Esoteric Ebb is the D&Disco Elysium I never knew I needed, but more importantly it's proof I'll never be cut out for political canvassing

Which way are you voting in the election?

There’s an election coming, could I trouble you to ask which way you’re voting?

ELECTION. YOU. VOTING? WHICH WAY?

The time to place the great slip of paper into the holy box of ballots is almost nigh, my honoured friend, wherefore will thou be placing thine vote and whom will it be in favour of?

There are a lot of ways you can ask someone which way they plan to vote. All of them are awkward. The awkwardness isn’t helped by the fact that, in these situations, you might be standing on a doorstep having just interrupted their dinner or be butting into a chat they were having in the street with someone they actually like. Esoteric Ebb revels in that awkwardness.

It has a whole quest based solely around its protagonist, The Cleric, asking every human, goblin, sphinx, crab, or floating angel they meet which way they’re leaning in the city’s upcoming election. Ask enough people, and you’re rewarded with special democracy powers. You can understand why The Cleric would be making such a fuss about this particular election. It’s the first one the city-state of Norvik has ever had, enacted as a last wish following the death of a dictatorial founder and god named Urth.

Naturally, several groups with different ideologies seek to firmly plant their flag in the fantasy locale, which is home to perfectly normal real-world bicycles for some reason. There are the ruling Nationalists, the looming spectre of free market capitalism in the form of the Freestriders, and socialist egalitarians dubbed the Azgalist Workers’ Party. The Cleric can also vote for themselves to rule as some kind of mighty mage-overlord if you go down the path of pumping their brain so full of arcane knowledge that a spell of greater ego enlargement is unavoidably cast.

Asking Novik’s residents which way they’re voting tends to throw up one of these stances in response, unless the person is either undecided or apolitical. The Cleric can also opt to fence-sit and declare themselves nonpartisan, with the voice of your charisma skill openly recommending it if you spec into a smooth talking build. Because, as any centrist dad will tell you, for everyone to like you, you’ve got to take on a manufactured persona which projects having no principles or thoughts of your own, aside from a nebulous commitment to being ‘sensible’. Regardless of which way you want to lean, you’ll need to pick something to say, because asking other people which way they’re voting inevitably leads to The Cleric having to cobble together their own thoughts on the issues of the day.

Esoteric Ebb being a lovely mishmash of Disco Elysium with Dungeons and Dragons, this means absorbing the oodles of lore and history Norvik and its surroundings are imbued with. Yeah, you’ve got to learn things. To come up with an informed opinion. You’ve got to consider the goblin genocide Urth led the humans in as they colonised the land upon which the city stands, because that colours what a lot of its current goblin and human residents think of each other. You’ve got to understand the serious boon or serious threat that the Askanii-Reeds Trading Company’s Freestrider-aligned tentacles spreading throughout the city could represent. You’ve got to navigate the fact your job basically makes you an armed civil servant/cop/enforcer of the status quo by default, something that bequeaths great power and equally great responsibility.

You’ve also got to try and solve the mystery of a tea shop which mysteriously went boom a week before the election, something that’s much easier if you’ve got the slightest clue how Norvikian society actually works.

As with Disco, I did my best throughout my Esoteric Ebbage to take in the impressively detailed picture developer Christoffer Bodegård has painted. I even tried to get my head around the minutiae of the realm’s esoteric bullshit, that being the magical goings-on which all tend in some way to point back to a big wizardy pillar plopped right in the centre of Norvik.

Talking to other people about politics is bloody tiring, though. In contrast to Disco, whose protagonist Harry Du Bois’ dalliances with the p-word are mainly about him deciding whether he wants to style himself as fascist, communist or something else, with the occasional committing of acts which help reinforce that self-perception, Esoteric Ebb’s pushing its Cleric to get out there and consider trying to make a tangible difference. Argue against people, it urges, put their beliefs to the test. Make sure you go and cast your own vote, even if your ballot paper just says the word ME in capital letters because you’re a dickhead who can’t stop huffing their own farts.

There was a time in my life, around the time Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the UK’s Labour party, when I’d have been down for all of that effort. Sign me up for debate club. Hand me enough flyers to clog letterboxes from here to Land’s End. Fill my brain with knowledge of what the smeg a quango is. Perhaps some day another political leader dripping with genuine empathy and concrete ideas that sound like they could make the world a more tolerant and equal place to live will stir up those feelings in me once more.

For now, asking every Tom, Dick and Harry in Estoteric Ebb their views has left my mind swimming in talking points and buffeted by waves of potential consequences. Caught between scheming magistrates, bossy goblin rulers, unnervingly smooth corporate agents, and frustrated dwarven protestors, plus the occasional unhelpful magical phone call with my boss, I doggy paddle against the current affairs. It’s lucky Esoteric Ebb’s funny enough to have had me wheezing at quirky lines for 90% of its runtime, each gag like a handy pool noodle lobbed my way to help me stay afloat.

Ironically, few times the game grants you momentary reprieve from the onslaught of words to comprehend is when you’re desperately fighting to survive a monster run-in or getting caught up in esoteric shenanigans. The physical takes over as you scrabble for a favourable dice roll, before turn-based jolts of pain can plink The Cleric’s health bar down to nothing.

When I should have been settling into bed at the end of my first day trying to solve the exploded tea shop mystery, I stumbled across an orb of magic threatening to develop into some sort of magical situation. It’s a cleric’s job to keep an eye on these things, so I sat for a few hours and waited for the energy to do its thing. Before I knew it, I’d been sucked into a circle of Scandinavian nature spirits called Vättar and was being forced against my will to dance like a maniac. The bustin’ of moves threatened to bust my joints. I ended up stuck there strutting my stuff in pure agony until the sun came up.

It was an enrapturing encounter, not awkward in the slightest. I can’t express how glad I am that supernatural forces conspired to prevent me from asking the jiving creatures which box on the form they’d be crossing in a matter of days’ time. I much prefer being left to believe their night boogieing might have had a throbbing Azgalist undercurrent to it.