Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developer Sandfall Interactive’s debut project, has the juice. The French RPG is clearly inspired by the Japanese greats like Final Fantasy and Persona, but its Paper Mario-style timing elements and wealth of original mechanics keep its grind engaging and decidedly modern. The game isn’t without frustrations but nonetheless, while I wrote my initial review-in-progress I was wishing I could have been playing the game instead. That’s gotta count for something. Now, I’m writing a review that, in the interest of avoiding spoilers, can only scratch the surface of everything I have to say about this weird, woeful, wonderful RPG.
Clair Obscur follows a group of young expeditioners journeying from their home in search of the Paintress, a god-like being who paints a number on a monolith visible from most of the world. As the number ticks down with each subsequent painting, the human life expectancy dwindles with it, for people disappear into dust when they reach the designated age. In a years-long effort to stop the Paintress from shortening human life, people in their final year form expeditions dedicated to reaching and killing her. The titular 33rd expedition has many world-weary characters among its ranks, including the swordsman and gunslinger Gustave, the mage Lune, and the rapier-wielding Maelle, and they set off bravely on their daunting journey.
Despite heavy losses, protocol is to keep moving forward, and that’s because the expeditions don’t seek out the Paintress because they believe they can be the ones to stop her; they do it to lay the groundwork for those who, they hope, eventually can. Gustave, the de facto leader of the group, often says “for those who come after” when doing his signature attacks in battle or writing in his journal about their journey. As I travel through different regions across the game’s sizable world, I keep finding old documents from the expeditions that came before. Being part of an expedition isn’t an act of self-preservation; it’s believed to be a suicide mission to make way for the next one. Clair Obscur is bleak, melodramatic, and full of dramatic gut punches that make the team’s efforts feel futile. There’s not much reason to hope. Nevertheless, the expedition persists.
Clair Obscur’s core premise drew me in, but the game pulls from so many different genres that it can sometimes feel disorientingly inconsistent. Sometimes it seems to take place in a steampunk setting full of ramshackle technological advancements; elsewhere, like in an underwater area that the expedition can somehow walk around and breathe in, the magic bubbles to the surface. This eclectic approach manifests not just in the world, but also in the creatures who inhabit it, and even in a surprisingly diverse soundtrack that draws from genres ranging from orchestral to Skrillex-esque dubstep. And as you cross the distance between home and the Paintress, you’ll find inhuman creatures, beings who were long believed to be fairy tales by humanity, and what seem to be the remnants of long-lost societies. Until you reach a certain point, this hodgepodge of influences can read like a lack of real identity, but Clair Obscur’s later reveals manage to recontextualize even that.
While the world is fascinating enough that I often get distracted from my expedition’s stated goal by my desire to explore and learn more about its history, unfortunately, the game has also forced me to do some meandering I’d rather not have engaged in. One of the biggest problems undermining my travels has been the lack of a mini-map in dungeons, towns, and other bespoke locales. I am historically a directionally challenged individual. I have to have a GPS open to navigate my own city just to reassure myself I’m going the right way. So moving through dark caves or villages I’ve never been to before without any kind of navigational tools has been annoying at best, momentum-killing at worst. Last year, 1000xResist patched in a map after enough people complained about how hard it was to get around the adventure game’s hub. I hope Clair Obscur follows suit because I’ve been hugging walls just to make sure I’m not running in circles.
It may sound like a minor complaint considering how many RPGs thrive on forcing you to explore, but it’s a microcosm of my broader frustrations with Clair Obscur. It has a lot of ideas, but it does a poor job of directing you to them. There’s no map to help you travel, you pick up items that gesture at other mechanics with proper nouns you don’t know, and the game doesn’t actually take the time to tutorialize them for you. I was 20 hours into the game before I knew what the Lumina system was: a system which allows you to equip perks across your team as you “master” them with one character. At first, I thought I had just been mistakenly not engaging with a system the game introduced to me hours prior, but when a friend directed me to where it was located in Clair Obscur’s obtuse menus, only then did the game pop up the tutorial for my benefit. My poor attention span wasn’t the problem, the game had just put the word “Lumina” in front of me multiple times without walking me through an entire, pretty important gameplay system. Once I knew how to utilize it, the fights in the latter half were significantly breezier than the sweaty nonsense I’d been dealing with up to that point. Clair Obscur has so many big ideas, but it sometimes feels overwhelmed by them, and it doesn’t take the necessary steps to clarify and demystify it all for a new player to whom it might all seem pretty complex and convoluted.
Also getting in the way have been the various monsters I’ve faced on my journey. Its sense of melodrama is one obvious way in which Clair Obscur draws from Final Fantasy, but it’s the turn-based systems that I’ve been missing from the series for decades. At a glance, Clair Obscur’s battles look like your standard turn-based RPG fights full of elemental affinities and status effects, but what helps it stand out is how each party member has their own distinct mechanics that create really interesting opportunities for party synergy.
