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’
The creator of Esoteric Ebb has designed the game with a deliberate philosophy: most players will only experience a fraction of the content created. The developer wrote 700,000 words knowing that the majority will remain unseen during a typical playthrough. Rather than viewing this as wasteful, the creator sees invisible content as essential to world-building.
The approach is intentional. By ensuring players discover only a portion of available material, the game creates the perception of a vast, expansive world extending beyond individual player experience. When players realize they’ve only scratched the surface—unable to see everything in a single playthrough—the world feels larger and more mysterious. This contrasts with completionist tendencies common in RPGs, where exhausting all available content is often the goal.
The philosophy reflects a belief that scarcity and incompleteness enhance exploration and wonder. Missing content becomes a feature rather than a limitation, fostering curiosity about what lies undiscovered. The creator explicitly embraces this gap between created and experienced content, arguing it makes the world feel authentically expansive rather than confined by completion metrics.