esoteric ebb

6/12

HGR beat Esoteric Ebb in slightly over a day (real-time). We started yesterday evening and he finished the game tonight.

Meanwhile, I was at work today. Also, I am sooo behind in-game…it’s the morning of day 3 (in-game) and I JUST found the [redacted] in the tea shop. How cooked am I. HGR was of the opinion that the timing element is fluff and you don’t need to solve the mystery before the election, but it didn’t seem like fluff to me imo tbqh

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6/15, 2 am

IT WAS FINE. I still think the election is likely a hard limit, but I overestimated the amount of game I had left. I did the final plot sequence around midday on day 4 and got fast-forwarded to election day. HGR says he looked it up and time slows down the closer you get to the election lol

ANYWAY I decided to quit at the start of election day (even though the game is basically over) because it was past midnight on Sunday and I really wanted to finish the project edits before Monday proper lolol. will finish up tomorrow

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6/15, 10:30 am

Finished the game!

Top reviewer comment: “Honestly, the game felt kind of biased against fascism.”

Overall, it was fun, but Disco Elysium was a lot better. The cleric and his voices didn’t have Harry’s level of charm and wit. But that’s a very high bar. I still enjoyed it.

Battle-wise, the difficulty curve was awkward. At the start I was getting game overs at every combat encounter and had to save scum just to get through. Felt bad. I was stressing. By the end, I had a ton of damage mitigation (barkskin, advantage on death saving throws, a bunch of other mitigation feats) but largely didn’t need it. tbh it would’ve helped a LOT If I’d gotten eight hours’ sleep every night (gives you advantage on ALL rolls until you hit 0 HP for the first time that day). But I think the game is designed so you don’t have that bonus early (since both Darrow and the potion-seller want you to meet them after midnight) and do have it late (when you’re running out of things to do and likely to go to bed early). Which is fair enough.

The actual funniest thing in the game was getting into the tea shop. My cleric (a man of great intellect) was like “Can I guess the password?” to which my intellect was like NO, there is no way, the password could be literally anything, even if you knew who set it up AND you knew all their preferences AND they were dumb enough to put one of their preferences as the password, it’s exceedingly unlikely that etc., etc. Meanwhile HGR asked the same question and his intellect was like *crickets* so he just started saying random stuff and got it on the second try.

The goofiest thing in the game (in a negative way) was that I flubbed the Dunk interrogation by failing a very low roll, so he did not tell me about the [redacted], but all the subsequent dialogue acted as if I did get that information. The player really isn’t supposed to fail that roll.