Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Game Review

The first half of this review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will not contain spoilers. There will be a warning before spoilers begins.

When I was too young to read most novels on my own, my dad spent some of his evenings regaling my sister and I with the stories. As with many kids, some of the earliest books I fell in love with were the classic epic fantasies: The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings. When I got old enough to read them for myself, these became The Shannara Chronicles, the Inheritance Cycle, and more, and more, and more. But as I've grown older, and especially as I've read more epic fantasy, the allure of these books has worn a little thin. The problem, I think, is novelty.

These books are all wonderful in their own rights, but over time I learned to recognize the patterns that underlie all of these books. Instead of getting lost in the worlds, I could see them for the words on the page that they were. Even great epic fantasy RPGs that I thoroughly enjoyed, like Dragon Age: Origins and Inquisition, games that were born to live up to those old tomes, never managed to meet that childhood wonder.

Expedition 33 is a game that reminds me how grand these stories used to feel.

The narrative and aesthetic direction of Expedition 33 have been widely recognized as the game's main attraction, and I'm inclined to agree. Of all of the games I've played that involved exploring into a mysterious land, E33 achieves the rare feat of feeling truly alien, while still feeling grounded and consistent in its own logic.

This is supported almost entirely by the deeply cooperative effort from the character artists, environment artists, enemy designers, and narrative designers. E33 adamantly refuses to engage with most classic high fantasy tropes; even the ones it does riff on twisted, altered, and melded as to be almost unrecognizable.

The narrative arc of Expedition 33 feels both grounded and incredibly complex, clearly inspired by the classic story patterns of high fantasy while still invested in telling an original and nuanced story. E33 is not afraid to look you in the eye and tell you that everything you expected was wrong, and it'll look good doing it.

To be clear, there were parts of the game that I didn't love. I personally have never been a real fan of turn based RPG combat, and even the adjustments made in E33 weren't enough to save it for me. Because of my relative disinterest for the combat, I didn't spend much time making builds for my characters until I could no longer progress without it, around the beginning of act 3. At this point, once I did optimize my build, the combat became almost irrelevant with the amount of damage I was dealing. While the game does offer you ways to challenge yourself, the core combat especially in the late game can be undermined relatively easily.

There's also something I've been chewing on with the story: For the first time in a while, E33 presented me with a narrative that I didn't fully understand the first time through. The amount of nuance and complexity layered into the story means that if you're not paying full attention to many little details throughout the entire game, you will likely miss things and be surprised by reveals later on. I even picked what I now believe to be the bad ending, despite being confident in my choice going in.

After a bit of thinking about this, I've decided that this isn't a failing of the game. Many of the best books I've read have had a similar kind of density, becoming more rewarding for people willing to spend additional time pulling them apart. I just wasn't quite used to games that work in the same way.

Overall, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 earns a fantastic 93/100. As with all of my reviews, a rating of over 50 indicates that I enjoyed the game.

A deeper review including spoilers will continue below.

The depth of the world in Clair Obscur is the first thing that really sold me on the game. There have been many games I've played that have been filled with journals, notes, and environmental scraps, but most of them fall short of achieving the feeling of a world existing outside of the player. Supported both by the individual levels and the multitude of modes of transportation on the main map, the landscape of The Continent feels like an expedition in exactly the way it needs to. Exploring it for clues about the past adds an additional layer of interest.

Both the narrative setup of the previous expeditions and the higher-level framing of the game set up a perfect opportunity to build a world that feels real and grounded. I often read the random journals in RPGs like this, but I actually remembered some of them from E33.

Many of the journals and side character dialogue entries also do a great job at building towards the major twists of the game, without giving it away. As with great twists, each piece of dialogue seems to hit at something you're already aware of, until the reveal recontextualizes them.

The writing as a whole in the game is immensely high quality. They manage to strike a very good balance of dramatic and comedic, providing a lightness to the world that meshes well with the landscape's bright colors and whimsical figures, surrounded by death and devastation. As Esquie would say, it's a very "WeeWooWeeWoo" game. Monoco's entry dialogue where he hits himself with the bell mid-challenge is probably one of the funniest scenes I've seen in an RPG.

The overall narrative of the game also lands incredibly well. The storyline is layered and complex, and despite me not fully understanding the through-line of the painter's family until very late in the game, and missing the subtext surrounding the ending choices until I had already made a decision, I usually felt like those were more failings of me as an active player, rather than the game. I felt like the game had given me all the pieces, I just hadn't quite put the puzzle together.

In my defense, the puzzle is quite dense. I think that many more casual players might feel sidelined by some elements of the story that are hinted at but not explained outright at times when they're relevant, and those casual players might not feel passionate enough to look back at the game once complete to see what they missed along the way. That's OK, not every game has to be for everyone.

The characters are emotional and well-written, although I felt like some of the romance options seemed somewhat rushed; Sciel's romance storyline seemed far more interesting to me than Lune's. The casual dialogue between characters was consistently funny, and I always felt like their connections to each other, the world, and their own histories were realistic. Despite literally never using her in combat, the slow buildup of Esquie greeting her as his "bad swimmer friend" into the reveal that he saved her after she tried to drown herself following her unborn child's death was probably one of the most powerfully I've felt about a character's backstory since playing The Last of Us.

The combat did present me with some challenges. I played on Story difficulty, which may have some relevance, but after checking in on some let's plays it seems like other folks had a similar problem. The power scaling, particularly in act 3, gets frankly pretty ridiculous. After beating the Paintress and unlocking Painted Power, the ability to break the 9,999 damage cap allows you to stack pictos in many ways to reach millions of damage in a single hit.

Particularly with Maelle's various ways of entering virtuose stance, I was able to one-shot the final boss in a single hit with relatively minimal effort. Generally this wouldn't be a huge issue, except that in a number of boss battles, particularly the final battles against Renoir and Verso/Maelle, there's a solid amount of cinematic action that happens at marked phases of the fight. I completely missed the summoning of the axons, which made me pretty surprised when I saw "Sirène rescues Renoir". I also missed the first instance of Renoir flying around the screen, which undercuts Maelle's last hit just a little bit.

The final fight against Renoir actually seems really awesome, from what I've seen in videos, so it's unfortunate that the game made it so easy to skim over. Playing in Story Mode doesn't increase outgoing damage numbers, so it seems very likely to me that this could've occurred with other players. It's my personal opinion that I shouldn't have to hamper my abilities in order to experience the game fully.

Despite this, I don't think my issues with the combat really damaged the game at all. Especially in the first two acts, there were a lot of fights that I thoroughly enjoyed, and I think playing on story mode helped me enjoy them. It's a true challenge to build this much enemy variety, particularly in ways that mesh very well with the story and world, and E33 has done an excellent job of that.

Clair Obscur has been rattling around in my brain for a while, and I'm not able to fit nearly all of my thoughts about it into this review. I didn't even get a chance to touch on its incredible soundtrack and audio design. I'm actively working on an essay about the cyclical themes of the game, and have been doing some investigative work into the deeper narrative elements to support that essay.

For now, the review is this: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a masterclass in modern epic fantasy, particularly in the form of video games. It expertly manages all elements of its aesthetic direction, and pulls gameplay in despite some struggles to create a really powerful game experience. This is a game everyone should play.