For example, Maelle has different stances that determine her damage output or intake. But you don’t simply switch between them freely; they’re determined by what ability you use in the previous turn. There are stances that prioritize attack or defense, but there’s a third one called Virtuose Stance that doubles her damage output for her next attack. Maelle swaps between these three depending on which attack she uses and if they can chain together with other status effects and abilities. One attack shifts her into Virtuose Stance if she’s aiming at an enemy afflicted with a burn status, but after she unleashes one attack in that stance, she’ll default to her “stanceless” mode. Normally, it would take a couple of turns of setup to get her back into that superpowered stance to deal that kind of damage again, but I unlocked an attack that, if used while in Virtuose Stance, maintains it for the next turn, letting me skewer an enemy once again the next time it was Maelle’s turn.
The more I learned how best to wield each character’s original skills, the more I got into Clair Obscur’s groove. Gustave has a powerful ability called Overcharge, in which he uses his prosthetic arm to unleash a powerful electric blast on an enemy, but it has to charge throughout several turns. Through equipping him with different Pictos, which give characters far-reaching passive abilities that go beyond simple stat buffs and debuffs, I was able to let him gain charges simply by avoiding enemy attacks. So if I were fighting a powerful boss that would periodically unleash a barrage of attacks against my team, I could easily unleash my own devastating Overcharge in a turn or two.
I was repeatedly surprised at how robust the customization options are and how they let you feed into these kinds of strategies. Everyone’s kit is built to tactically bounce off one another’s, and there’s a lot of room to experiment. Turn-based RPGs can easily drive you into simple patterns of attacking elemental weaknesses or just grinding until the numbers go up enough to overpower any foe you face. Clair Obscur has so many systems that allow for creativity, all without ever getting too overwhelming. Even characters I didn’t use much, like the scythe-wielding Sciel, have deep mechanics that could be the basis of another game’s entire battle system. Given all those complexities, it’s wild how well these systems fall into place and feed into each other.
The key element that strings all of these together is the timing-based moves reminiscent of those in something like Paper Mario. Every attack in Clair Obscur can be dodged or parried, but you have to do this manually for each incoming strike. Dodges have a slightly larger timing window, but parries can be followed up with a strong counterattack. However, most enemies will unleash combos on the team, and you have to parry every hit to counter, so there’s a risk vs. reward aspect at play. And when enemies do land a hit, it hurts. Clair Obscur’s defensive moves aren’t just a cool thing you can do if you’re feeling spicy; they’re integral to surviving in battle.
I love this concept on paper because it could make even the most tedious, grindy encounter engaging, but in practice, there’s a lack of consistency on the cues for when to dodge. Really, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to every enemy as their combos are all different, they move in distinct ways, and sometimes they’ll use an attack that can only be avoided with a specific method. Which is good for keeping you on your toes, but there are several points at which the dodge window is so precise, and also so poorly telegraphed, that it can be as frustrating as it is rewarding. Not to be one of those sore losers who declare “it’s not me, it’s the game,” but I grew up on character action games and fighting games and like to think I’m a pretty rhythmically inclined player. I know how to dodge and parry, I’m a sicko for that shit, but Clair Obscur’s integration of these techniques lacks clarity, and gets especially annoying when the game’s cinematic camera doesn’t give me a great view of an incoming attack.
Clair Obscur isn’t necessarily challenging in the traditional sense, but it can be punishing when you miss a dodge and find yourself on the wrong end of a team wipe. But all of its systems still coalesce into something that’s really rewarding to experiment with. Perhaps, however, the most rewarding part of it is the twists and turns Sandfall Interactive has woven into this already compelling world. You might have heard that Clair Obscur’s final act has been divisive for fans and critics. I’m still chewing on it, and will have some spoiler-filled thoughts about it on Kotaku soon. But my knee-jerk, spoiler-free reaction is that while I understand why it might be too drastic a left turn for people who bought into the initial premise, I think it’s at least thought-provoking. Clair Obscur’s wealth of innovative ideas and inconsistent execution make it a gratifying and worthwhile game to wrestle with, and even now that I’m no longer playing it, it continues to challenge me in other ways as I think about it after the fact. Even if I’m not sure it sticks the landing, I can’t deny that it’s interesting.
Sandfall Interactive is made up of a lot of veteran talent, but as a unit, it’s still finding its footing, so it makes sense that despite all Clair Obscur’s polish and vision that there would be a few oversights that frustrate. But if the team’s debut project is this impressive, I can’t wait to see what the future holds.