When One Falls, We Continue - An Essay on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

This essay contains spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Part 1: The Window

"Art can be a window, and art can be a mirror."

It's January 26, 2013, and the winter air still has a bite to it. Today, I will learn that my granddad is dead.

At this point I've been fencing as an after-school hobby for about two years, and have yet to win a single real award for it, until now. I've never been much of a sports person, despite my granddad's best efforts; his wiffle ball games and ping pong sets had been a beloved pastime for me and my sister, but nothing more than that. But today, I'm feeling electric. The tournament is over, and I've come out with a shiny silver trophy. I walk back to the car, and my mom sits me down in the open passenger side door. It's there that she delivers the news.

I'm not one to hold grief close, but it follows us all in different ways. I kept his college medals, his firefighter pin. I still have his old baseball mitt in a drawer, though I never got past wiffle ball. But in the 12 years since his passing, the things I cherish most are not the things I have of his, but the memories they invoke, and the changes they made in me.

There are ripples a death leaves on a life. But who decides when we've died? At what point are the ripples more important than the splash?

Verso Dessandre's death is not one we ever see in the runtime of Clair Obscur, but it is easily the most important. Long before we've even met the character, we feel its ripples. From beginning to end, every part of the game is in some way a reaction to it: a ripple from a ripple. And it begins, of course, with the first character we ever see, even before we open the game.

The cover art for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

It's an interesting and very intentional choice that the centerpiece of Clair Obscur's cover art is not any of the playable characters. In fact, on first glance, they're almost hard to see. The placement, lighting, and motion of the image instead direct your eye to a single mourning figure: The Paintress.

Most of the characters, or players, for that matter, are not aware enough to recognize the significance of her aching posture at the beginning of the game, but the ripples of Verso's death that come off of her are the most palpable. From her, it comes in the form of a wave: The Gommage. Literally, "The Erasing", the wave of death that shortens the lifespan of every human being by one year. Clair Obscur doesn't tell us about the ripples of Verso's death. Instead, it allows us to feel the effects firsthand through the characters, starting with the Gommage of Sophie, the love interest of our main character Gustave.

Loss begets loss. In turn, we see the grieving reaction of Lumière's own population: The Expeditions. Missions to kill The Paintress in an act of pure vengeance — one that everyone in the Lumière knows is fruitless (Gustave's sister calls them "a bloodless guillotine"), but that people sign up for anyways. Grief, as Sophie points out in her final moments, is a cycle that both The Paintress and the Expeditions are trapped in.

But the experiences and reactions to the cycle of grief are not the same for everyone. The soft, vanishing sorrow that The Paintress exudes is juxtaposed immediately by the brutal, gory rage of the White Haired Man, who summarily executes almost the entire Expedition moments after they land on shore. For the players, the combination of these two forms of grief lays waste to nearly every named character we've met, all within the first 15 minutes of the game.

Clair Obscur needs to do this, because it needs us to understand that our grief, and the grief of the characters, is real. It's messy. It is often wrong and illogical. It's different for everyone. And more often than not, the passive form of grief is self-replicating. Ripples, without being absorbed, will only grow into more ripples. Clair Obscur is a game that makes its own ripples; some that splash at our feet, some that grow into titanic waves; and asks everyone, from the characters to the players: "What will you do to them? What will they do to you?". And more than that, "Who decides when we've died?".

But Clair Obscur also reminds us that there is always a way out of the cycle. After Expedition 33 is destroyed, when Gustave is on the edge of despair and ready to die, he is saved by the motto of the expeditions — and really, the motto of the game as a whole — "When One Falls, We Continue"

A portrait of the Dessendre family, located in the Manor

We can't talk further about the game without talking about the Dessendre family. The Dessendres are Painters; powerful people who use Chroma to create living canvases, worlds that contain pieces of their very souls. Aline was a master of this work, who taught her husband, Renoir, the art. Together, they passed it down to their children. Their firstborn, Clea, was a prodigy left to her own devices. The youngest, Alicia, though she had the gift, was never very interested in painting. And then there was Verso.

