About this filter

Esoteric Ebb is a narrative-heavy isometric CRPG from solo Swedish developer Christoffer Bodegard, and like most games in that tradition it lives and dies on its dialogue. The bulk of the experience is read rather than heard: branching prose authored in Ink, inkle's narrative scripting language, presented as on-screen dialogue and choice text. Because so much of the game is text you sit and read through, the language in that text is front and centre throughout a playthrough. This filter is for players who want to keep the writing, the choices, and the world intact while taking the explicit English wording out of what appears on screen — useful if you stream or record, share a screen with family, or simply prefer a cleaner read of an otherwise wordy game. The game ships in English only, and this filter is scoped to that English text accordingly.

This patch covers 2,088 English text instances across the game's Ink dialogue and on-screen text. Each flagged word is replaced in place with a same-length run of asterisks, so a four-letter word becomes ****, with no first-character hint left behind. The categories covered are the usual run of strong language and slurs you would expect a profanity filter to address; the listing above describes the scope without spelling any of it out. The work is text-only by design: sentence structure, punctuation, line breaks, fonts, and the underlying Ink branching logic are all preserved, so only the flagged words themselves change and nothing about how a scene reads or where a conversation leads is altered. Lore-specific exclamations and Latin phrases that happen to overlap with the wordlist were reviewed one by one and deliberately left untouched, so the game's intentional world-building language survives the pass.

The filter was built by scanning the compiled Ink text embedded in the game's Unity asset files, applying the same-length asterisk replacement word by word, and then re-scanning the patched files to confirm zero remaining matches; the patched build was also launched and checked in-game to confirm the censored text renders correctly with no crash. It is distributed as a self-applier that ships none of the game's own files: you run it against your own legitimately owned copy, it backs up your original files first, and it re-creates the edit locally and deterministically with no internet connection involved. The story, world, tone, and Ink branching are exactly as the developer shipped them. The audio is left as released, because the voiced lines live in an FMOD sound bank with no viable round-trip path. Non-English text is untouched since the game is English-only, and your saves and achievements are not modified. You can revert at any time from within the app or by verifying the game files through Steam.