Esoteric Ebb is one of the few games that will take over democracy

I've been telling everyone I know to play Esoteric Ebb, and I've usually followed it up with, “It's like a Dungeons & Dragons campaign gained class awareness,” which… doesn't seem as cool to everyone else as it does to me.

Ever since I finished Christoffer Bodegård's fascinating indie work, I've been digesting its themes. You could say I was thinking about the meaning of the game – do people still ponder? In the end, I came to the (obvious) conclusion that Esoteric Ebb is ultimately about democracy.

It's not something you see as explicitly in video games because, let's face it, voting for the least bad capitalist isn't sexy… but it's important. We'd all much rather be at the forefront of a revolution or the overthrow of monarchies, but in terms of achieving change, nothing is more important than voting.

Esoteric Ebb informs players whether they like it or not

To give you a little background, Esoteric Ebb puts players in the role of a cleric tasked with solving the mystery of an exploding tea house. To complicate matters… you were murdered. After being revived at the local morgue, you're told you have just five days to solve the case before the city's first-ever municipal election.

Like any proper campaign, everything at Esoteric Ebb is in anticipation of this election. Just like in Disco Elysium, all of your skills (six abilities from Dungeons & Dragons) have a personality and interact with you during each playthrough.

Each of these skills is broadly associated with a political party or movement present in the game. The Force represents the nationalist, fascist-oriented Norvik party. It is a skill and a movement that values masculinity and conservative values. Wisdom, meanwhile, represents the Azgalists, a communist movement born out of dwarven industrial action.

Then there are the Freestriders, a party that sells universal suffrage as a means of achieving a capitalist oligopoly. The Arcanist side (Intelligence) wants a Magocracy, a system where the most powerful mages are in charge. The constitution is mysterious, tending towards a kind of self-interested anarchy. Finally, Charisma is apolitical, often advocating any decision that keeps the cleric out of trouble.

Esoteric Ebb presents each of these ideologies with subtle nuances – Power is not necessarily the great evil and Wisdom is not always wise. You could say that the Force yearns for meaning, for something free from the arbitrary cruelty of the world. The side quest involving the Norvik Party is about disenfranchised young men who have turned to oppression because society has chewed them up and spat them back out.

The Norvik Party is the status quo – a theocracy on the move, currently ruled by its leader – and they are leading in the polls. Young men fear change because even if life is bad right now, the alternative could be worse; feminism could make life worse for them, or so they think.

Dealing with the Azgalists, the player is asked to decide whether gradual change to a social democracy is better than an unpopular revolutionary movement that remains pure of its ideals but never achieves electoral power. This ideological schism is portrayed through the conflict between a veteran party member who has been agitating for Azgalism for decades, and a younger party member, angry at the world and ready to lead a revolution.

With almost every choice in the game, you are subjected to an internal debate between your skills, forcing you to hear an ideologically balanced conversation for each decision. I like to think it's an allegory for political awareness – sure, you hear propaganda, but you hear everyone's propaganda before you're allowed to make an educated decision for yourself.

Voting is everything

There's also a lot of fantastic hijinks in Esoteric Tide, but Bodegård has placed almost everything through a political lens because… everything is in anticipation of an election. Despite what some people wish otherwise, every action we take (or don't take) in our lives is political. If you indulge in mindless consumption, you are tacitly submitting to a world driven by corporations and consumerism.

At one point in the game I was asked to give up my vote card – which strangely gives -1 intelligence – for safe passage through an area. I thought if I couldn't vote, when the election came, everything I had done until then: the ideological statements, the people I had helped, the mysteries I had solved, would all be worthless. At great personal risk to my character, I hung onto my voter's card.

Turnout in the 2024 United States presidential election was 64.1 percent, with approximately 90 million people in the country not voting (The Guardian). Across the European Union, the average turnout in national elections is similar (TrueDEM).

Political participation continues to decline as people neglect to exercise their democratic rights. Simply put, apathy sets the stage for wealth inequality, fascism, bigotry and genocide. Unfortunately, democracy dies in the light. It's rare to have a game (or any medium at all) that puts such an emphasis on a single voice, but Esoteric Ebb does exactly that, and I'm very grateful for that.

During the game's closing dialogue, the odds—a motif in the game of rolling the dice—were 50/50 that Norvik would have a bright future. As my cleric approached the ballot box, the odds increased to 51/49. I cast my vote.