If you’ve never experienced grief, count your blessings. Most of us have lost people in our lives, and know the heartbreak that comes with it. But somehow video games seemed to have missed the memo on sadness. Games are built on heroic narratives, where death is rare, and life means winning. We’re hard-wired to fear the game over screen, because death in games is a sign of our failure.
Yet where some games avoid death, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 runs towards it. Death – and its companion grief – is ever-present in this epic, turn based RPG. Each year the Paintress paints a number on a monolith, wiping another year of life from the people of Lumiere. And each year, an expedition is sent to stop her. This time, Expedition 33 embarks on their mission to stop the Paintress, and death itself.
With this grim theme come the big questions: can we truly stop death? How do we process grief? And what would you give to save someone you love?
In tackling these big topics, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 takes bold narrative swings – and sometimes misses in trying to emulate the mind-blowing reversals of the Final Fantasy series. But you’ll never hit a home run if you’re not prepared to miss. Its willingness to go bold or go home is admirable at a time where media companies are constantly trying to reiterate old IP.
Oh, and I should mention, it’s very French. Sure, life and death are important, but you can also run around in a striped shirt with a beret and a baguette fighting mimes.
If that doesn’t sell you on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you’re probably still asking if you should play this game? And for me, despite its flaws, that answer is absolutely yes. There’s no doubt Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be one of the big games of the year, and it won’t surprise me one bit when it lands on Game of the Year lists.
But is it good enough to win? Let’s find out. And as hard as it is for me not to talk about the story, this review is going to be spoiler free.
Nostalgia wave: Auron, Tidus, and Yuna walk into a bar…
The first thing that struck me as I played Expedition 33 wasn’t the combat or the writing, or the maddening way the voices don’t match the lip animations.
No, it was a tidal wave of emotion for teenage me, playing Final Fantasy X for nine hours a day over the summer until my eyes became bloodshot from sitting in front of the screen for far too long. FFX was the greatest game I had ever played. Voice acting! Loveable characters! Shocking twists!
We need to talk about Final Fantasy when we talk about Expedition 33, because the iconic JRPG is everywhere, from the turn-based mechanics down to the piano soundtrack that pays tribute to Nobuo Uematsu’s ‘Zanarkand’. But where recent Final Fantasy games have got bogged down by their own mythology, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 builds on the legacy of great JRPGs to create a game of staggering originality.
It’s what Final Fantasy could be if it shook off the baggage of the past. If it reinvented itself and said, what makes a great game isn’t chocobos and crystals; it’s an epic, high-stakes story with ride-or-die characters.
High stakes storytelling; same old structure
And in Expedition 33, the stakes couldn’t be higher. Stopping death itself! Hail Mary save-the-world missions are always excellent story fodder, because it motivates the player to see it through. If you weren’t already convinced about joining Expedition 33, the opening of this fantasy Logan’s Run leaves you deeply vested in their mission.
Understandably, you might also find yourself confused. In exploring an ambitious and original new world, it took me a while to find my feet. Nevrons, pictos, luminas; even how the magic worked didn’t feel like it quite hung together with logic. Bear with it. The more I played, the more I understood these choices. By the end of Act I, I was all in. By the end of Act II, I was confused, and by the end of the game, I felt like it had landed a very challenging story. It wasn’t perfect in its execution, but it had achieved its ambitions.
I’ve been trying to figure out why Expedition 33 didn’t hit as hard as I felt like it could. I confess, I cried several times, but there was always something missing from my picture of grief. And what I figured is this: while the story takes big swings, the narrative hangs on a typical three-act structure like a bad coat hanger. In trying to hit the ‘correct’ story beats, it misses the opportunity to give more space to explaining the complexities of the story.
It’s a hard balance to strike. With such an ambitious story, the writers needed a familiar structure to anchor the more outlandish plot points. Players need these in order to find sure footing when everything else stops making sense. Within the three-acts, quests rely on overly familiar structures: defeat two enemies to pave the way to a boss battle. Within those quests, defeat these three things before you can confront the sub-boss. Get this object, do this thing, fight a boss, finish game. Okay, that’s an oversimplification, but you get the picture.
This insistence on following tried-and-true structures feeds into the repetitive nature of the dungeons. The world ranges from underwater levels to forests of falling leaves, but each one of these has a linearity that’s hidden like the map. Perhaps the need to open every chest and find every treasure was ingrained in me in Final Fantasy X, but I ended up using the classic maze trick of following the left wall around the level, in order to make sure I’d uncovered every corner. In doing so, it laid bare the linearity of the levels.
Esquie, mon ami!
The voice acting is a huge part of Expedition 33’s success. The warmth of Gustave’s voice actor, Charlie Cox, is one of the reasons you become so attached to his story. He’s a gentle engineer with a heart of gold; his journey shows the impact trauma can have on even the kindest people. Each character holds their own identity and voice, with the acting and writing working in concert. Lune’s hyper-analytical mind, Sciel’s calm demeanour, and Maelle’s strength borne from repeated losses.
