#oneaday Day 636: Esoteric Ebb and Flow

Well, my original plan was to play at least one of the bonus episodes of Resident Evil Revelations this evening, but then I was distracted by some screenshots of a game that apparently came out recently, and which I hadn't previously heard of: Esoteric Ebb by Christoffer Bodegård, published by the "indie publisher to watch" of the moment, Raw Fury.

Here's one of the screenshots that convinced me to buy and play this game:

If you're looking at that and thinking something along the lines of "cor blimey guvnor, that sure does look like Disco Elysium and no mistake", you'd be absolutely right. The game isn't trying to hide its inspiration. But the other thing you may well notice from this screenshot is that this is Disco Elysium, But Fantasy.

In Esoteric Ebb, you play the role of The Cleric, an ostensible agent of the government who has been sent in to investigate an explosion in a local teahouse. As befits a CRPG hero, whether or not you actually get stuck right in to this "main quest" is entirely up to you, because the small but well-crafted world of Esoteric Ebb certainly has lots of distractions. You do have a time limit, though; the setting is having its first ever democratic election in five days' time, and the current sitting government would really rather all this unpleasantness was quietly dealt with before that happens.

If you've never played Disco Elysium (or, indeed, games like it, since they appear to be Becoming a Thing right now) the simple pitch is this: they're a cross between classic "Infinity Engine" RPGs like Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment and the like, with almost all of the combat removed, and a strong emphasis on the game responding to you a bit more like a human dungeon master during a tabletop gaming session would. That means all of your stats get a workout, with most sequences in the game involving either passive skill checks (which you will just automatically pass or fail based on your current stats) or active skill checks (where you roll a die and your stats can potentially boost or penalise the score).

Crucially, failure is not necessarily a bad thing, because it can lead to amusing situations or alternative solutions — much as real tabletop sessions are often at their best when things get a little improvisatory.

Skill checks are only half the story, though. The other defining feature of a game following the Disco Elysium mould is that your stats "talk" to you, reflecting your character's often conflicted inner monologues about the situations in which they find themselves. Exactly how helpful you will find these "Chimes", as Esoteric Ebb calls them, depends on those aforementioned passive skill checks; failure often means you misinterpret a situation, fail to notice something or do something clumsy, depending on the context, while success can mean anything positive: performing a complicated physical task correctly, finding just the right words to say in an awkward situation, feeling empathy for the person you're talking to.

Esoteric Ebb adds a few additional features atop this, too. One of the most notable is that you can examine any of the interactable characters, and a skill check of variable difficulty (with the exact stat being tested depending on the character you're examining) will determine how much information you can tell about them just from looking at them. Failing to pass the check at all means you just about notice their basic appearance; passing higher difficulty level checks will let you know their level, class, stats and even pieces of information they would rather remain hidden — you might recognise someone who is trying to conceal their identity, for example. These pieces of information can often be used in conversation.

Other interesting features are the interconnected web of quests in place of the usual quest journal; this indicates how various happenings around the city relate to one another, and upon successfully finishing one of the major quests, you then get to reflect on the situation and allow your stats to "debate" one another, with the eventual result being a nice chunk of experience and a new feat based on the eventual conclusion you came to. In this way, there's a real sense you're building your character just by playing the game; you do "level up" in a conventional RPG style, and you can increase one of your stats when you do so, but it's not just about gaining experience — and, indeed, given that it's a game where it's impossible to grind, you're best off just exploring the world and seeing what happens.

This can, of course, sometimes have fatal consequences in unusual ways. Thus far I have died from attempting to retrieve a shiny object that was stuck in a set of gears, which caused me to get crushed and then fall to my death just to make sure, and from being eaten by a "Roper" enemy hiding in the rocks. I also narrowly escaped death in the very first scene of the game, where I felt an uncontrollable urge to try and eat a path through a room-filling pile of apples, but thankfully my sense of self-preservation kicked in early enough to allow me to survive.

It's a really fun game, so long as you're on board with a slow pace. There are combat encounters in the game, but rather than being a matter of lining up and attacking or quasi-strategic combat, these instead unfold much like all the other encounters in the game: through skill checks, dialogue and choosing actions to take that are always more interesting than just pressing "attack".

I played for a good few hours this evening, and I'm looking forward to exploring it further. The full thing is apparently about 10-15 hours or so, so it's not a game that outstays its welcome. This, to me, is a selling point. It also means it's potentially replayable, and in a choice-heavy game like this, that's always a good thing.

So yeah. A confident thumbs-up from me on this one from my few hours with it this evening, then. Grab it on Steam (don't think there's any news of console or alternative PC storefront releases as yet) — it's 10% off until the 14th.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 63: Late-Night Disco

Finished Disco Elysium this evening. I think I will save more in-depth thoughts for a proper write-up on MoeGamer, but I came away very satisfied with the whole thing, and impressed that the game as a whole managed to successfully carry a highly replayable 30+ hour RPG without a single combat sequence. If you've been hanging fire on giving this one a go, don't; it's absolutely great, particularly if you enjoyed Planescape: Torment's approach to the CRPG: dialogue-heavy, emphasis on the story and on having the flexibility to really "play" your character in a number of different ways, despite following a canonical storyline that focuses on them.

Anyway, that has… been the majority of my day, to be perfectly honest. It's the last full day of my week off work, so I thought I'd take a day to just do "nothing" in particular, just enjoy something. So I did. And I'm glad I did; it's always satisfying to reach the conclusion of an enjoyable game, and especially if you can do so while not under any real sort of time pressure to do anything else.

