Some games, particularly those in the RPG genre, take their time to really get the player invested. The worlds can feel so dauntingly large, the number of new proper nouns to learn can leave one confused and turned off. In some cases, whole chunks of the mechanical structure of a game can be locked off until several hours in, and narratives can take their sweet ass time to really get going. It’s so common, that there is a well-known joke in the games community that goes, “the game gets good after x hours” and usually that x is a number in the double digits.
In Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, there was no need to wait, no toughing it out for the good stuff. Within the first 15 minutes, I was deeply intrigued by the setting, invested in the characters’ to the point of deep, gasping sobs when things turned to tragedy, and fully locked in on the satisfying and technically dense combat. It’s been a long time since a game had me so hooked so early on, that I knew immediately that I was going to see this one to the end.
And I did! Here I am, many hours later with the platinum trophy and enough thoughts to write a whole book on this game, though – for now – I will stick to just this simple essay.
This will be a spoiler free review, but if you want to go in completely blind I will say these things up front.
Should you purchase Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? Yes.
Should you finish Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? Yes.
Is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 my current pick for Game of the Year? Absolutely.
From its opening moments the game’s music, visuals, writing, and voice acting are top-of-the-line. Themes of decay, loss, and perseverance in the face of impossible odds weave elegantly into ideas around child-rearing in a world that will not be able to support future generations. Existential dread is the name of the game here, and yet somehow the characters and the writers of the game find time for some of the most hilarious lines I’ve encountered in an RPG.
Each character feels has a distinct personality and look which gives the player an immediate sense of their identity, and they are complex and well-realized characters with differing motivations and ideas on the nature of life and the struggles therein. And they somehow all find time to crack jokes, to be intimate with one another, to express doubt, fear, and admiration. To look at the terrors they face with a deeply human combination of abject horror and profound amazement.
To put forth the very basic premise of the game, Clair Obscur takes place in a world that was literally fractured: broken into chunks with the land scattered apart and many people left dead or utterly at a loss as to the cause of this calamity. Furthermore, there now stands a great monolith at the far edge of the horizon, impossibly visible from the distant city of Lumiere, where our story begins, and at its base sits a weeping, huddled figure known only as The Paintress. Above her, luminous as the sun, is the number 33.
This number, as we soon come to realize, refers to a sort of literal deadline for human life. Every year, like some grim holiday, the Paintress paints a new number, sequentially moving downward towards 0, and anyone whose lifespan has passed this limit is near-instantly killed, dissolved into withering flower petals in a process called, gommage (a real life practice of removing dead skin cells). The true terror of this premise is twofold.
One, every human being knows exactly how long their life has the potential to be.
And two…
That number is getting smaller.
It is an incredible premise, and everything in the first few minutes of the game solidifies the tragedy and complexity of a world living under such bleak and absolute tyranny, exploring the painful realities of child-rearing in a doomed world, questions many of us in our own dying world often come to grips with.
And it’s only the beginning of this game’s astounding journey, one that is beautiful both in its narrative content, its presentation, and its mechanical cohesion, because Clair Obscur is not only deeply engaging in terms of its story, but in the gameplay as well.
The game’s combat starts simple: it’s turn-based with a dodge mechanic during enemy attacks that lets you evade incoming damage entirely, or a more precise parry that can result in a powerful counterattack, creating an effective risk vs reward scenario during every enemy turn that never stops being engaging. Add in a light bit of resource management (balancing usage and creation of AP – action points – to use special abilities or fire off ranged attacks to pick at an enemy’s weakness or deal that last little bit of damage to finish them off.
Right from the outset this is an effective system that keeps the fights interesting and tempts you with that ever-present challenge: “Can I do this without getting hit a single time?” The answer, for every fight in the game’s lengthy runtime, is an emphatic yes. The timing can get tricky, but once you start to internalize the patterns of your enemies’ attacks, the momentum of a fight can shift dramatically in your favor.
That’s barely scratching the surface.
Because for all of its many, MANY wonderful aspects, Clair Obscur’s gameplay is primarily focused on the many additional layers to the combat which get added as the game progresses.
First off, each member of your party has an entirely unique set of skills, weapons (each with unique passive buffs and traits) and equipable powers from the game’s Pictos, which require a limited resource to equip and grant passive or active bonuses and tweaks to the way your characters play. Essentially, these work like badges from the old Paper Mario games, and if you aren’t familiar with those, come back once you’ve played them, you rube. These all combine to give the player a staggering degree of control and depth, creating unique builds which are fun to poke around with and fine tune as the game progresses and more choices become available. The combat becomes so deep that it can start to feel intimidating, and the admittedly poor UI design doesn’t do much to help in that regard. However, mastering the dodges and parries can allow you to brute force your way through combat where your constructed builds aren’t working, and you have an enormous amount of freedom and opportunities to undo potential mistakes in your characters’ advancement.
Not only that, but each character plays so distinctly from the others, with unique mechanics and specialties. These make them stand out not only in a narrative sense, but in the way they interact with the change how you think about their turns and how they work in tandem with your other party members. This does a lot to foster strong feelings of attachment to your the characters, because not only are they interesting in the way they are presented through writing, visual design, and voice work, but in the way they play to certain strengths and weaknesses.
For example, the first party member you get is presented as being analogous to a mage in a more traditional fantasy setting (she even floats rather than walking when outside of combat). Suitably, her abilities are all about elemental attacks that can chain together with the elements you’ve used in previous turns to unleash even more devastating attacks or to grant buffs and debuffs that can change the course of a battle in an instant.
And you can create some seriously incredible combos to deal astronomical amounts of damage. A guide online taught me how to construct three characters to work in tandem so that the game’s most powerful optional boss can be defeated in a mere TWO HITS.
Incredible.
I could easily go on for several thousand words about why Clair Obscur’s story and themes are so incredibly well-explored, so powerful and meaningful, so evocative and brilliant and tragic and beautiful…
But that would be so full of spoilers as to ruin it for those of you that are sensitive to such things, so I will refrain. I will simply leave you with the way I felt upon reaching the credits of Clair Obscur.
My god. I’ve just finished one of the best games I’ve ever played.
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