Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Makes French Cinematic Themes Fun
But does have some flaws gameplay wise that detract from that.
Have you wanted to play a turn based RPG experience but, instead of being from a Japanese developer and influenced by Japanese culture, it's all French? No? Well too bad because you got one in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, made by French developer Sandfall Interactive with the help of outside companies as well (it wasn't just 30 people that built it). France is a place filled with a tremendous amount of weird culture and depth of philosophical examination and Clair Obscur is the perfect encapsulation of all those things. It's a very intriguing game that has a lot of people talking and has gained very very high praise since it came out, including many glowing reviews from my fellow writers here on Substack.
I had a good time with Claire Obscur, but it did have some...or several, issues. It didn't ruin the experience but it did make me not like it as much as others have. Let's just get into it so you can see where I'm coming from before you jump to conclusions.
The Premise
In the world of Clair Obscur there is one constant, every year The Paintress will paint a new number on her Monolith that will Gommage all of the people in the world who are that age. Every year it decreases by one and every year the city of Lumière sends off a group of citizens who are on an Expedition to stop The Paintress from painting another number ever again. Now, after every Expedition has failed prior, Expedition 33 sets off to try and stop The Paintress but this time their story has a secret weapon, being able to absorb Chroma (life energy/magic stuff). Will they succeed? Will they finally stop this dreaded cycle of death and grief? Will they find out about why The Paintress even exists? Or will they fall and have to remind themselves that when one falls, we continue, for those who come after.
The Good
Clair Obscur is undeniably and thoroughly French. I mean this in every possible way, far more than I can put to words. Mainly this is about examining very human experiences and what it means to both live and to die. This is incredibly French to do in media. For reference, I went to Film School and had to watch a lot, and I mean a fuck ton, of French films over the course of my time there. All of them lead to me either being incredibly uncomfortable and getting super upset they were even showing us such a offensively shitty movie that supposedly was "provocative", or asleep. This is a key part of my issue with much of French media is that it likes to explore interesting topics but in such a way that it removes all the interesting concepts from it and just gets all up its own damn ass. But Clair Obscur is different for one key reason, it's fun. So many times I had moments where I was reminded of movies from my classes in Film School because they were approaching similar topics but instead of putting me to sleep I was engaged and able to relate and become attached to the characters and be more willing to explore the philosophical implications as opposed to during class when I was bored and after the movie finish most of my classmates and I would gather together and trash on the film.
For instance, a core part of the game is it's exploration of death as a force both to be fought against and to be simply accepted and grieved. The game literally opens with the Gommage, the mass disintegration of everyone that is the age of the number on The Paintresses Monolith, in this case 33. It opens with the idea of having to accept and rejoice that these people made it to 33. There's this whole morbid festival to mark the end of a year and to say goodbye to those you love. It's a beautiful opening that shows you how the game itself is going to explore these philosophical concepts in such depth that you might begin to understand death more yourself. Then you have the fact that you constantly see dead expeditioners everywhere, and come across some of their numbered journals to give you details on those who came before, what they were like, and the emotions they were feeling during their Expedition. The remnants of old Paris are all around you so you'll see destroyed building everywhere. You'll even come across a former battlefield of expeditioners where there are a bunch of swords sticking out of the ground. There are also things that happen during each act as well that show you the ramifications of the Fracture (world shattering event, literally), The Paintress, and the death of those close to the core group is everywhere in this game and there's a reason for it, but that's spoiler territory.
Something I really appreciate in such a heavy game about death and fighting to live is that there are still moments of levity and humor. Like, for instance, there's multiple areas called Gestral Beach where you have to do some weird activity. The one I want to highlight is where you have to climb up a tower of random objects and buildings and shit, just like "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" which is a game where you have to climb up a tower of objects using a sledgehammer. It's an insufferably difficult game that has had many further operations on it including a 3d version and others. Well this is just jumping between objects but you're still climbing a tower. Now I do have some issues with this but overall it's a pretty cool little thing to have in your game that allows you to do some random unrelated and unimportant shit in a world that is far more dark. It's wonderfully enjoyable sorta. More of that below.
I think the stories relative simplicity is one of the strongest portions of the game. The best stories in games often have a very simplistic goal, defeat the big bad, whoever that is. When you have this simplistic plot it allows you to enter the world in a much easier fashion. Like The Last Starfighter or the original Star Wars. You have a simplistic plot to be a good entry point to the world. Much like those stories, Clair Obscur slowly gives out lore and intriguing character development to the point where it ends up moving past some of that simplicity in Act 3. It makes reveals that stick with you and makes you question the motives of characters. It introduces characters right at the start that you don't know much about and when you learn about them, and manage to put aside the horrible things they have done in order to understand them, it opens up a rather interesting, and very French, storytelling direction.