Tomorrow I might go into town for a bit to have some lunch with Andie and a couple of her friends, then I think I might record a few more videos. I had sort-of planned to make a bunch of videos during this week off, but that didn't happen for one reason or another. I'm not annoyed about that, mind; part of the reason for having this week off in the first place was just to decompress and unwind somewhat from the daily grind and stress of work, so loading myself up with self-imposed "work" to do may not have been the best thing to do.

But anyway. Now Disco Elysium is safely ticked off the list, I can think about other things. I got a few retro treats through the post today — Jungle Strike and Urban Strike for SNES (I already have Desert Strike), Golfamania for Master System and Rad Racer for NES. I'm excited to give all of these a go for various reasons. But that can probably wait until tomorrow. For now, I need a poo, then to go to sleep. So that's what I'm going to do. In that order.

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#oneaday Day 57: The evolution of interactive fiction

I've been playing Disco Elysium for the last couple of evenings. I finally got around to nabbing it in its The Final Cut incarnation last GOG.com sale, and I felt like playing something a bit "different", so I fired it up. (I'd also been waiting until the hype surrounding it had died down so I could approach it with fresh eyes and zero expectations or prejudices.)

This is a very good game, although it's also a game for a very specific type of person. Despite having console versions, it is very much a game for those who grew up with PC gaming in what old men like me tend to vaguely refer to as its "golden age" — around the turn of the century, approximately. No, I'll be a bit more specific; it's for people who grew up with text adventures and subsequently found themselves particularly enjoying CRPGs on PC in the late '90s/early '00s.

The reason I say this is because Disco Elysium has a significant text component. All of it is voice acted — and for the most part voice acted very well, I have to say — but at its heart, it is a role-playing game in which the majority of its major happenings are conveyed almost entirely through text rather than flashy graphics or even animations. It takes some strong cues from the legendary Planescape: Torment in this regard, but it also successfully distinguishes itself as something that builds on what that game was doing, rather than simply aping it.

For the unfamiliar, the big Thing with Disco Elysium is that it's a role-playing game that focuses almost entirely on non-combat situations. I'm not even sure there's a combat system at all — after playing for (checks GOG Galaxy) 8 hours so far, there has not been a single fight. Instead, everything has occurred through a combination of exploration and text-based interactions.

This isn't to say that Disco Elysium is a kinetic novel, either. Not only do you have a lot of choices in terms of dialogue options in most conversations and interactions, but the wide array of skills your player character has play a significant role in almost everything that happens in the game. And, unusually, this isn't just the form of "SUCCESS/FAILURE" rolls to perform particular actions based on your skills — although those do feature at various points — but rather the various facets of your personality actually "speaking" to you, offering suggestions and commentary on what is going on.

For example, if you've put points into the Empathy skill, at various points in conversations your Empathy trait will actually chime in to "conversations", giving you greater insight into how the person you're talking to is feeling, or how you might be able to get through to them. Your Perception skill will "speak" to you and notice little habits people have. Your Drama skill will flamboyantly point out opportunities where you might be able to express yourself. And there are tons more besides these examples, suggesting that playing Disco Elysium with a different "build" of skills and stats will end up being a markedly different experience; it'll still cover the same basic plot beats and events, but doubtless you'll end up resolving various situations in different ways.

This is really cool, and it feels very much like a natural evolution of interactive fiction. While you don't have quite as much freedom as in a traditional "text adventure" style piece of interactive fiction by virtue of not having a text parser to type in whatever you want, there's a really strong feeling that you're seeing the world through the eyes of the character that you have designed. And, interestingly, that character is designed not as an "ideal", but as an absolute wreck of a human being.

Amnesia is an overdone trope, particularly in role-playing games, but having your player character waking up with a raging hangover and no memory of what got him into the situation he starts the game in is a great means of bringing the player into the game almost in medias res. You, the player, are discovering things about the game world and the story as the protagonist character is (re)discovering them, and you have a lot of scope as to how you want to play that protagonist, who is canonically a policeman.

Do you play things by the book and attempt to impress your partner with how you get your life back together and work hard on solving the investigation that has brought you together? Do you lean into the "weird" and start freaking people out with how you behave around them? Do you start spouting particularly extreme political ideologies at every opportunity? You have the option to do all of these things in Disco Elysium, right up to deciding that you're the one who is going to bring Communism to the people, becoming a massive racist or turning into someone whose sense of self-worth flew out of the window along with his shoe prior to us joining the narrative at the start of the game.

A lot of it is smoke and mirrors, I'm sure, but I can't remember the last time I felt like I was so completely being invited to inhabit the role of a game's main character. The way Disco Elysium works strikes a great balance between having some things that are canonical fact about the protagonist, and allowing you to mould them as you see fit.

I'm not sure it would have quite the same impact if you had a completely freeform self-insert protagonist, because the temptation there is always to go down the "idealised" route, and a significant part of Disco Elysium involves how one deals with one's own flaws — whether that be accepting them, attempting to overcome them, ignoring them in the hope they don't mess things up further for you, or leaning hard into them. By forcing us to inhabit this absolute disaster of a human being, we're put in a position where we can explore how we might get out of a situation that is pretty much rock bottom. Will we rise to the challenges life has thrown at us — at least some of which are our own fault? Or will we crumble under the pressure?

It's a game that I feel could have only been made these days. I'm looking forward to seeing how it develops — and if my take on the protagonist manages to survive to the end of proceedings.

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