Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 surprised me. After playing games for thirty-five years and writing about them for eighteen, I don’t say this lightly, but Sandfall Interactive’s party-based RPG took me to places I wasn’t fully prepared to go. It’s not often I describe a game as “heart-wrenching”, but this one is, repeatedly so. It’s also mesmerisingly, perhaps disarmingly, beautiful at times, doing things with light and colour you don’t often see in this genre.
Of course, this is entirely calculated. The very title, Clair Obscur, pertains to an artistic technique that makes use of stark contrasts between light and dark shades to create volume and evoke emotion in the admirer. By all accounts the game does the same, layering light and dark moments atop one another over and over again, mixing the bittersweet with the heart-breaking, thrilling highs with sudden and unsteadying lows.
It is set in a city called Lumiere, kind of like a Steampunk Paris – even complete with its own Eiffel Tower analogy. The story begins 67 years after a cataclysmic event called the Fracture, that split the world in two and trapped the city under a magical dome. Every year since, the citizens of Lumiere have had to live with the Gommage, which literally means “to scrub”, as an eldritch, unknowable entity known as the Paintress awakens and inscribes a glowing number on the face of a towering monolith. At that moment, every living person past the corresponding age dies, leaving the survivors to move on.
It’s a grim setting for sure, peopled by those who know the exact time of their impending deaths. Children are born with a death date already assured, while those who approach their Gommage have no choice but to accept their fate and live the best life they can, while they can. Where many works of fiction would depict a lawless society of chancers and criminals, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 instead presents a city of people sworn to work together, to make the most of every second, to create wondrous art and great innovations – with the primary focus being the titular Expeditions.
Every year, those with one cycle left volunteer to embark on a perilous voyage to the Monolith in an attempt to stop the Paintress and free the city from her curse. Not a single soul has ever returned, but Expedition 33 could be different thanks to Gustave, the central protagonist of Clair Obscur. He’s fitted with a steampunk bionic arm that’s able to manipulate Lumina, essentially spells weaved using a magical energy source called Chroma, the lifeblood of creation. In this world, Painters can harness Chroma to accomplish great feats, and expectations are high for Gustave’s party.
From the moment they make landfall across the channel, Clair Obscur descends into nightmare. Cut off from the rest of the Expedition, Gustave and his adopted sister Maelle, along with a handful of other expeditioners, must rally their resources to overcome the beautiful horrors of the Continent. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an arrestingly stunning game, producing some of the most haunting vistas I’ve seen. A particular favourite biome has an underwater aesthetic despite it being ostensibly dry land. Glancing up you’ll see sharks circling in the “sky”, with jets of bubbles forming twinkling columns among swaying seaweed.
Combat is presented as turn-based, like a traditional RPG at a glance. It’s deeper though, introducing new mechanics steadily throughout the first two acts of the campaign. Each member of your party has a number of Action Points which can be used to attack, use items, or cast special abilities. While you’ll accrue AP each turn, which is determined by an initiative queue, you earn more by clever use of certain abilities or perfectly dodging, parrying, or jumping over enemy attacks. Enemies will often use combos, hitting you multiple times in a row with a variety of techniques, and Clair Obscur offers little in the way of signposting. Instead, you’ll need to intuit from audio and visual cues, with no big flashing lights or countdowns. It forces you to engage with every fight meaningfully, paying attention to each new enemy and looking for tell-tale hints as to whether you need to dodge or parry. There’s a huge variety of enemy types, too, which keeps you on your toes.
As you explore the world you’ll find special items called Pictos that can be equipped in limited slots (which you can increase using a currency known as Lumina). These offer passive or reactive buffs, and unlock for all characters after using them in four battles. They do things like restore AP for perfect dodges, or allow a second hit on your base attack, or offer immunity to certain status ailments. It’s an outwardly complex system that soon becomes easier to navigate, as you layer buffs and effects with specific special attacks to manipulate the turn system, granting you AP for certain actions or setting up the next character in your line of three. It’s hard to put into words just how addictive and satisfying the combat system is, helped by some dazzling animations that wouldn’t be out of place in latter-day Final Fantasy titles.
In fact, Clair Obscur owes a lot to Square’s seminal JRPG franchise. It shares DNA tonally, though feels markedly and deliberately darker. Although, there is comic relief in the form of the Gestrals, mystical creations of the Paintress who have a tribal society on the Continent and are often willing to help or hinder the party – none more so than Esquie and Monoco. The former tags onto the party and provides various means of traversing the overworld map, while the latter offers help in more direct ways.
