Earlier this month, Raw Fury released Esoteric Ebb for PC via Steam. Following its release, we had the chance to speak with Esoteric Ebb Creator Christoffer Bodegård about the inspirations behind the game, challenges faced in development, early looks at the game, and much more.
I know that a handful of NPCs in the game are based off of real life DnD characters from campaigns you DM’d with your friends. Was the Cleric also based on any character from any of your sessions? If not, how did this character come to fruition?
Christoffer Bodegård (CB): That’s a fun question! I mean, really there’s a ton of characters in Ebb that were created for or during campaigns. I tend to play with a very improvisational and collaborative vibe when I play, so there are tons of characters that my players came up with on the spot, or that popped into existence during some random quest tangent.
The cleric, however, was created for the game alone. Once production got started for real I defined him to exactly the narrative beats and themes that I needed to hit. So I crafted a character who has experience with all the political factions (thus leaving him in a state of flux), has insane magical abilities (power fantasy!), is generally a good guy (which is why you never get to perform any actual truly evil actions in the game), and most importantly, he’s extremely hard to deal with. Nobody likes him, and for good reasons. But that’s what also makes him extremely fascinating to watch – and play.
Did you always have it set in stone that the main character of Esoteric Ebb would be a cleric or did you mess around with the idea of letting the player choose a class?
CB: It started as a cleric. That first prototype I made back in 2018 had a cleric and a goblin in it. It looked and played nothing like today’s Esoteric Ebb, but those seeds were still there. However, in the prototypes following that one, I changed this several times. In one iteration – called Imposter Arcana – you played as a rogue pretending to be a cleric, while getting into increasingly ridiculous trouble because of it. In another, you played as Snell, a goblin runner for a local tribe who had to manage local politics in order to score a promotion. But ultimately, it always came back to that cleric idea.
The cleric is just the most versatile class after all. Spellcaster, melee fighter, heavy/light armor user, and healer, all in one. Plus, I’m a cleric player myself, so…
And I did play around with the idea of creating your character, you know, Baldur’s Gate-style. But there’s a reason why almost every single game that’s lauded as having ‘best writing ever!’ has a mostly predetermined character as protagonist. You automatically sacrifice a ton of narrative weight by having a generic protagonist. There’s also, of course, a ton of immersion and player agency to be gained from customizable protagonists, but it also makes any actual storytelling so much more difficult. That’s one of the reasons why a game like BG3 is so impressive, they managed to tell a really hard-hitting story while also allowing for that player freedom.
Snell and the Cleric’s relationship is one of my favorite things about Esoteric Ebb. The short rest scene in the dungeon between the two where they discuss the Cleric’s father is one of my favorite scenes in gaming in recent memory. What was it like writing their dynamic?
CB: It was really fun. I knew exactly where to take their story from the moment I started writing, but funnily enough I actually left those scenes – the ‘breather’ and the ‘voting’ scenes in particular – until almost the end of production. I think I was a bit scared. If the Cleric and Snell don’t work, then the game doesn’t work. But all through-out writing the game, since almost every dialog contains both a Snell and a non-Snell version, I knew that the Snell-version was just such an upgrade.
Originally he was born out of the companion structure of the games that inspired Ebb. Kim Kitsuragi is the glue that holds Disco Elysium together. Similarly for Morte in Planescape: Torment. Snell then had to fill that purpose as a guiding beacon for the player, as well as be someone who is just as relevant to the themes of the game as the protagonist. Someone who could both riff on the cleric’s crazy behavior, act as the straight man when needed, and also be deeply invested in A) protecting his tribe and B) showing the deeper layers of folk-relations in Norvik. I feel like I managed to nail down both the cleric and Snell very early on in the process, and that alone helped the game actually work. Plus, it’s genuinely hilarious to write. I always say that if it’s boring to write, it’s a hundred times more boring to read. So when I felt actually worried about what I would write for the cleric’s choices in that dialog with Snell after the fire trap, that’s when I knew I was on the right path.