Verso only ever made a single canvas. Alicia was too young at the time, but the rest of the family would often join Verso there. They spent time with the characters he made, and they painted in the canvas alongside him. Verso created the landscape and the creatures within it, including his best friends, Esquie and Monoco. Aline added Lumière, and all of the people within it. Renoir created the Axons, huge painted representations of all of the other family members. Clea populated the land with nevrons, strange monsters that gave them a challenge to face and overcome.

Of the five members of the family, three made it out of the fire unscathed: Aline, Renoir, and Clea. Alicia survived, but was scarred. The fire melted her face and singed her throat, rendering her all but silent. Verso was not so lucky.

Though the manor could be repaired, Verso could not. All they had left of him was the canvas that they had made together, and Aline could not help but sink into it. In the canvas, she used her power to create new versions of her family, so she'd never have to leave. Renoir followed her in and attempted to pull her out, damaging the canvas in the process. Alicia, at Clea's behest, tried to help her father, but was unable to save herself from Aline's chroma. She was reborn in the world of the canvas as Maelle. And Clea, alone as always, left to fend for herself.

The story of Clair Obscur is really the story of the five of them, in all of their forms. To uncover the full portrait, we have to see how Verso's death rippled off of each of them, and then, how those ripples found us.

Verso, holding out his hand towards the camera, surrounded by growing fire

Part 2: The Mirror

Recently, I spent some time sorting through the boxes of old schoolwork that my parents had stored. Buried under a dusty lid and about 10 pounds of 4th grade worksheets, I found a short story I had written about the day my granddad died. It was a nonfiction piece, for a simple assignment that didn't warrant a death story.

The thing that surprised me most was how simply I had written it. In the story, it took up about two sentences; He was here, and then he wasn't. In the days after his passing, the ripples from my granddad's life hadn't made themself clear on me yet, and so, the portrait was unfinished. Despite being closer to the point of impact, it's effects weren't realized. The art that I made in response to it wasn't an accurate representation of his life, or what he meant to me.

For the Dessendre family, the moments after Verso's death and the art that spawned from it were not the whole story. It takes months, years even, for those impacts to become clear, for those closest to loss to realize what it means to them. Unfortunately, those with immense power often fail to see when they should hold off on using it.

Verso holds Aline, The Paintress, after defeating her at the end of Act II

Aline is, as far as we are aware, the most powerful painter in the world. She is also no stranger to the risks of the art, and she has spent years witnessing the cycle of grief. In fact, she saved Renoir when he became trapped in a canvas. In the wake of the fire, Aline knew that entering the canvas would be suicide. For Aline, Verso's death wasn't the start of a cycle, but a catalyst.

Instead of happy escapism, Aline wallows. As Renoir says, "We don’t even share the bonds of grief anymore. She walks her path and I walk mine. I don’t exist to her. None of us do. She’s left us all behind to drown by ourselves, so that she can drown alone…" Even her painted humans create the motto of the expeditions, demanding that they do the thing that Aline cannot: Continue when one falls. Move on, instead of drowning in grief.

Aline's art, too, betrays her emotions. After all, it is a mirror. Even in the replicas of her family that she paints for comfort, the pain shines through.

She paints a Clea who falls in love with one of her painted humans, giving her a reason to stay that the real Clea would never be bound to. She paints a new Renoir, with a son still alive, but she paints him with the memories of the real Verso's death — a father who remembers the death of his still-living son. She paints a new Alicia, but cannot help but give her the scars from the fire — she sees no difference between this one, choked and rendered silent, and the one who lived before. She even drives this Alicia away, too agonizing is the memory of the fire: "Her pain is a broken mirror, the shards reflecting back tenfold. Every moment with her, the cuts deepen, and I feel myself unravelling…". And she paints a Verso who knows that he is not real, who knows he cannot possibly replace what was lost.

As The Paintress, Aline exerts her power and control over the entire canvas, painted family included, forcing them to suffer alongside her. Even in an attempt to save them, preventing the Gommage from killing them all at once and warning them with the monolith, Aline inadvertently brings the people of Lumière into the cycle with her. They, like her, cannot accept one simple truth: They lost. Aline drives herself to death's door to escape her grief, and it finds her anyways.

