In the first hour of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Gustav, a gifted scholar with a mechanical arm, experiences the tragic loss of his ex-lover being wrenched away from him by a slow-motion apocalypse that’s tearing his world apart. The next day, he and a determined band of heroes set forth to a shattered continent to try and save what’s left of their world, treading a path laid down by the sacrifice of those who went before them. They make landfall knowing that if they fail, there won’t be many more generations left to try, but also confident that maybe, just maybe, this time they’ve found an edge thanks to Gustav’s pioneering magical techniques.
So far, so JRPG. Then a mysterious figure stalks forth from the mists, and things escalate.
As far as plot details go, that’s all you’re getting from us in this review. Clair Obscur is a masterpiece with one of the best stories ever told in this medium, and it’s a story you need to experience in all its intricate glory. At its heart the plot is the mystery of why any of this is happening, and the game does a masterful job of drip feeding you tantalising clues as it sets out the world and the players, then draws everything together in an incredibly satisfying way that does not cheapen anything that’s gone before. The front half of the game has significant echoes of the first few seasons of Lost, with mysterious figures and events hinting at some great, profound secret. Unlike Lost, the writers here actually stick the landing; once the truth outs, everything that’s come before fits seamlessly together, making it an incredible success as a piece of craft even before you get to the fact that it also succeeds at being funny, tragic and heartwarming to a degree that few games reach.
We’re going to spend a lot of time gushing about the game’s aesthetics and story, because there are no end of nice things about it, but before diving into that we should cover what it actually is as a game. Clair Obscur is a turn-based RPG in the Final Fantasy vein; your party journeys through levels, and as they do you are sometimes rudely interrupted by monsters that need to be fought. Your team and the monsters line up across from one another and take turns performing attacks that can range from simple sword swings to earth-shattering anime bullshit super moves, and this proceeds until one side falls down dead. You are supported in this by skills you can learn, weapons with damage boosts and special effects, and equipable passive effects and stat boosts you can acquire from items scattered around the world.
Every turn-based RPG has its own take on this formula, and Clair Obscur synthesises ideas from across the genre to create its (excellent) version to the point that there’s no one direct analogy that really captures how it plays. The best I can do is a three way mix: Combine Final Fantasy X’s basic structure with the active elements of a Paper Mario, and the focus on turn-to-turn resource management from Bravely Default, and that starts to give an accurate picture. The attack types, stats and elemental affinities aren’t going to surprise anyone used to a Final Fantasy or Persona, but the active elements and resource management make everything feel much more immediate.
Resource-wise, there’s no static MP or mana bar for each Character; instead, you have a stock of AP that ticks up each turn, and can be replenished by normal attacks, which you use to execute your special moves. Various equipable items (plus the parry system) give you ways to generate AP more quickly, and while in the early game you’ll often need to take a turn to do an attack between unleashing your fancy tricks, you fairly quickly stack up passive abilities to keep the energy flowing, letting you instead alternate between low-end utility moves and your big damage-dealers.
That’s even more true if you’re parrying stuff, and that moves us nearly on to the active elements. Each time your characters attack you get a little quick-time event prompt to trigger improved damage or effects, and when enemies attack you, the target (or your whole party) can attempt to either dodge or parry it by pressing the right buttons at the right time. Successfully doing either prevents you from taking damage, so if you just need to not die dodging is your friend, as the timing window is fairly generous. Parrying needs a bit more practice to nail the timing on, but when you pull it off it rewards you with AP, and if you parry an entire enemy combo, your characters execute an extremely satisfying and very powerful counterattack.
This part of the game’s combat system is probably the one that’s generated the most discourse. It’s fundamentally an action game element, and not something that everyone wants in their turn-based RPG. Unfortunately I am entirely the wrong person to tell you how harmful this is to the experience if you don’t like this sort of thing, because I am a known Dark Souls enjoyer. What I will say is that from someone who actively likes this sort of thing, the mechanics are very well tuned to help you learn and improve at them. Having the more forgiving dodge option lets you practice timing without getting constantly punished for it, and the game encourages you to use it for this; a very early upgrade you can apply to your whole party gives you an AP for the first successful dodge you make each turn, so while you can’t replenish a full AP bar by dodging a combo, you can use it to avoid gigantic single-hit super moves at essentially no cost. Most enemies also have good audio or animation cues you can use to anchor your timing. Finally, the game does introduce some “special” types of dodge/parry in the mid game, but these have much more forgiving timing and provide an opportunity to unleash big counterattacks at (relatively) low risk.
