After many years of reviewing games I’d inadvertently set myself a long list of boundaries that, for whatever reason, I wouldn’t cross. It started with simple things, like I had to review games that came out in the same year (making January a rough month), reviews had to follow a pattern and I had to complete at least the main campaign/story/core game loop. These helped, for a while, but years on and as my life changed those rules soon became a noose. So for the better part of a year now I’ve been casting those rules off, one by one, freeing myself from my own tyranny.
I write all this because in the past something like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would not have even got a second look. I’ll save you the homework of going through my back catalogue of reviews to figure out why, it’s simple: I’ve loathed turned based combat games for a good long while. I think the last one I played was probably Final Fantasy 7 which, technically, wasn’t fully turn based but pretty much every game that implements something along those lines has gotten a swift no from me. Indeed when I came face to face with the game’s first combat section I almost put it down right then and there, thinking that there was no way I could see myself enjoying this.
I was so wrong, and I couldn’t be happier saying that.
Across the sea you can make out a figure, a giant woman hiding her face from view as she cradles her knees tightly. Above her head is a giant glowing number, one that’s been there for the past year: 34. Once a year she’ll stand up, wipe the number away and replace it with another that’s one less. Those who are that old will disappear, gommage we’ve come to call it, vanishing in a flurry of flower petals before our very eyes. Every year we send an expedition out to her island in the hopes that one day she’ll never paint again. You’ve chosen to dedicate the last year of your life to Lumiere’s future, to cross the vast sea and explore a world that is unlike any other you’ve ever known.
Clair Obscur is an incredibly beautiful game, one that fully shows off just how capable the Unreal 5 engine can be when it’s paired with the right kind of assets. It’s also amazing to see how far the game has come over it’s development cycle, the original game looking much more indie-like compared to the AAA level visuals that it’s sporting today. The game is at its best when it’s playing with grandiose scale of the world you’re in, the vast vistas teasing at a world that’s so much bigger than the one you’re experiencing at any given time. The environments are, for the most part, relatively small but the level designers have done a great job of making them feel a lot larger while you’re in the initial stages of exploring them. This is due in no small part to the incredible level of detail that’s put into the environments, every corner providing an opportunity to hide something interesting or become a pathway to another place to explore. It all comes at a price of course, which my RTX 3090 was mostly up to paying, but it’s one of the few games in recent memory that have made me want to upgrade.
Placing Clair Obscur neatly into one game genre is a fruitless task as it borrows elements from many and brings them all together seamlessly. The core combat loop is turned based, however the amount of interactivity it demands from you means that that aspect of it just means you won’t instantly die should you step away from the computer for 10 seconds. I’ve seen many give it the soulslike tag which I agree with to a point, given the reliance the game has on understanding an enemy’s moveset in order to counter it, however that’s about as far as the similarities go. Most of the foundations of the rest of the game are from the JRPG genre although I will say that I’m basing that off decades old knowledge now. Suffice to say that Clair Obscur has endeavoured to be its own thing and it achieves that, likely setting a trend that many other games will seek to emulate in the years to come.
There are some core concepts that will be familiar though. You have a party of characters that you can take into combat, only 3 of which you can use at any one time. It would seem that the ones in combat are the only ones who get XP and level up, but it appears there’s a bit of rubber banding in place to ensure that certain characters don’t fall too far behind as to be totally useless if you never use them. The usual RPG tropes apply to their progression, levelling up to get new skills, finding/upgrading weapons with different stats and bonuses, etc. The pictos system stands in place of the usual attributes on items, giving you 3 slots to min/max stats on. Once you’ve completed 4 battles with them equipped you can then equip the bonus effect on any other character up to a set limit of points. That gives you a lot of customisation with how you can build them out and it looks like most things are pretty viable, at least for mandatory content. Optional things, however, require you to get a lot more nuanced lest you get one shot by a random encounter.
From a core gameplay perspective it starts with exploration: initially in mostly linear environments before expanding to a larger overworld that you can explore. The game puts barriers up to let you know that the world will get bigger for you as you progress which helps in making sure you don’t get too lost early on. Enemies dot the map, some of which you can avoid with careful pathing whilst others you’ll need to tackle head on. There’s a checkpoint system at various points, where you can refill your points (health, AP and revive) which, in soulslike fashion, will respawn all regular enemies. One of the great design choices that Sandfall made with the game was to make all the required content relatively straightforward, whilst hiding the real challenge in optional activities. So if you’re just playing the game to enjoy it then you’ll likely never hit a wall of difficulty, even if all you do is chase main objectives. Want a real challenge though? Go down a few winding paths, you’re sure to find something to test you.
The combat is definitely a stand out with its mix of turn based strategy and soulslike, telegraph and react quick time events. One tip I picked up early on was that dodging has a longer window than parrying, which is what I ended up defaulting to for most of the game. That being said if you’ve got dodge timing down well enough for most attacks then you can, usually, switch to parrying it with not much more skill required. In the early stages of the game dodge and parry will be a lot more meaningful than it will be later on as you’ll build out a bigger toolkit that’ll have more options to recover from any mistakes you make. You’ll quickly figure out which combos of characters, abilities and pictos best suit your playstyle the best and, for the most part, that should be viable for any encounter you find yourself in.