Speaking of French storytelling. Clair Obscur made me nerd out about one core aspect, it's filmmaking techniques. If you're a long time reader you know I went to film school and the amount of interesting techniques used in the story that are simultaneously used to mess with your head (black and white sections adding to the mystique of a moment as well as pillar boxing certain moments for Maelle as a way of making you feel out of sorts, claustrophobic, and as if someone is intruding on your space) and some for stylish flourishes that are quintessential French cinema (canted angles at the end of each battle) is truly wonderful. I adore the filmmaking style of Obscur, it has won me over for being able to enjoy something as close to French cinema as I am willing to get. Absolutely stunning.
The characters themselves are also exceedingly French Cinema. Sad melancholic characters staring out at large vistas. Talking about death and what it means to be alive. What it means to know that you only have one year left. Clair Obscur is able to take the complexities of French Cinema, that often are harder to sit through during that kind of experience, and place it directly into a videogame filled with French Culture and uniqueness. I adored all of the main characters in the world and the side characters as well. I loved learning about the past of the world, listening to the last journals of past Expeditions. I loved just talking to your teammates around the campfire. Sandfall made such a wonderfully unique and interesting cast of characters that I just wish I had seen more interactions between them.
The Bad
There were multiple times throughout the game where I came up against a fight that was so incredibly frustrating it was just exhausting. This happened about several times in Act 2 and it just lead to me wanting to quit. I get that much of it is simply strategy and I appreciate that I can't just brute force all of the fights, but getting frustrated is something I have to mention because it does, unfortunately, harm how I view the game. I played on the easiest difficult and with all the accessibility features on that make it easier. There's a lot of ways this could have been improved. For instance, in Persona games and Metaphor there's a details button to see what each enemy is weak to and what you should, generally, attack it with. This feature is incredibly helpful when you're facing so many enemies and each one has weaknesses and resistances. Yet, in Clair Obscur, this does not exist. It is simply up to you to remember. That sucks. Give me the exact same functionality that Persona games have and the gameplay immediately becomes easier to handle. This would also be helpful so that when you're 20 or 30 hours deep into the game you don't have to look up on the internet what you have to do for certain enemies in order to defeat them, like I had to do about 20 hours into the game for enemies that dodge almost every single attack (just shoot them). Again, this is a simple feature that is necessary for these types of games and I hope that whatever game Sandfall makes next they have that kind of menu.
Adding on there's a specific fight I want to call out as an example of just how unfair some of this shit can be. By the time I got to this fight in Act 3 I was rather used to parrying and dodging and all that shit. I was rather used to dealing with shields and getting AP back in order to get my best moves quickly. But then I came across the flying serpent in the sky. I would like to say that if you play this, do not fucking fight this enemy. They are legitimately the worst enemy in the fucking game and thankfully they are optional. Anyway, the enemy gets 5-6 turns in a row, but each is 2 actions so it's more like 12 turns. They will do one or multiple of these actions: Give themselves 9 shields, Swipe their tail 3 times, shoot a freeze ray 3 times each at a different character, shoot a normal ray of light thing 4 times at one character, smash it's head down 2 times, smash its head down 4 times, and absorb your AP (notice how that is 7 actions which means multiple will be used multiple times although that is almost always just using absorb AP multiple times). The thing is that you'll be gaining AP during they're actions by parrying and dodging and such in order to be able to consistently get AP back. But often what will happen is the enemy will just absorb your AP near the end so you are without it on almost every. Single. Turn. And the only way to remove the 9 shields quickly to do damage is with AP skills. That's it. So it's basically locking you into barely doing any damage. But that's not all, eventually it will absorb too much AP and will explode doing a ton of damage to it and to you. The thing is that only happens if it's without shields for long enough. Which, if you have 3 people, is still rather difficult. But if your first team wipes then just give up right there, 2 people literally CANNOT take down the shields long enough for the explosion to occur and do the massive damage.