You do also have difficulty mode options to turn the experience, but again I’m the wrong person to examine this because I saw the option that (basically) said “pick this if you would like some Sekiro in your Final Fantasy” and smashed that button at speed. For what it’s worth, I got what I was asking for – the hardest main game bosses took me three or four attempts, and a few bits of optional end-game content involved multi-hour sessions trying to nail the parry timing on ten-hit nightmare beams. With that in mind, I’ll throw to Oliver to talk about how the game plays on other modes.
Keewa: As someone who likes a challenge but doesn’t enjoy being punished, I picked the less difficult option, and even then some of the bosses (both story and optional) were a real struggle to defeat. I grew up on FF7-9 so I love me a bit of turn-based combat, although CO:E33 doesn’t follow any kind of Active Time Battle formula, this is more of a strictly initiative-style turn based system, the order is defined – you can see it on the side bar – which helps your planning a bit. Let’s say it’s Lune’s turn and Sciel is pretty badly hurt. You could use Lune’s Healing Light ability to heal Sciel, but you see that Sciel will take her turn next and thus she can use her Grim Harvest ability to heal herself, leaving Lune free to bust out some of her high-damage whizz-bang pyrotechnic magic instead.
Each character has their own “thing.” Maelle moves through various “stances” in her status as a fencing damage dealer; Lune acquires various elemental “stains” on her little doohickey that can be spent to make her spells stronger, cheaper, or add different effects; Sciel’s card-based attacks add to a “foretell” counter stacked on each enemy, which are consumed by her weapon skills – coupled with a “sun, moon, twilight” quasi-stance system that changes what she does. Gustave has a magitech prosthetic arm that stores up “charges” that can be expended on a super attack, so on and so forth. Each character having their own special mechanic makes them feel special and prevents them from being fully customisable blank slates.
Combat is also complicated by the ability to spend 1AP to take an aimed “free shot” at your enemy, lots of enemies have a special “weak point” you can shoot at, either to deal very significant damage or to weaken their attack/defence. Sometimes, especially towards the beginning, these weak points are either obvious (literal glowing orbs) or very thematic (an enemy in the aquatic section has a floating naval mine on a chain on its head, no prizes for guessing what happens if you shoot at it), in later enemies they’re a little more oblique and so combat does reward experimentation and risk-taking, those free shots aren’t free!
The dodging and parrying system is an interesting mechanic in that it can be exceptionally frustrating; parrying in particular requires a quite high degree of precision – you essentially have to hit the button at the exact moment the attack would land. This is offset by the fact that each enemy attack has a specific rhythm, and once you’re familiar with a combo and locked in it’s almost like a rhythm game, combat via Guitar Hero.
James: I do have one complaint about the combat system, which is the choice to keep a “traditional” JRPG version of an Agility stat, where characters/monsters with higher agility just flat out get more turns than the others. This has the effect of making battles where there’s a significant mismatch in Agility either trivial or impossible depending on the direction, the latter being a particular shame given the active mechanics otherwise let you punch above your weight if you master them. Weapons also have “scaling” with two out of four of your stats each, and because Agility is so fundamental to how much you get to participate in a battle, you can basically discard half the weapons as late-game options out of hand; no Agility scaling, no dice.
I thought last year’s Metaphor: ReFantazio did good job of modernising this; the baseline was that every character (except bosses and powerful solo foes) got one action a turn, and Agility primarily determined what order actions happened within the turn but you could earn more actions within a turn, and acting earlier made it easier to do that (or stop the enemy doing so). It still mattered, but it wasn’t a god stat any more. Something like that would have been preferable, and also let you experiment more broadly with character customisation (which the game has plenty of depth in), rather than always keeping one eye on whether your Agility is high enough to continue to participate.
That is ultimately a minor gripe; like everything here, the combat system is very polished, and very enjoyable, and clearly shows the development team’s broad understanding of the genre. Speaking of the team; just how did they come out of seemingly nowhere to put this together?
Keewa: Everything about this game’s production is improbable in the extreme, a bizarre kind of stars align convergence made real: The devs are a relatively small team directed by Guillaume Broche – who got bored while toiling away at Ubisoft – and its ranks are filled with junior developers. Regardless of their own inexperience in the actual creation of games, the stories coming out of the production tell an incredible story; one of the writers, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, was recruited from Reddit after auditioning for a voice acting part; the composer Lorien Testard (who is surely in hot contention for the best soundtrack at the next games Baftas), was recruited on the back of music posted on SoundCloud.
