Scornedfury Esoteric Ebb Review

There are many things about Esoteric Ebb that I really enjoyed. The ability to equip items that raise your stats or give you a unique ability is a great way to expand upon the genre. The world-building was fantastic. The items were unique, and the story was kept you interested. Although I still feel like this genre needs to come up with a better way to specialize. Nothing is worse than building your character and still having an extremely low percentage when pulling off basic stat rolls. Halfway through the game, I had 16 int and 15 wisdom. I can't tell you how many times I almost just disregarded stat modifiers because it feels so random; I'll just reload a save anyway. How can I be this highly intelligent cleric and not be able to pull basic dialogue feats? Well, because the genre can't seem to stray from the D20 formula. This genre would do very well with limiting immersion-breaking botched rolls. It would do this genre a lot of good if they made specialized stats roll a dice that's 7-20, for example. Get creative with it - we don't NEED to stick to stereotypical/traditional dice. Just do SOMETHING that actually makes players feel like the choices they made about their characters make sense coming into stat-specific scenarios. Certain dialogue checks should just be automatic successes if you've put the time and work to build your character. Otherwise, I'm just playing a dialogue lottery game. The biggest blunder of this game is the use of modern language, phrases, and the general atmosphere of the game. It's as if the devs couldn't decide on how the world should be and just did a mishmash of reality with fantasy tropes. A lot of the time, it comes off very cringy and just breaks all the immersion they just built up for you. Some of it is just plain bad. Just bad. As if you were talking to my 14-year-old cousin. "Like, I'm impressed with the tea shop..." "Can you believe, like, they could actually do it..." Mixed with constant retelling of political factions and (as someone who's politically educated), which at best gives you something slightly to relate to, at worst comes off as esoteric philosophical babble with no depth, and comes off like someone just took a poli sci class. Anyhow, good game but not great, and would just like to emphasize how bad the writing can be because of the "modernness" issue. That should really be emphasized because if I were told that is how it would be before I bought it at full price, I would have waited for a sale.