I wasted an hour on this fight trying to get it done and eventually, after 30 minutes with my backup team, I just gave up because I had barely done any damage with the backups. I would get the shield down to 1 in my turn/with parries and occasionally get a few thousand damage but usually when it got to 1 or 2 shields the serpents first action would be to make it 9. The ONLY reason I was able to actually beat it was because I broke down, gave up, and switched to my windows partition on my desktop to be able to use cheats (to find out why I cheat see here). It was the only way to take that fun back and oh my word did it feel good to kill that serpent in one fucking hit. What would have fixed my issue here is more accessibility settings that allow me to, maybe, hike how much damage I'm doing or taken and decrease how much damage the enemy does. That was one of the things that I adored so much in Dragon Age: Veilguard, these accessibility settings are necessary for games where your enemy has a hundred million health. It's crazy more games don't have them, but they need them. I don't want to have to cheat to have this capability. But I'm more than willing to because damn are the optional bosses really fucking cool.
Okay, so. Remember how I mentioned I had issues with Gestral Beaches? Well here are those issues. The game is not at all designed for these things. For instance, because the camera is so close and the mantle system is inconsistent (see video above) and takes far too long to kick in sometimes not even kicking in leading to just falling over and over it makes the climbing one much more difficult. Because the camera is so close and the character is off center it makes that one where you have to balance on some logs and jump between other platforms and stuff after rather fucking annoying. Because the character does the little right bumper hand explosion thingy so slowly it makes the going between too big of a raft to reflect flying small Gestrals incredibly frustrating and inconsistent and annoying, especially with the hitboxes being kinda trash. Because the game hangs for a second on the climbing handholds it makes racing to get to the finish line take just a bit too long for the gold medal, although it's always close. And the climbing hanging also impacts when you need to race up a tower with three columns of handholds and big balls of energy coming down the tower quickly and knocking you off because it's very hard to do it effectively when it has that mild delay in movement. These are all things that don't matter at all in the main game because why would they (except the FOV but that's below). But put simply, the game isn't designed with these beach activities in mind. And it's okay that it adds some of a challenge for these activities but I wish the devs decided to either, alter some of these aspects of the game to make it easier to do the beaches, or added specially designed cameras and such for each one. They did a special camera for the one where you have to reflect small Gestrals to destroy your opponents raft so there's no reason to think they couldn't expand that for each beach. I'm glad they're in the game but I think they just need to be tweaked.
Or, hear me out, stop with this off center character BS and such a close camera angle and give us a FOV slider as well. Seriously, being off center and being so close is just, ugh. It's not well done and is just annoying (even in games like God of War: Ragnarok. It doesn't have to be this way either. The game is built in Unreal which has an integrated FOV slider and you can add a variable that allows you to move the character to be either off center or more in the center with a higher FOV. You can make these variables changeable in a menu. These are foundational integrated features in the engine that Sandfall chose not to implement. I think it's in order to "make the gameplay feel more intimate" or something like that but, I'm gonna be brutally honest, it doesn't do that. Its just annoying and needless and if you really want that fine, do it, but give the player the option to make it more comfortable for them. It feels claustrophobic being so close. A very poor gameplay decision.
Speaking of poor gameplay decisions, there is a turn order in the upper left hand corner, as you can see in the above screenshot. Well that turn order sometimes shows when an enemy gets multiple actions. And sometimes it doesn't. I'm unsure if this is to "keep you on your toes" but when you establish a turn order system that is supposed to show who's turn it is and who's turn it's gonna be, and then you decide to randomly throw that out, that's not fun. It's not good gameplay. It negates the entire reason for having a turn order list in the first place. And it should have been fixed. All they have to do is show it. Literally that's it. They already have the system there, why not have it be accurate all the fucking time instead of just most of the time. It was genuinely infuriating the moments when I was relying on turn order in order to know what strategy to use and then it was messed with by needless gameplay decisions. Metaphor: ReFantazio did this perfectly where it showed you the amount of turns an enemy can take and then it stuck to that. Why is that so hard? I eventually found out that enemies have AP too, but that both isn't taught anywhere or represented anywhere in the game. So my point still stands that, this isn't really that fucking hard.
