Esoteric Ebb creator on Deus Ex, Disco Elysium comparisons, and wanting to make a first-person game

Christoffer Bodegård, the solo developer behind Esoteric Ebb, sat down to talk Steam libraries, creative influences, and where his head is at after one of the most acclaimed RPG launches of 2026.

Esoteric Ebb — a CRPG where you play the world's worst cleric unraveling the mystery of an exploding tea shop on the eve of a fantasy realm's first election — took eight years to build and released in March to strong reviews and solid sales. Bodegård says his next project will reuse the technology he built for Ebb, though it won't necessarily be a sequel. He also mentioned wanting to make a first-person game at some point. On the gaming side, he's currently deep into Victoria 3, calling it "a masterpiece in the making" that just needs a few more years of developer support to fully get there — he has around 400 hours in it and still considers himself bad at it. Before that he was playing Abiotic Factor, the Half-Life-inspired co-op survival game, with friends he'd largely been too busy to game with while finishing Ebb.

Bodegård's path into RPGs started with Dragon Age: Origins just before high school, which sent him down a rabbit hole of top-100 CRPG lists that eventually ended at Planescape: Torment — a game he says "raised the bar for everything." That lineage is visible in Esoteric Ebb, which draws frequent Disco Elysium comparisons from players and critics, though Bodegård has cited Deus Ex as a heavier influence on how the game is structured. He grew up on a DOS machine inherited from his father through a Swedish state computer program, starting with Disney's The Jungle Book before graduating to the RPGs that would define his career.

With Ebb out the door and a next project still in the ideas phase, Bodegård seems energized rather than exhausted — finally playing games with friends again after years of watching their streams from across a desk while he worked.