started]. I suck at the game, basically, is what I'm saying. But I love it, it's really fun to simulate the economic aspects of that period, alongside all the political stuff.

I tried getting into Victoria 2 , because my friend Max is really into it, and he tried to convince me. Played some multiplayer with him, I could never get into it. This was a year before Victoria 3, so I always said "OK, I'm gonna push that aside, I'm gonna get it when it comes out."

Now, of course, Victoria 3, it's such a debatable topic, because the mechanics—I'm trying to be a good representative of supporting Swedish game development, but Paradox, they're doing fine either way—I think it's a masterpiece in the making . It's so close to being absolutely amazing. You can just see all the things that [need improving]. Obviously, the developers are also aware of [those], they need a couple of years to work on it … I like the fact that they've supported it to actually finish making their masterpiece.

What was the previous game you played, and is it still installed?

(Image credit: Deep Field Games) The actual previous game I played was Abiotic Factor . It's really good. It's Half-Life with the boys. I finally have time to play games with the boys again. We have a D&D game going but, playing these general games, I usually take all the time where we usually hang out and play games and just sit and work on Ebb while they're playing. So I'll watch their stream or whatever. They play a lot of Final Fantasy 14 . I purposely made the choice not to play it with them to instead work on Ebb years ago.

But it was half [price] off for Abiotic Factor, and I think one of them said "Hey, do you want to play?" and I was like "Yes, I want to play." It was really fun. It was like "Yeah, we're all into Half-Life." I'm not a base builder, but I can go around and shoot stuff, and it's just fun.

What is the oldest game (by release date) currently installed on your PC?

(Image credit: The 3DO Company) I had to look up the specific release months and dates for these games, because I had four games that were 1999-2000. And these are some of my classic favourites. The four of them were Heroes [of Might and Magic] 3 , King of Dragon Pass, Deus Ex , and Diablo 2 . Which one comes first? It was Heroes 3 in February.

Which is good! Because I have a top list of games on my personal website, and at the top is obviously Heroes 3. That was basically the game that was truly influential for me. I was introduced to it by my cousin and I played it forever. I still play it. I have the modded version called Horn of the Abyss .

I like the fact that it's inspired a bunch of stuff, and I get why it's popular now. It's because of the core game loop of randomised maps, the AI being fun to fight against, building up numbers, going and killing a thing, having very strong different strategies especially for multiplayer, for hardcore players, mixing that with an extremely solid fantasy base.

Amazing music. Amazing aesthetics. Just it being a good experience to press the 'End Turn' button and have that little jingle play. It's dopamine. It's just really well designed. When we were doing the jingles for, like, the short rest [in Esoteric Ebb], the composer was like "OK, you know Heroes 3?" And we were like "Yeah! Of course, why wouldn't we?"

What is the highest number of hours you have in any given game, according to Steam?

(Image credit: Paradox Interactive) So technically it's Esoteric Ebb, because I didn't turn off the thing of Unity being counted into the hours on Steam until way too late, so I have like 1,000 hours of Ebb. But that's cheating because that's work. The real game is Europa Universalis IV . That is the game I play the most.

I was absolutely addicted to that for a very long time and then I finished the game, and I'm done in a spiritual sense. One of the caveats is that I am also terrible at the game still, so that's fun. Absolute ass. Complete bullshit. But here's the thing, I picked it up again—which also boosted the numbers—when I got into the greatest mod of all time.

Anbennar is essentially classic D&D fantasy, but in a way that fits the [EU IV] worldbuilding. It's extremely deep, extremely elaborate, extremely fun, extremely creative, and it fits a grand strategy gameplay loop perfectly … they have things that mirror the real Europe Universalis IV timeline, right? A clash between the main religions, the league wars, they have the black powder rebellion for the French Revolution.

They have all of these different things and all of it is very interesting, because they take, not just from a world building perspective and aesthetics, but the fact that they take mechanics from this—and also Victoria 3—and they revert them and twist them into something entirely new. So when you play, for example, the dwarves, you're in the mountains, most of it is uncolonized, it's just a bunch of caves, and you're playing essentially as an adventuring band using the mechanics of tribes from North America.

You move across the map as a state that is an adventure band, you grow, you go on adventures, you delve for treasures, you fight against other tribes, and then you eventually settle and expand, and it's an entirely new way of playing the game with the same mechanics, and it's absolutely incredible.

What game will you never, ever uninstall?

(Image credit: Ion Storm) That's Deus Ex. Ever since I played it for the first time, also in high school, I just don't uninstall it, because sometimes I hop back into it, and I've had some projects that are first-person. I want to do a first-person game at some point, that would be really fun, specifically like Ultima Underworld . I sometimes joke in interviews that if somebody gave me unlimited resources, that I would try to make an Elder Scrolls killer, but I want to do it in my style.

But Deus Ex is one of the core inspirations for a lot of the design decisions in Esoteric Ebb. It's such a classic. I try to do something different every time. It's such a good RPG because of that. You can take inspiration for how to create choice opportunities for players, where they specifically don't always have to make choices in text. With dialogue choices. There's much of that, but I enjoy way more when your choices are more "Do you go left or right? Do you hop up or do you go down, do you crash through the window or do you pick the lock?"

What's a piece of non-gaming software installed on your PC that you simply couldn't live without?

(Image credit: Notepad++) The one that's more unique and weird is Notepad++ . I love it. I modded the hell out of my version so it looks really weird. I built it so that it works perfectly with Ink files, because I write scripts in Ink.

It has everything in it in order to code, and you can also plug in everything. You can edit it as much as you want, getting the highlights for different code stuff, and it just works with everything. And the reason why I love it is because it's like Notepad, meaning that it's very lightweight.

That's the main reason why I don't use all these really cool tools for interactive writing that exist … [they're] slightly not fast enough for me. When people ask how this game has so many choices while some games don't have as many choices, part of that is just stuff like voice acting … [But] it's also a thing of exhaustion on the side of the writer.

If the writer feels like it's slightly annoying to add another choice option, and it takes a little bit longer to click and add that bubble and structure it, they are going to be infinitely more likely to not add more choices. When you're writing and it's super-fast and really quick to add 15 different choices, even just as a joke, then you're much more likely to.

How tidy is your desktop screen?

I had a period where I would drag and drop images to my desktop from the internet to just save them. I stopped doing that when I started actively using the command Windows+Shift+S to take screenshots and just copy those into Discord instead.

So my desktop is cleaner now, but I had a period where my desktop would be covered in images from stuff I'd saved, to the point where at the end of the year it would be completely filled. I have an old laptop, I think, that's like, you can't see the desktop. That's insane behaviour as a person.

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