Each character has a deep, unique combat style that far outstrips anything I’ve seen in the genre before. For example, Lune uses elemental spells which create Stains, and each of her skills consumes those Stains to add extra effects to subsequent attacks, so learning to layer her abilities and work a few moves ahead is key to success. Maelle is a fencer who has several stances, and using certain skills causes her to switch stance, setting up buffs and extra abilities.
Another character, Sciel, uses magical tarot cards to stack damage between multiple states, which means the longer you hold off, the more potent she becomes. Add the various counter moves, and that every character has a Free Aim ranged attack that uses AP and stacks effects, and it’s a lot to learn – but the payoff is more than worth it. On standard difficulty (you can change it if you want to), you will need to engage with these systems, as enemies will chain attacks, cast status effects, and target your weakest. Each has a different array of attacks and attack patterns, and it requires some genuine skill to overcome everything it throws at you – especially when you’re up against bosses, optional or mandatory.
Enemies will wander around until you either engage or avoid them, but landing a ranged attack when close will give you initiative in the coming fight, which is highly advantageous. Stats you increase when you level up affect your attributes in interesting ways, boosting damage and defence but also your speed, which affects your turn order. Each character also has a unique skill tree which requires an ever-increasing number of points to advance along, unlocking a huge variety of special attacks. The order isn’t set either, allowing you to skip some of the attacks you don’t want to save up for ones you do.
Exploration is the other main tenet of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, as you move between nodes on a huge overworld map, or investigate every nook and cranny within stages looking for collectibles, Chroma, Pictos, and gear. It’s here that all my frustrations with the game design exist, though. Clair Obscur litters its biomes with shortcuts, looping paths and hidden treasures, but has no map to consult, meaning you can literally go in circles at times. The environments are stunning, no question, but their cluttered beauty can make them hard to navigate with no compass points or any way to orient yourself. Progression can lock you into boss encounters when you haven’t finished exploring, and while there is fast travel it only exists within certain biomes.
The overworld map is pretty and absolutely heaving with things to do outside of the main campaign, but even with Esquie fully upgraded it can take a long time to get anywhere and it’s difficult to remember what’s in certain biomes. Of course, you could get around a lot of it with an old fashioned notebook, but nothing breaks immersion more than stopping to make notes every two minutes. It’s simply not intuitively designed enough to get by with no map or compass, and it genuinely hampers the experience.
And yet, I saw past this effortlessly thanks to what is arguably my favourite video game story since Red Dead Redemption or Cyberpunk 2077. The characters fit into this world seamlessly, lending it an air of authenticity and believability. Their actions fit the situation, their personalities clash and click in ways that make sense, and the narrative is so replete with sudden shocks and dizzying highs that I barely found myself engaging with the side content, not because it wasn’t interesting or compelling, but because I needed to see the story through and understand the secrets of this world.
Without hyperbole, the writing is superb, and the voice acting is simply outstanding. Daredevil’s Charlie Cox imbues Gustave with immense depth and unassuming charm, while Jennifer English brings a determined, infectious optimism to Maelle, a girl volunteering for the Expedition despite having nine years left on her clock. Elsewhere Andy Serkis turns in a star performance as the enigmatic and villainous Renoir, and Ben Starr appears as Verso, a mysterious Expeditioner stranded on the Continent. The story is deeply affecting and powerfully told, moving at a brisk pace. You’re always trying to get somewhere to unravel the next piece of the puzzle, and it rarely lets up.
The soundtrack, too, is astoundingly good, with some of the best battle music I’ve heard that never fails to evoke the right atmosphere during combat. It’s a world stuffed full of mystery, from an otherworldly manor housing seemingly endless secrets to Gestral arenas, an Endless Tower offering an endurance mode-style challenge, and capricious traders who’ll only sell you their best stock if you best them in a fight first.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is that rarest of treasures: a AAA adventure that feels fresh, presenting old concepts in new ways. Its dazzling, dangerous world is like nothing I’ve ever played through, at turns gorgeous and gruelling, offering puzzles aplenty and numerous intrigues. More than this though, it tells a story that delivers genuine emotion with characters who feel real and human, in tandem with its hypnotic art style and stirring score. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 truly feels like something unique and artistic, and reminds us how moving, exhilarating, and provocative big-budget adventure games can be.