Not sure if this is a universal issue but there were definitely instances in the combat where I was dealing with a weird kind of input lag. Some encounters seemingly locked me out of reacting, almost as if the input recognition needed to be warmed up first before it’d react properly. I did all the usual things to combat this: plugged my keyboard in directly, turned off vsync (which is on by default by the way, even for g-sync mater race people like me) and whilst that seemed to help a bit it still didn’t address the issue completely. I even experimented with key presses to see if I was somehow thinking I was fully pressing a key when I wasn’t, but that didn’t appear to be the issue either. There’s a good chance that the Windows store app version of the game is to blame for this, as it is for any unusual behaviour I usually see like this, and I didn’t test this with a controller to see if that’d fix it (my muscle memory was developed enough at this point to make changing a painful thought).
Of the characters I typically ran with Maelle, Verso and Lune. Monoco felt viable most of the time but I really struggled to get Sciel to work properly, at least with the way I was approaching most encounters. Thinking back on it more this is probably because I was viewing each of the characters as damage dealers primarily, with a support ability or two to use when needed. Seeing some of the other builds that people have done though shows that most of the top tier combos come from having a dedicated buffer/support, main damage dealer and one who has a foot in both camps to round everything out. My usual cheat of looking at build guides wasn’t entirely helpful as most of the content out there seems dedicated to building out characters once you have access to the full map, something that doesn’t happen until you’re about 2/3rds of the way through the game. To be fair though it’s not like I was struggling before then, but I certainly wasn’t living the overpowered fantasy that I like to for most of the game.
Progression comes fast and often, probably too often if I’m honest. After pretty much every encounter you’re likely to have levelled up at least one of your party members, picked up some form of loot or acquired something that you can use to increase your power. This can get rather repetitive after a while as you’ll be forever greeted with the option to do something, which you can ignore of course, but you’ll always then be questioning whether or not you should go back and re-min/max everything so you won’t fail that encounter again. The flip side of this though is that if you’re wanting to try something different with the party members you’ve neglected then it usually isn’t too hard to get them back up to speed.
Part of this might also be a misjudgement on my part as to how the game wants to you manage progression. Going back to camp regularly is definitely a thing in Clair Obscur, but for a good chunk of the game you don’t really have the option to do that whenever you want. So I got into a usual rhythm of spending a couple hours clearing out an area from end to another, camping once, then finding the next area to go to. That meant time between camps felt pretty long, and so did upgrades. So those checkpoints where you could do some of the non-camp related things seemed like they were begging to be used whenever I saw them. Thing is though, those level ups you get in between aren’t usually game changing by themselves, they’re incremental, so it’s unlikely to really change what you’re doing. Perhaps it’d be better instead then to go longer between drinks, keep the upgrade fatigue down and perhaps then see a more meaningful impact from those choices. This is making it hard for me not to go back for a NG run…
Before I delve into story spoiler territory one last thing that deserves a big mention is the soundtrack which goes far harder than it has any right to. The composer, who was found by the devs on SoundCloud, had never done a game soundtrack before but you’d never know it. They did an amazing job of capturing the vibe of JRPG and other eastern-styled games whilst giving it the right overtones to suit the world of Clair Obscur. It being all in French did mean that some of the songs went right over my head, but reading some of the lyrics to my favourite tracks just made it all the better. Really the whole story of how Clair Obscur came to be is an amazing one and the fact they’ve managed to accomplish what they have says a lot about the state of the AAA game industry today.
PLOT SPOILERS BELOW
It was really, really refreshing to play a game that was exceptionally well written for a change. The game’s opening moments were more than enough to carry past my initial inertia of not wanting to engage in turned based combat precisely because they didn’t spend 2 hours just exposition dumping on me. Instead I was focused on the characters, on Gustav’s history with Sophie and Maelle, how people would react to something as insane as the gommage (they create a whole damn festival for it, incredible!). Having an overarching goal that’s always there as a constant reminder also helps drive the story forward at a good pace, especially when almost all areas and interactions are laced with so much foreshadowing that’s not obvious until the great reveal.
I have to say though, at the conclusion of Act 2, I definitely struggled for another hour or so. There was so much build up to that moment that not being given a long time to breath afterward made it hard to want to push on. To be sure, I knew I wasn’t done, but it felt really hard to want to push on since I’d, you know, done the thing. I think it was also because I hadn’t really grasped the full reality of what had really transpired there, thinking that the main reveal was more going to be something like a time loop than the whole painted world scenario. That being said though the drip feeding of reveals that give you just enough to speculate wildly was superbly done.
In the end I chose to Maelle’s ending for my head canon conclusion to the story, even though after seeing Vero’s one I’m in the camp that her ending is indeed the bad one. I’m still OK with my choice as it feels like the one that she would make, even though in reality what’s best for her is to move on. Not only that it also opens up the possibility of another Clair Obscur that takes place in the real world, one that explores those mysterious “Writers” who were responsible for Maelle’s capture and Vero’s death. Maybe I’m just getting sucked too deeply into a world that may never be fleshed out, but the possibilities there are incredibly intriguing.
PLOT SPOILERS OVER
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 shows the power of what can be accomplished with a strong creative vision that is unencumbered by the faults of the AAA games industry. It’s a well written, fully realised world that does something that few games have done in the past: make me enjoy something I knew I didn’t like, forcing me to reevaluate an entire genre I’d let slip by me for all these years. It came at me out of left field, with only an interesting trailer and the fact it was on Xbox Gamepass being the two things it had going for it. Suffice to say, some 30 hours later, I’ve only part of what it has to offer and I want more. Sandfall Interactive has set the bar astronomically high for themselves with this but, like many great indie studios who’ve done similar before them, I’m sure they’ll use this success to reach even greater heights.
Rating: 9.5/10
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and PC right now for $69.95. Game was played on the PC with 30.2 hours of total playtime and 50% of the achievements unlocked. Game is also available on Xbox Gamepass.