It takes time to recognize what grief offers to us. After nearly 200 years of living in the canvas, it's her real daughter and her imagined son that save her. The painted Verso, as with the real Verso, wants to be let go. He leads Maelle to Aline's self-made prison and banishes her, allowing Renoir to wipe her influence on the canvas clean. But she does not stay out for long. In the final confrontation with Renoir Aline returns, but this time it's different. She isn't the cracked, hollow visage we see after her centuries of mourning, she's herself again. And this time, she hasn't entered to fulfill her own grief; she's entered because she wants to ask forgiveness — of Verso, of Maelle, of the people she made. She returns to the canvas, putting herself on the edge of death again, but this time to give those she tormented the chance to choose for themselves. It's all Verso would've wanted. It's the only way for a chance to break the cycle.

Renoir, face disfigured after extended time inside the canvas

Much like Aline, Renoir's grief manifests as a form of control. For Renoir, everything is a narrative. Every story must have a moral, every person a tragic flaw. Renoir believes that everyone is doomed, and that because he understands that, he has a responsibility to save them from themselves. With this mindset, anyone who simply stops — to grieve, to mourn, to wallow, good or bad — is at best delaying the inevitable, or at worst denying reality. Renoir loves Verso as much as Aline does, but in his mind, the only way to move forward is to sacrifice everything. Erasing (Gommaging) the last piece of Verso's soul isn't just a safety measure, it's a catharsis. It's the final, heroic, tragic sacrifice that Renoir sees as the conclusion of his own story. It's the only way to bring his family back. An ironic twist to his favorite attack pattern, Renoir is unable to see in gradients, everything is simply black or white.

Renoir's tragic views of his family are painted out in the canvas as well, in the form of the Axons. Each are beautiful, powerful beings, suffering from their ultimate failing. Clea is represented as a hunched figure, carrying an entire city on her back, protecting it at the cost of her own life and taking the weight of the world on her own because she refuses to accept help. Aline is Sirène, "she who plays with wonder". To Renoir, she is a beautiful, powerful figure, who cannot help but control others with her art. Like the real Aline she isolates herself, surrounded only by those she created.

Alicia is The Reacher, "she who grasps the sky". To Renoir, The Reacher represents his hope for Alicia, that one day she might grasp her full potential. But the foundational implication is that Alicia will never succeed; one cannot build a wooden tower to the stars. Instead, The Reacher seems emblematic of a paternal scoff: As the father he knows she will never succeed, but he can find beauty in her naivete.

And as his last Axon, Verso become Visages, "he who guards truth with lies". While all of the Axons are painted with the context of the fire, Visages is the only Axon painted of someone deceased. Renoir's choice to paint his dead son as a faceless being shows that he is not seeing him as a person anymore, but as an event that is impacting others — the splash his death made, rather than the ripples. Visages is more a representation of Verso's canvas than the boy himself, full of all of the competing emotions that his family is trying to force onto him.

In the end, it takes Aline to save him. Seeing Aline re-enter the canvas, making the ultimate sacrifice for her daughter, reminds him that he does not know everything. It wasn't that the two of them didn't "share the bonds of grief", it was that their bonds manifested in fundamentally different ways. Not wrong, but different. Only then does he see that the salvation he's trying to force on his family may not be what they want, and that bringing his family back together by force will only drive them further apart. Only through giving up control, and accepting that everyone processes grief differently, can he ever have a chance to save what's left of the Dessendres.

The boss fight against the painted Clea, in the Floating Manor

Playing through only the main story of Clair Obscur will leave you with almost no read on where Clea fits in. Nearly every bit of history involved with her interactions in the canvas are buried behind side quests, optional bosses, challenge modes, and deep map exploration. This mechanical distance that the game places Clea at mirrors the physical distance that her own grief drives her to.