James: The music is exceptional, and one of the boss fight needle drops is unironically the best since the original One Winged Angel. I have been listening to it on the soundtrack a lot.
Keewa: Add to this raft of wide-eyed inexperience the absolute coup of this debutant indie game landing the contributions of some of the voice acting world’s biggest, most in-demand talent: Jennifer English, hot on the heels of her outstanding performance as Shadowheart in Baldurs Gate 3 brings an enormous amount of emotional depth to the fierce-but-fragile youth Maelle; Charlie Cox (Daredevil) creates a Gustave who is a brilliant, caring elder-brother figure, but is troubled, fresh from the loss of his estranged love and the fear of the expedition into the unknown. Other characters are given nuanced and moving vocal performances from such massive talents as Ben Starr (Clive in FF16), Rich Keeble (Rivals), Shala Nyx (Cyberpunk 2077) and Andy fuckin’ Serkis himself. This cast of luminaries is rounded out by an (at least in my opinion) career-making performance from Kirsty Rider as the obsessive and driven scholar Lune. It’s a cast that any AAA developer would give their right arm to work with, so for the team from Sandfall to pull them together on their first ever game is one of those lightning strike moments whispered about ever-after in a sort of hushed reverence.
James: The exceptional VA cast is supported by some incredible work from the motion capture artists, who help make these characters feel truly real. They help the interpersonal scenes feel very naturalistic despite being set against a vibrant Ghibli-like wonderland, and more so than I think any other game I’ve played, you can actively learn things about the characters just by watching the body language. Having rolled credits on the game, where each character gets a Marvel-style flashcard, I was very pleased to see that these performers got individually credited alongside the vocal talent, as their work is critical to how compelling the characters are. Also crucial to that is the script, of course.
Keewa: The writing in this game, my god the writing, now let it be said – I’m a sucker for a story well told, and the narrative arc in CO: E33 is something that will stay with me for a long time. For the sake of your enjoyment of this game you must go into it completely blind, do not seek out spoilers or watch other people play it – to do so would be to rob yourself of the joy of the experience, Clair Obscur demands that you enter into it with no knowledge of the world that is slowly, ever-so-slowly, filled in with vibrant brush strokes, washes of colour, and the flair of increasingly wild abandon. Paint-by-numbers this most assuredly is not.
This game is beautiful, a word as overused in our lexicon as awesome – there are many games that are attractive, certainly; games that set their aim on a lifelike fidelity or an earnest kind of realism. But no, CO:E33 is truly beautiful. The art design tends towards a saturated dark surreality slashed through with moments of extreme brightness, as the title suggests, the clair with the obscur. Death is everywhere, a looming inevitability, but that doesn’t preclude moments of joy and camaraderie. The design reminds me in part of the 90s Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come in its painterly approach to vibrancy and saturation (shot on Fuji Velvia, for all my photo nerds), with the art director, Nicholas Maxson-Francombe (a former stage show concept artist making his first foray into games) firmly planting his banner and declaring a stand against the miserable desaturated brown-filtered milieu that hangs heavy over the AAA industry like some choking smog. In the noted early level “Flying Waters,” Maxson-Francombe is quoted in CreativeBloq as saying, “SpongeBob has the same kind of idea where they’re just walking normally underwater, so I was like, why not try to make a realistic version of that?” Given the number of screenshots I’ve seen online from this level captioned “this game is so beautiful,” I think it’s safe to say he succeeded.
The game is heavily informed by French art of the late 1800s, and realises this absurd surreal Belle-Époque setting with panache, the environments are varied but still littered with the relics of the 19th century Parisienne mode, ruined Baron Hausmann-esque buildings replete with their elegant mouldings crumbling to plaster, wrecked steam engines lying vacant on twisted tracks, wrought-iron lampposts erupting absurdly from the earth, and the agonisingly twisted figure of the Eiffel Tower looming distant in a swirling sky. What has happened to this world? What caused these bizarre circumstances? What is The Paintress really doing? That, dear player, is for you to discover.
As a game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a wonder to bask in, as a work of art it is mesmerising, as an achievement it is insane. Allons enfant de la patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
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