There was also a pretty funny moment where I was so impressed with Renoir’s voice actor, I looked him up because I was sure I’d heard him before. Yep, I’d heard him the night before on my 27th rewatch of the Lord of the Rings. He’s played by none other than voice acting royalty, Andy Serkis, and the depth of his performance adds a lot to the complexity of his character.
But the real star of the show is sentient goon bag Esquie. It’s hard not to love the wisdom spouting, rock-collecting marshmallow who could end the Paintress in minutes, but he’s too lazy to do so.
Near-perfect JRPG mechanics
Turn-based RPGs are some of the most difficult mechanics to balance. Too few combat options and this style of game becomes repetitive. Too many, and it becomes overwhelming; not to mention, over-budget for game developers. In a genre that’s notoriously hard to get right, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 combines innovative combat mechanics with clever storytelling to re-energise the turn-based RPG genre.
You’ll find your classic menu of character skills alongside innovative and unique classes for each character. It’s a refreshing break from the often gendered roles of women in JPRGs, where the good girl is a healer, and the goth girl a black mage. Instead, the smallest girl, Maelle, is your most powerful weapon. And yes, if you’ve heard, Maelle’s Stendhal skill is completely nerfed.
But the real trick to player engagement are the real-time parries and dodges. Miss a cue on the screen because you’re distracted, and it could spell disaster for the Expedition. You won’t get bored, because you’re too busy paying attention to the enemy attacks.
As with any RPG, it gets easier as the game progresses, although most bosses are reasonably levelled for where the characters are at in the story. On balanced mode, I didn’t find any particularly difficult – although I came to Expedition 33 from playing Elden Ring, so nothing is hard these days. Except for the mini-games. I’m an Elden Lord who can’t beat a single gestral beach mini-game; thankfully you don’t need to in order to advance the story.
Late game, I relied on tried-and-true combinations, rather than risking new builds. I would have liked to tag team members in and out, depending on the fight. It’s almost as if you have to fight a boss once in order to figure out your strategy, then come back a second time to beat it with the right team.
These spectacular boss battles combine cinematic elements with storytelling, seamlessly moving between turn-based combat, cut scenes, and the meta-narrative of the fight. A game that uses the very mechanics to tell the story of grief and loss? That’s some seriously impressive narrative design. It’s exciting to me as a player and a writer to see these things work in concert; more often, games feel developed in separate streams by separate teams. Here they work together brilliantly. At some points, these cinematics make it hard to gauge when an attack is going to hit, but I’ll take it in exchange for sweeping, narrative-driven boss battles.
Stylistically inconsistent?
Alongside grief comes the expression of art. These two ideas are inextricably linked throughout the game; we create art to express the inexpressible. There’s no doubt it’s a beautiful game to look at. But if the Paintress is an artist, I never got a full impression of her style. While the world is inspired by Belle Époque Paris, I didn’t get a sense of the Paintress’ style. Was she a classical landscape artist? An impressionist? There’s a missed opportunity to push the style beyond the fantasy as it exists here; I’m thinking of the impressive Timeless River level of Kingdom Hearts II.
This inconsistency of vision of the Paintress’ art carries across to the world style. There’s a constant art-school switch from colour to black and white. I wondered what could have been if a change in visual style had been used to differentiate these scenes.
The animations could use more finesse matching mouth movements to the vocals. I read the subtitles more often than looking at the characters’ mouths as they spoke. I even put the game in French to see if this was a translation issue, but the out-of-sync lip movements continued. Less problematic in cut scenes than in engaging with NPCs, but frustrating if you’re trying to create a sense of intimacy between the characters and player, and their stories.
And there’s just quality of life fixes the game deserves. Like fixing the many fatal errors I experienced while playing the game. Thankfully, the auto-save is reliable. Or being able to mark the map with notes, or to fast travel. Although then you’d miss out on the joy of Esquie’s bark: ‘Time for a swim swim!’
And that soundtrack, oh boy…
Despite being a musician, I don’t normally write about soundtracks. Too often, soundtracks feel generic to me. But Clair Obscur has one of the greatest video game soundtracks I’ve ever heard. It does what a good soundtrack should do; not just provide background music, but tell the story. Each character has their own theme, and if you understand French, you garner more insight into them and their stories. Team members are musicians, and they bring their creativity to their more technical roles. This music reflects their inner journey; the soaring vocals an expression of the internal cry of grief.
Which brings us full circle. To that hard feeling that haunts us all: grief.
How many of us have played video games to come to terms with grief? To mark the passing of time when all seems lost? To have hope when none is found?
At its heart, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is about the stories and art we make out of grief. At one point a character muses on “how deeply attached we become to the worlds we create”. These worlds become beloved memorials to the ones we have lost; it’s no wonder they’re hard to hold on to, and even harder to let go.
I admire the boldness of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It makes big narrative choices that don’t always work. But in doing so, it’s giving permission for ambitious storytelling, the kind where characters drive the narrative, where combat works in concert with the story, and where games talk to us in our grief.
As the expeditioners say, when one falls, we continue.
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