The Ending - Detailed
**Start Spoilers**
First, a word on the end of Act 2. Leading up to my fight with The Paintress I got rather confused. Not because of the story or situation but because I felt like I was at the end of the game, about to defeat the big bad, but I had yet to reach Act 3. I was aware of it existing largely because of the internet talking about how Maelle in Act 3 is a massive damage powerhouse that can do a hundred million damage easy. This also confused me as I was caped at 9,999 damage. I just figured I missed some side quest or something. Then once I defeated The Paintress, saw everyone in Lumière get Gommaged, and The Epilogue loaded in I got even more confused. Just thinking, that's it? I finished it? Welp, a mere few minutes later and it's revealed with a rug pull "This is not the Epilogue! We fooled you! Get ready for Act 3 where you face off against the real bad guy, actual Renoir instead of fake painted Renoir!" This was a really really cool reveal and done really well. I was already thinking The Paintress was Verso's mom but I had no idea who The Curator was. I even thought that Maelle was a manifestation of The Paintress instead of her literal daughter who jumped into the painting of the game in order to get her parents out. It was such a a good twist that I didn't really see coming and I loved it. Anyway. Now to the actual ending.
After defeating a bunch of optional bosses, if you want, you descend upon Lumière and lay siege with your armies of ghost past Expeditioners conjured up by Maelle and her control of her paintresses abilities. There you have these epic moments running through the city where you see it literally has been torn apart and then some enemies you think you're about to fight end up being taken out by said Expeditioners. Eventually you get to Renoir who is just determined to erase the canvas the game has taken place in, since he believes he is doing it to look out for his daughter. After phase 1, Renoir heals and Aline, The Paintress, comes back into the painting in order to fight back against Renoir one last time.
After the fight, Maelle convinces Renoir to leave the painting so she can be there just a little longer. When Verso jumps through a portal he thought was to the real world, it wasn't. Instead he comes upon the small amount of the real Verso's soul that was still in the painting. The soul that Renoir was trying to erase. Maelle interrupts him exactly when he's about to get little Verso to stop painting, thus erasing the canvas. You then get to fight as either Verso or Maelle to decided whether the canvas should be erased or continue on respectively.
I picked Verso. After defeating Maelle and her being kicked out of the Canvas Verso says Goodbye to his friends from the party you've come to know and love, and takes littler Verso's hand and walks away from the painting, thus ending it.
The Epilogue shows the Dessendre family back together in the real world all in front of Verso's grave. They are mourning but you're able to at least see some level of acceptance going on in their faces. After everyone but Maelle has left, we do a zoom out over her with the entire party in front of her waving goodbye as they disintegrate. Credits.
**End Spoilers**
The Ending - Reaction
Clair Obscur's ending does what many games are just incapable of doing, dealing with a real human emotion that is routed in how we as humans exist and the things we have to deal with and accept. The ending shows that grief is something we have to accept. Something we have to exist in in order to process it but that we cannot let it overtake us. That if we do it will morph us into something completely unrecognizable from whom we really are.
It also shows that there is a profound power in accepting grief. In not running away from what happened but simply having to accept that it did happen and all we can do is hold what or who we lost with us always. Death is a fact of life and Clair Obscur shows that that doesn't have to be a horrible thing, that that doesn't have to drive us mad, doesn't have to destroy our futures. That all that it really does is change us and our futures. It can impact us without ruining us.
The ending was truly one of the best endings to a game filled with discussions on death and grief that you could have has. In truth, I don't want to see the other ending, despite knowing what it roughly is from reading others articles. I'm happy with this one. I'm happy knowing that the characters I cared about had an ending that made sense and that allowed Maelle to accept her real life existence. I'm happy with the ending I got as I think it's the only one that really made sense for what the story was all about. Truly wonderful.
The Conclusion
I found Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to be a mixed bag. I had many moments of just being frustrated with some of the gameplay decisions the team made while also still thoroughly enjoying the majority of the gameplay. I adored so much of the story, world, film nerd shit. But at the same time, I expected to like it a lot more than I did. It's a truly amazing game but the gameplay needs some tweaking. The devs have shown that they are completely capable of making an amazing game, a world with such depth that I actually felt for the entire people of Lumière as opposed to just our main cast, and just an experience that messes with the wonderful strange reality of French culture. I think it's an amazing game and you should totally play it but the gameplay has some pretty big flaws for me.
If you're on the fence on playing it, you should take the plunge. I've seen a lot of people talk about how it takes 40-50 hours to play but I finished it in around 30 (Add another 10-15 hours for all the optional bosses and arenas and stuff though, I was only able to do those in 30 hours because I'm on PC and ended up using cheats in Act 3). It's not the longest game of its genre out there and for supporting an indie studio on their first outing, it is far more worth it than supporting larger corporations that will ask for far more money from you (70-80 dollars vs 50). I highly recommend Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and the flaws that exist don't ruin the entire experience even if they do detract from it.
Meow,
Cat