In the main story, we see what at first seems like the most sensible of the family's responses to the fire. Instead of wallowing in grief like her mother or lashing out like her father, Clea is going off to find the culprits of the murder. Only through the eyes of the other members of her family and the beings in the canvas itself do we see just how much this too is a ripple.

As she has been frequently represented, Clea's coping mechanism is distance. She deals with death by putting herself as far away from it as possible. She wants to get her family back from the canvas, but she doesn't want to look Verso's death in the eye any longer than she has to. Instead, she paints. In order to help Renoir, she repaints her mother's recreation of her, creating what is essentially a nevron factory. She then seeks out the person who her painted version fell in love with, an expeditioner named Simon, and tricks him into killing her Axon. In one fell swoop, Clea disconnects herself from her mother, her father, and her brother, all while justifying it to herself as efficient.

By digging deep into the game, we start to learn just how much of herself Clea has had to carve out to reach this level of nonchalance. In the Endless Tower, we find a small shred of Clea's soul, and learn that as Clea and Verso were growing up, the two were very close. They were the first to work together on Verso's canvas, with Clea creating the nevrons originally as a challenge for him to face and overcome. In the Floating Manor, we find the repainted Clea, trapped in her studio. In the same way that Aline's painted family held the seeds of their creator's grief, this Clea holds hers. At the end of the fight, unable to be free of the responsibility that she has forced upon herself, the painted Clea summons the nevrons to kill her.

Esquie's statue of François and Clea

But the canvas wasn't always about Clea teaching Verso lessons, or being the most grown-up of the children. Inside, we also find hints about how Clea used to be, before she cut herself off. In one of the final companion quests for Esquie, Verso carves a sculpture of Clea and François. The stone turtle denies it's meaningfulness at first, but privately cries over the gesture later. In the time before the fire, Clea made friends in the Canvas. She found purpose. With the presence of Simon, it's possible she even found love. Her absence, and her further attack on the canvas's life, even hurts the remnants of Verso's soul. In the manor, we hear him say "Why… Why would she paint these things? Eating the world… eating our world… We used to have fun here… Together…". Whether or not those people were "real" didn't matter, because the connections she made were.

Verso's death did hurt Clea, whether she lets on or not. Renoir includes it in his speech towards the end of the game: "Since the fire, our family has crumbled. Aline in the Canvas. Clea fighting her solitary war. You, a living ghost. Verso’s death broke us."

The truth is, there's a healthy dose of grief. Take too much and you can drown in it, but take too little, and you cut yourself off from emotion entirely. To be able to be happy, we have to understand sadness. Clea removing herself from her grief is as integral to the cycle as Aline immersing herself in it.

Painted Verso (right) holding hands with the real Verso's soul (left)

We have already talked extensively about Verso. His painted self acts as a constant reminder of his loss to the other members of the family, and he himself is constantly seeking an escape, a way to end his own life that he sees causing so much hardship to his family. But instead, I think it's more interesting to look at Verso through the person he actually was, not the vision that Aline saw.

There are still many memories of Verso left in the canvas. The landscape of the world itself, the gestrals, the grandis, but most important of all are his two best friends, Monoco and Esquie.

Monoco and Esquie probably knew Verso better than his own family did. They were, after all, little pieces of his soul. The radiating positivity that Esquie exudes is a part of Verso that we don't see in Aline's recreation, a part that was lost in the grief. Monoco, in a similar way, is silly. He hits himself in the head with his bell. Like the other gestrals, he loves fighting more than anything. Their narrative functions as comedic relief and a spot of light in the darkness is probably the same way that Verso worked for his family, when he was still alive.

Esquie in particular has a few moments where his light shines through. In the final relationship conversation, Verso asks him if he ever misses the old Verso. Esquie does, of course, but he doesn't hold that against the painted Verso. "You’re my friend. Other Verso was also my friend. You are – cousins. Same same, but each different. Why would that bother me?". Esquie, silliest, most absurd character in the game, often proves to be the wisest. It takes much longer for most of the others to recognize the value in both worlds.

