REVIEW: Clair Obscur – Expedition 33 is a phenomenal piece of art

Clair Obscur is an incredible game that mixes first class storytelling with one of the most interesting and engaging combat systems in recent RPG history. If you’re at all interested in playing it, that’s all you need to know — going in with as little prior information as possible is essential to get the most out of the experience.

If you’re still on the fence, though, let me walk you through why Expedition 33 is not only one of the best games of the year, but among the best games ever made.

Expedition 33 opens with a beautiful, somber chapter, and it does so with spectacular confidence. Information is drip fed to the player slowly over its opening, and it revels in exploiting everything you don’t know about this world. That opening ends with the kind of gut punch that cannot be achieved through over-explanation — if you knew more about this world, more about the challenges these characters face, you wouldn’t feel the way you do when that punch hits. It’s meant to confuse and shock you, it’s meant to evoke a primal response, and it pulls that off with relative ease.

Its storytelling beyond that doesn’t pull its punches. It places the responsibility of the world on players’ shoulders, asks them to shoulder that burden, and rarely lets up. There are moments of levity scattered throughout, a necessity when dealing with subject matter as harsh and cold as inevitable mortality, but they’re surgically placed to extract the most emotion out of the player.

Throughout Expedition 33, you’re tasked with leading an expedition to defeat the Paintress, a mysterious and all-powerful being whose sole function seems to be erasing people of a certain age, once per year. Every year, the age threshold gets lower, and every year, the people of Lumiere send out an expedition to defeat the Paintress and reclaim their futures. None have prevailed.

These characters are faced with death frequently, so the idea of throwing themselves face-first into inevitable death – after having watched for decades as expeditioners left and never returned – is second-nature. Death is the driving force of Lumiere’s entire existence, it pushes them forward, gives them something to fight for and against. Everybody deserves the right to exist, and sometimes that means risking existence yourself.

It’s impossible to play this game and not think about your own mortality, the inevitable void that awaits you, someday. It’s confronting, but it’s also somewhat comforting. It’s a hard feeling to explain, but watching these characters fight against death while knowing full well that it’s coming for them eventually, it sticks in your brain. You want them to succeed, even when you know it’s futile.

As the story progresses, everything gets messy, complicated, and confusing. They’re supposed to be, that part is intentional, a reflection of life’s own messy, complicated, and confusing whims. There are times where it seems like there’s no possible way to stick the landing, where threads are so tangled and so adrift that it seems like they’ll never come together. And yet, somehow, it does.

The same is true of Expedition 33’s gameplay. At first, the combat loop seems like a straightforward action-responsive turn-based system, much like Paper Mario or Super Mario RPG — you attack on your turn, and then time button presses on your opponent’s turn to reduce or negate damage. Then it gets messy, with systems and new characters adding incredible complexity.

Often throughout my playthrough I found myself feeling overwhelmed and directionless, unsure of how to pull together a strategy from this pile of systems, but it always came together. It’s a system that makes you feel very dumb at first, then makes you feel very smart for learning to engage with it at its deepest levels. Unlike something like Xenoblade Chronicles where you can afford to ignore a few smaller systems, Expedition 33 demands that you engage with everything, and it’s incredibly satisfying once it all clicks and you’re able to execute your strategies perfectly.

Other aspects of its gameplay are something I’m a little bit more mixed on. Exploration is a big part of the game, with large, twisting maps filled with branching pathways. There’s only one right way to go in each map, but finding that path can be challenging, especially if you have ADHD like I do. There’s no minimap – or map at all while in a level – to help you navigate, an intentional choice to encourage exploration but one I feel misses the mark ever so slightly. I got through it all, in the end, but there was a lot of needless frustration, especially given how samey some areas within a map are.

But I did get through it, and I wanted to get through it. This kind of frustration is the kind of thing that would put me off finishing a game, but I couldn’t dream of dropping Expedition 33 before I’d seen the credits roll. It pulled me forward, through the frustration, through the uncertainty and confusion, and every single moment was incredible, even the parts I didn’t like. I don’t know how a game does that, but this one did.

It’s helped along by presentation that is completely unmatched in the industry. It’s a gorgeous game visually, with some of the most beautiful environment design I’ve seen in a video game, high quality models and effects, and animation that goes above and beyond what most are achieving through games with ten times the budget. It’s genuinely astonishing watching the credits roll and seeing just how few people worked on this — it punches so far above its weight that you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a triple-A game with tens of thousands of staff.

It’s very easy on the ears, too, with a soundtrack that rivals even some of my favorite games. There’s an eclectic mix of jazz, big sweeping orchestral pieces, high energy electric guitars, and quiet, somber piano tunes. Every single moment from start to finish is punctuated by flawless music selection, and it makes heavy use of expertly timed callbacks and leitmotifs that make for a phenomenal audiovisual experience.

I also fell in love with Expedition 33’s main cast over the 40 hours I spent with them. Every single one of them is fleshed out better than any character I’ve seen in the last decade, in games or otherwise, and they’re acted wonderfully. I can’t give enough props to each and every voice actor responsible for bringing these characters to life, and the voice director responsible for wrangling it into shape. This game would have died on the vine without near-perfect voice acting, and every performer met that standard and often went beyond it.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not a perfect game, nor is it my favorite game, but I feel confident saying that it’s one of the best games ever made. Everything about it is incredible, and even when it stumbles, it always finds a way to stick the landing. It’s got some of my favorite music in video games, it made me cry multiple times throughout, and it will stay fondly remembered in my mind for as long as I live.