Esoteric Ebb balances its comedy so well with the more philosophical and emotional scenes. How difficult was it finding this balance? Was there ever a point where you had to dial back the humor in favor of letting a scene take on a more serious tone?
CB: I thought it would be harder. There are some REALLY tough subjects in Ebb, and I almost feel like I’m getting away with way more than I deserve at times. But I think the main point is just that I never allowed the characters to be disingenuous. I wasn’t allowed to do any 4th wall breaks, or treat anyone as a fake fantasy character. Every single person in the game, including the weird ones, had to have a fully fleshed out backstory and internal motivation. That’s why the insane demi-lich can tell you all about his ex-wife drama, why Thalassos refuses to share anything, and why Darrow only ever tells you exactly what you need to hear and nothing more. They don’t exist for the player or the story, they exist as people first. Thus, the cleric is not just another wacky guy in a world of Monty Python knights – he’s genuinely weird. Nobody likes him. He probably smells bad, and most other clerics are normal in comparison. So then when wacky stuff happens, the world reacts accordingly. A ridiculous spell like Mass Torsion seems like a joke (and is to us) but to them it’s a war crime. Charm Person is horrifying mind control, wielded by the state.
The humor then, is almost the exception. Wacky stuff happens all the time of course, and the jokes per minute is… pretty high. But once the jokes fade and you start talking about genocide with your companion, that then is just returning to normal. Had it been nothing but satire, then those topics (and most of the political stuff in the game) would have been entirely out of place.
I expected to have to dial back stuff more- and I especially expected to get feedback about how it didn’t work from early players and my awesome editor – but I didn’t. Everything just clicked right away. And I think it’s probably because I had those rules of realism set in place, and that I treat every single character – no matter how good or evil or ridiculous – with respect and dignity. You know, be like Jesus or whatever.
What was the biggest challenge you ran into during development?
CB: Time and ambition. I wanted to make a game that was all-too huge. And while I could write fast (anywhere from 2-5k per day) making it all ‘fit into the timeline’ was a struggle. While I finished writing the last real first draft of Ebb in December, ignoring maybe 20-30k words of later additions, I had not implemented large portions of the game at that point. Specifically the entire dungeon area, which I had originally planned on finishing over the course of a month.
I ended up doing it all in approximately seven days, over New Year’s. Which is not something I’d like to repeat – so I’ll be doing a lot more planning on the next project to avoid situations like that. Same with all the technical hurdles- I did all the programming myself until April of 2025, and while I still like doing all the core system design myself, I will continue working with more programmers in the future. I’m not an awful programmer, but I am not ‘classically trained’. And that shows.
You know we would have to ask this: What are you voting for in the election?
CB: I hope you had the Democratic Herald feat equipped, so you get some healing out of it. As for an answer, I’m horrifically torn on the subject. You can imagine my own mind as split as the cleric’s when it comes to this topic, and I can honestly say that Ebb has been an incredible journey for myself to explore it.
In a sense, I feel like the audience, in general, really dislikes it when the author arrives with already fully-formed thoughts and solidly fastened preconceived notions on any given subject. Even more so in interactive fiction. Listening to an expert serenade on a subject is always interesting of course. But when it comes to such ethereal and loosy-goosy things as the human condition and all the horrors it contains, I don’t think any of us knows exactly what the truth really is. Or at the very least, the ones among us who do truly believe themselves to be fluent in the exact source code of the universe are usually not that interesting to listen to. Unless you agree with them fully, at which point it becomes a bit masturbatory.
I don’t know what I’m gonna vote for in the next Swedish (or EU) election. But I’m gonna vote, as I always do. Until then, I’m going to keep debating radical politics with people – in real life, where it belongs.
(TL;DR, Maybe Agrarian?)
For more on Esoteric Ebb, be sure to check out our review below.