Esquie also has one of my favorite interactions in the entire game, this time with Sciel. Sciel has no connection to the Dessendres, besides that she was created by Aline, but she does have a connection to grief. Early in the game, we learn that she once had a husband, who passed away before his gommage. Much like her creator Aline, the grief from his loss drives her to try and drown herself; this time, literally. She swims out to sea and falls unconscious, but wakes up back on shore, being resuscitated. It's then that she learns she was pregnant, and in her near-death, she's lost the baby.

In a late relationship conversation, we learn that on that day, when Sciel tried to drown herself, Esquie was the one who saved her. This is one of our first signs that the cycle is not unbreakable. Sciel manages to move forward with the help of Verso, the real Verso. Her grief stays with her, but it changes from something that would kill her into something that drives her. By the end of the game, the real Verso will do that for the Dessendres, too.

Who decides when we've died? For Verso, it's very literally out of his control. His friends and family force him to keep living, despite his overwhelming desire for anything else. Metaphorically, how can we ever die, as long as the people around us refuse to let go?

Verso's death causes ripples, but he does not truly die until his family has accepted that he's gone. In doing so they deny him the freedom of choice and the purpose of his existence. Change and growth only come with time, and his family can't bear to give themselves that.

Alicia becoming Maelle as she enters the canvas

Maelle is different from the rest of her family in two major ways. The first is that her character is the closest we ever get to a bridge between the world inside the canvas and the one outside. Since Maelle literally is Alicia, even with her paint makeover by Aline, she is the only one who truly understands both the troubles of the family outside the world, and the terrible cycle and the toll it takes on those living inside the canvas. The second is that Alicia is the only one who was actually there at the time of Verso's death. She gets to live with both the survivor's guilt, and the battle scars. She even gets to believe that Verso's death is her fault, whether or not it's true, and whether or not she could've saved him.

Maelle and Alicia grieve in similar ways: Silently. After the Gommage, Gustave finds her standing alone on the dock, staring at the Paintress as the others celebrate and prepare for their doomed voyage. She loathes the power the Paintress holds over her life, and would rather die fighting it than living her next 9 years in the pillowy prison of Lumière.

Alicia has always had to live in the shadow of others. Even her presence in the canvas wasn't her choice, but Clea's. Her own father calls her a living ghost. Inside the canvas, however, Maelle has a chance to choose for herself.

Maelle grieves this way throughout the game. When Renoir finally hunts down Gustave, killing her canvas older brother in a way that eerily mirrors the unstoppable force that killed Verso, she lashes out at the others for not feeling how she feels. Later, Verso finds her alone at a pond instead of with the others, looking out at the Paintress the same way she did when the Gommage happened.

Maelle's interactions with the painted Alicia are some of my favorites in the entire game. The painted Alicia lives a silent, tragic life, not dissimilar to the one that the real one lived outside of the Canvas. She never makes decisions for herself, instead relegated to following around her brother or father, choosing a side but never making her own. Maelle, on the other hand, is more alive than ever. Through most of the game, she is free and fighting. She is constantly deciding for herself, even when those decisions are dangerous.

But Maelle isn't free from the cycles of grief either. Despite her loathing of the Paintress, as the game goes on, she becomes more and more like her. She is a paintress too, after all. But as she uncovers more of her powers and her memories, her grief begins to turn the same way Aline's did. The fight to stop the Gommage instead turns into a fight to remain in the canvas, the very thing that caused the fracture in the first place. She isn't giving up Verso any more than her mother did.

Maelle's "Gommage" ability, unlocked towards the end of the game

These shifts in her character are represented through her game mechanics, too. She unlocks her "Painted Power" after defeating Aline for the first time, and a suite of abilities revolving around controlling her chroma. And of course, it's no coincidence that the final ability she learns is simply called "Gommage". By the end of the game, Maelle is teetering on the brink of falling in exactly the same way Aline did.

But Maelle is the player's main character at this point, and she hasn't made her final decision yet. She's proven that she understands that grief sometimes needs to be a personal choice. When the painted Alicia asks Maelle to Gommage her, she agrees. She even forgives Verso for letting Gustave die, even though she's hurt by it. She understands that each of them have different needs.

