Esoteric Ebb dev talks Disco Elysium and mind control: "It's kind of stupid to make an entire RPG by yourself"

While immediately the game's Disco sensibilities are clear to see, Esoteric Ebb began development before Disco even released, born from an unconventional spark.

"I was on vacation, and I was really bored, because I hate vacation," Bodegård remarks casually.

Escaping a year of burnout and inspired by D&D campaigns with friends and his unyielding boredom, Bodegård put together a design document for his ideal RPG, at which point he thought he may as well make it.

"I found out that it's kind of stupid to try to make an entire RPG by yourself," he laughs. "RPGs need to be very big."

Despite the scale of the task, Bodegård found his game coming together largely according to plan, albeit with one glaring exception: "I could hit all the beats that I wanted, like exploration and socialising, but I couldn't hit that third pillar, which was combat."

Bodegård dropped the project. "You cannot make a role-playing game without combat. It's impossible. It's not going to sell," he reasoned.

Three months later, ZA/UM released Disco Elysium.

"They solved every single problem I had in my design document. They answered every question," he gushes. "This was my dream game."

Reinvigorated, Bodegård immediately began to analyse the game, trying to figure out why Disco worked so well, and iterating on his own game in turn, producing a new prototype every year before first revealing it to the Disco Elysium subreddit in 2022.

Feedback was almost unanimously positive, but comment after comment included the same caveat: It's too similar to Disco Elysium.

After three years of hard work, Bodegård had successfully turned his game into Disco Elysium, and it was now time to make it his own once again.

The only aspect of Disco that had to remain, for Bodegård, was the interactive writing, something he credits as the main reason for Disco's success. "Over half the content you see line per line is dynamic content.

"Once I realised that I could pull it off, everything else was just auxiliary," he explains.

Bodegård is a writer at heart, and he acknowledges that early builds of the game look "primitive" on account of his self-taught design skills – "learning UI design from scratch is very, very not fun".

Luckily, he would not have to toil away for much longer, as news of the game reached the ears of indie publisher Raw Fury, whose funding has allowed Bodegård to focus entirely on the writing while hiring artists to work on the visuals.

While Bodegård takes care of all the writing, design and programming, all visual assets, music and audio are created by fellow developers he works with at his local incubator – one of several spaces for developers to collaborate and share ideas that have become a major facet of the Swedish game development scene.

He insists that "I should not and will not call the development of Esoteric Ebb a solo project", dubbing his collaborators his 'escargatoire' and listing them on the game's website.

With time freed up to work more heavily on what he does best, Bodegård has not rested on his laurels, instead working on the vast network of dialogue options that a game like this requires.

On the surface, Esoteric Ebb is a comedic game – the game's writing is full of humour, darting between dry witticisms and silly slapstick set pieces. Writing and setting combined, it's almost as much Monty Python and the Holy Grail as it is Disco.

But while Disco Elysium is an often-hilarious game marketed very seriously, Bodegård considers Esoteric Ebb an outwardly comedic game with a serious core.

"What Esoteric Ebb does is essentially the exact opposite [of Disco Elysium]. It sells the experience of being a very fun experience with a bunch of jokes," he explains. "But when it comes to the actual world, the themes are the most important part.

"It should be funny and it's going to be funny, but at the end of the day, it has to be an exploration of something interesting. Otherwise, why would you want to invest so much time into this world?"

Perhaps the finest example of Bodegård's dance between humour and gravitas is how the game handles its spells.

Esoteric Ebb's world is one of magic, but Bodegård's magic plays out in words. Your spells can be used on anyone in the game, with the result of every combination of spell and target causing a unique outcome – each of which has been painstakingly crafted by Bodegård himself.

This is a huge amount of content for one person to produce, so Bodegård has chosen his spells carefully, selecting "the most fun ones" and implementing them as best he can.

Unlike in many RPGs, Bodegård's magic leans into its inherently bizarre nature, grappling with the ramifications of magic as we would see them from the view of non-magic folk.

"If you cast 'Charm Person' on someone, that is mind control. That is horrifying from an existential viewpoint," he chuckles, adding that when you write dialogue with this in mind, it very quickly becomes political.

"Oh, you're mind controlling people? That should be illegal. You should be in jail. That's not OK. This is fascist. This is authoritarian. Very bad behaviour."

Bodegård has considered every possible impact of his spells, stretching every consequence to its absurdist limits.

In his world, you can create food and water out of nothing. He clarifies, facetiously, that "it doesn't taste good", but that seriousness raises its head once again.

"[You] can make a lot of money doing that if food has value in this society. And then the question is, does food have a value in this society if you can create it out of thin air?"

Bodegård's magic isn't just your standard RPG fare – every spell is a thought experiment dragged out to its natural conclusions.

It's a fascinating, almost Sartrean look at the interplay between a fictional magical system and our very real societal values that, in a way, circles back around to being incredibly funny all over again.

"That is essentially what Esoteric Ebb is about," declares Bodegård. "Just taking these weird elements of, 'What if magic was freely available?' and extrapolating on it, making it interesting.

"The player also gets to play around with that, and that's what makes it so much fun."

Esoteric Ebb is coming soon to PC.

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