Esoteric Ebb creator reckons most players only saw half the game, and that’s fine by him: ‘You’ve got to miss stuff in order to feel like the world is bigger’

I’m fairly completionist with my RPGs: I only just beat New Vegas for the first time after 300 hours, 15 years, and I don’t know how many abortive playthroughs because I refuse to wrap one up until I’ve done everything⁠—and I often get tired or distracted before I can finish everything.

I thought I did a pretty good job clearing out Esoteric Ebb, our running contender for RPG of the year, then I talked to Christoffer Bodegård, the guy who made it. Spoilers for Esoteric Ebb below, but devoid of context they’re pretty, well, esoteric.

Over our conversation, Bodegård rattled off a litany of items, places, even a full character class I’d missed in his game, an RPG I luxuriated in for 26 hours. I even went back through some of the map before the point of no return, scouring Tolstad for clues.

My consolation, and part of Esoteric Ebb’s magic, was that I managed to dig up an extremely hidden scene that even eluded one of Bodegård’s playtesters⁠—no two runs will be the same, but not because of mutually exclusive content. You just didn’t find it. As we talked, Bodegård kept mentioning characters and places that I would’ve assumed he was making up on the spot, had he not created the game:

“Did you find Lord Gorm’s stash?” No, I did not.“Did you find the giant dragon skull?” I did not find the giant dragon skull.“Did you find the Living Library?” The hell do you mean, “Living Library?”“I’m assuming you didn’t fight Visken” You’re assuming right.“So you can meet up with him and his helpers at midnight and either swear an oath or fight him.” Oh, that clears things up“Did you find a little goblin that jumps out of the eye and then it starts to scream at you and uses telekinesis to steal the key? The magical key that you get.” I honestly can’t tell if he was messing with me on this one or not.

You’re always a Cleric in Esoteric Ebb, but there are five additional D&D classes you can choose to align with instead, and the full spread of six corresponds to the six attributes⁠—Cleric for Strength, Rogue for Dexterity, etc. I assumed the Charisma class I missed was Warlock, but nope! I could have been a Bard. “You can go around in every single dialog in the entire game,” said Bodegård. “You can go around and say, ‘Hello, I am the Dancing Bard.'” That rules. I had no idea.

(Image credit: Christoffer Bodegård)

I was a “Dick-Ass Rogue,” by the game’s parlance, but I was neither Dick nor Ass enough. “By the way,” Bodegård mentioned. “You can get the title ‘Dick-Ass Rogue’ on your character sheet if you steal enough stuff.” I should have worked over that merchant’s shop, but she was just so nice.

There’s this encounter with a mean elf that I won’t go into too much detail about. Suffice to say he’s kind of a jerk⁠—classic elf, am I right? I kept my best poker face talking to him, maybe passed a dialogue check, and he went on his merry way. “He’s basically a small boss,” Bodegård revealed. “You can wrestle him and⁠—spoilers⁠—you can rip off his shoes. He has very nice shoes.”

Man, what did I even do in this game? Bodegård also revealed one creative regret about Esoteric Ebb while discussing this jerk elf: “Internally [in the files], my main 3D guy at Gibbet Games, [Jonathan Nilsson], he called them ‘Air Elronds.’ I couldn’t do it in the game because it’s such an overt reference, which I’m so sad about. But it’s still in the files.” The world needed Air Elronds.

Missing out

My main feeling on hearing about everything I missed in Esoteric Ebb? Pure joy. That’s peak RPG to me, having what felt like a definitive, completionist-ish playthrough, then finding out I missed half the damn game. And not from a mutually exclusive choices perspective, either, like needing to replay The Witcher 2 to see the version of chapter two you didn’t get. According to Bodegård, it’s possible to get every achievement in Esoteric Ebb in a single playthrough⁠—it’s just challenging, and an extreme improbability your first time.

(Image credit: Christoffer Bodegård)

“There’s going to be completionists,” said Bodegård. “You can 100% it basically on a single playthrough. That’s perfectly fine. Same with achievements. I wanted to design it that way. But a normal playthrough should not be 40-50 hours of doing everything. It should be 10 to 20, maybe 30 at most, depending on how fast you read and you should miss about 60% to 40% of the game’s content.

“I knew that going in, which is a strange thing to say. I write 700,000 words and then I’m expecting most of it to not be seen on a normal playthrough, but that’s what makes it fun. You’ve got to miss stuff in order to feel like the world is bigger than what you experienced.”

Bodegård argued that this is the foundation of a game with legs, one where you’d compare notes with a friend after playing and be blown away by the depth of the world. When I compared it to all the hidden stuff in Elden Ring, the side stories and secret areas that could have made it a playground legend in a pre-internet age, he said that was the exact sort of magic he was trying to capture.

“I call it the ‘illusionary wall of agency,'” said Bodegård, “Wherein, if you offer enough choices, and you have enough stuff that [the player] could miss, and then they realize that they [missed it], they’re going to think that the game is infinite … There’s a list of stuff you can do. You can 100% it, but if you missed 20%, it might feel like you missed 90%, and that makes the game feel larger.”