This internal conflict, between her life inside of the canvas and her life outside, is the one that drives the ending of the game. It's what makes this final scene so interesting. This is the final answer to the question of who decides when we die.

Maelle's ending of the game

I want to preface this section by saying this: The first time I completed the game, I chose to side with Maelle, and I did so wholeheartedly believing that it was the correct choice. I have since changed my mind.

The thing that's so devilishly clever about the final choice between Verso and Maelle is that it makes you reconsider everything you've done in the game so far. We've been with Maelle the entire game. We've watched her fight tooth and nail for her loved ones, and as the player, we've literally been fighting alongside her. The ending asks us, as much as it asks Maelle, if we'd be willing to sacrifice everyone we've met in the canvas for the sake of the family we've only seen from a distance.

The game puts us in the same shoes as Maelle. We know that the game is fake as much as Maelle knows that the canvas is, but we still feel connected to the characters inside it, and the relationships we've built. It's these connections that blind us to the truth: That any choice where we hold on will only serve to continue the cycle.

The final choice is also emblematic of the dichotomy between Maelle and Alicia. What matters more, the splash that our death makes (Maelle), or the ripples that come after (Alicia)? It's made further complex by the reality that Maelle and Alicia are inseparable. Maelle can stay in the canvas and live out the rest of her life, but she will never be free from the knowledge that she is Alicia, and her grief has caused her to stay here. Alicia can exit the canvas, but she will never lose the power, confidence, and freedom that she learned to harness as Maelle. As Verso says, "You're Maelle, no matter where you are".

But at first, I was fooled. I believed that the separation could exist, and that there was no need to erase the entire canvas just to keep them out of it. My mistakes here were twofold.

The first was that I believed Maelle could be free from the cycle. Despite the game telling me directly, I thought Maelle would leave someday, having taken her fill of mourning, and return to the world. I was blind to the path she was following, how similar to Aline she had become. The moment I first realized this was about halfway through the ending cutscene, when I saw Gustave and Sophie walking down the aisle together, alive again.

I was told that this would happen. The game spelled out very clearly that everyone who died could be brought back with the paintress's power. But seeing Gustave alive again, after spending the whole game seeing the ripples of his death and how much of an impact it had had on Maelle, the feeling was visceral. Gustave's rebirth wasn't beautiful, it was wrong. In one motion, Maelle had undone every ripple that Gustave had ever made on her life. His sacrifice was meaningless because it wasn't real anymore. She had recreated Gustave and Sophie in the same way that Aline had recreated her family, and I couldn't help but think that Maelle had filled them with her grief too.

My second mistake was not realizing that both choices took someone's freedom away. I believed at first that Verso's choice would take away Maelle's right to live in the canvas, and say goodbye to her friends. I didn't realize that Maelle's choice would take away Verso's right to die.

Over the course of the game we meet fragments of Verso's soul. They all say different things, but the through-line is the same as the painted Verso. He's tired. All he wants to do is stop painting. He never even liked painting that much. Piano was always his favorite.

Maelle spends the whole game battling against others controlling her life, but when it comes down to it, she isn't willing to give that freedom to others. She's willing to set Alicia free when she asks for it because she doesn't know Alicia, doesn't have the same familial connection. But she does know Verso, and she isn't willing to let him go in the same way, as much as he begs.

When I saw the way Verso looked at me — directly into the camera, at me, the player — I felt horrible. I understood what I had done to him, only minutes too late.

An older Verso, kept alive by Maelle

The other ending is sad, too. Maelle is forced to come to terms with her grief, saying goodbye not just to Verso, but to every person she's met inside the canvas. You feel the rage emanating from Lune and Sciel as they realize what you've done, and fade away. But in this ending, though one choice path is taken away, Verso's sacrifice makes room for a world of possibility.

Only by saying goodbye can Maelle finally be free. Only when she decides that Verso is truly dead, can she find the strength to move forward. Only then can she fulfill the promise of the expedition.

It's been a while since I've written about my granddad, but letting someone go doesn't mean they stop meaning something to you. When one falls, We Continue.