“When you play older games, you can feel the team behind it and you can feel the team trying to talk to you. It’s very much this human aspect that lacks in big games where everything has to be sanitized to make sure that you don’t lose any players at any point because the risk will be too high. The sense of joy, honesty, and humanity in a game is really important and I think players are just feeling the lack of a relationship with the team behind the game.” — Guillame Broche, Sandfall Interactive
I’ve never played a video game where you could feel the team behind the game as much as I did with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I could sense the love, sweat, and tears they poured into every detail of this game from the world design to environment art, the characters, the writing, the narrative, dialogue, performance capture, voice acting, combat design, gameplay, progression systems, UI, the soundtrack’s depth and variety to its overall pacing and stylish presentation. Literally every single aspect of this game is near-perfect and I’m stunned that it was pulled off by a team that had almost no experience making games before.
I remember seeing the original reveal trailer for the game in 2024 and was impressed by the art design and concept of the world. It was refreshingly unique and stood out from the crowd of generic games remixing and rehashing each other. But I’m always cautiously skeptical about reveals like this. I saw similar reveals for games like Atomic Hearts and The Callisto Protocol which seemed great based on vibes and gameplay footage alone but tend to fall apart when you analyze them as a complete package. Any new IP always carries that risk.
Seeing high Metacritic scores and universal acclaim for Clair Obscur when it launched was a welcome surprise. People liked it. People loved it with a fervor I hadn’t seen for a video game in a really, really long time. I quickly added it to the top of my backlog but didn’t get to it until months later. And I recently finished my first playthrough of it. And I am speechless. I usually have detailed thoughts about a game’s story or design or narrative, but this one truly left me speechless. Not just at the ending or major story arcs but throughout its entire runtime. I was in awe of how it melded every creative discipline in such an elegant and masterful package. I was stunned at how beautiful it looked, how incredible it sounded, how thoughtfully it was designed, how alive the world was, and how real the characters felt.
I’ve played other games that had these aspects and also blended them together in an excellent package, but this game is something else entirely. It is a mesmerizing mix of art, fantasy, grief, and trauma complete with personal dramas and surprisingly complex plot twists. It is emotionally and tonally mature in a way that I haven’t seen with RPGs or JRPGs before. It trusts the player to discover, find, and figure things out in a way that evokes the games of the 90’s where video games didn’t handhold you through every single thing you could see and do in the game. It trusts you to fill in the gaps with its narrative as it slowly untangles its interconnected web of family dynamics and backstory. It gives you a whole bunch of combat tools but doesn’t really tell you how to optimize their synergies, leaving you to experiment and tinker with different build combinations to try and figure out strategies that eventually let you break the game.
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In my decades of playing video games, there are some rare gems that I immediately know are going to be my all-time favorites within hours of starting them. Games like Alan Wake II, Half Life, Breath of the Wild, Ghost of Tsushima, Portal, and more. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was the fastest to cement itself as a surefire entry onto that list. Within an hour of the opening, I was hooked on the world and its premise of going on expeditions to slay the Paintress who keeps disappearing people over a certain age. It’s such an odd yet intriguing setting that introduces a ton of questions right at the beginning and tells you to strap in for a ride.
Within 5 hours, you have multiple teammates and you’re planning build synergies to optimize how you fight in battle using a turn-based system combined with real-time defensive play, which is a really interesting spin on RPG combat that I hadn’t seen before. Within 10 hours, you’re deeply invested in these characters, their relationships with each other, and are cheering for them to succeed. And then a lot of really unexpected, weird, and crazy things start happening. That’s when I knew this game was an all-timer. Its narrative flows with such a confident stride that it’s impossible not to love it. The story unfolds like a deeply detailed and intentionally crafted narrative that someone clearly cared very much about. You can almost feel how it was refined, shaped, and iterated over countless drafts to get to the version you’re playing. Without spoiling anything, I can confidently say that this is easily one of the best narratives you’ll ever experience in any medium, period. It is rich, layered, and complex in a way that is really gratifying to unravel and demystify as you’re playing through it. It takes more than one playthrough to truly understand the events of the story and how every character’s journey takes shape.
During my playthrough, I was so engrossed by the environment art and world design. How did a team that had no prior experience with texturing and creating game worlds create one that is so memorable and visually arresting? I kept asking myself that in every single area, each of which is so distinctive and stylized in its design with a whole lot of handcrafted love and detail put into every corner and crevice. It doesn’t fall into the typical trap of creating an ice biome, a fire biome, a grasslands biome, and a sky biome. It instead has themed worlds that serve specific narrative needs. It’s either a graveyard for a fallen species of warriors or a lush forest overtaken by gentle giants. It’s a drowned city brought back to life with a reef ecosystem or a candyland made of a child’s dreams. It’s so fresh and inventive with these ideas that it’s hard not to stand still and appreciate every one of them.
And then there’s the soundtrack. This has got to be one of the most sophisticated and nuanced OSTs I’ve ever heard, on par with and often eclipsing fan favorites like NieR: Automata, Journey, and Undertale. The finesse and depth of every note is marvelous, and the range showcased on the OST is unbelievable. You have gentle soothing melodies with just pianos and vocals only to enter another area where you’re treated to a full rock ballad symphony complete with a classic choir orchestra. The ambient environment soundscapes consist of oddball instruments and delightfully resonant notes, all of which are a joy to soak in as you’re traversing the world. This was the very first game album that the game’s composer worked on, a fact as unbelievable as the brilliance of the OST itself.
Lorien’s work really shines in a way that is omnipresent throughout the entire game. It adds an ambience and soul to the story and characters that is genuinely heartfelt and passionate. Testard has mentioned in interviews how he simply stared at concept art of the characters for hours and let the music come to him. He fully and truly immersed himself into the world of the game to create music that captured the themes and strokes of the world into a sonic canvas that is unforgettable. I’ve been continually listening to the OST on and off nearly every day since I started playing the game. My mind cannot comprehend the fact that it was Testard’s very first game album or the fact that the creator of the game found him by complete happenstance by stumbling upon a small sample of his work on an obscure indie gaming forum.
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The thing I wasn’t originally expecting to be out-of-this-world good was the combat. JRPGs are usually a mixed bag with some games overdoing it with too many menus and skill options (Final Fantasy comes to mind) that barely differ from each other and others suffering from a lack of variety across their main characters. Not here, though. Every single character has a special skill or ability that you need to play around. Lune generates and consumes “stains” on using skills that add special effects or deal more damage, Gustave can build up a charge that lets him unleash powerful moves, Maelle can switch between stances that change up her offensive and defensive output, and so on. The variety in the playstyles is really good and it can be amped up significantly with the hundreds of possibilities for build variations.
You can freely swap out pictos (similar to materia in Final Fantasy) across the characters and permanently learn them as passive effects by winning a few fights with them equipped. I was impressed with how broad and diverse the options were to rebuild your character’s playstyle in different ways by switching out pictos or luminas. You can focus on a shooting build or a high damage burst build or a healing build or a defensive build, and so much more. Add to that dozens of weapons with special effects and a whole bunch of unlockable skills that synergize with pictos and weapons in different ways, and you literally have thousands of possible ways to play.
Most importantly, the combat is fun. It’s easy for a game like this to fall into a trap of not having enough enemy variety or the gameplay feeling repetitive after a certain point, but it always stays fresh. The game is constantly giving you new pictos and weapons and you’re continually unlocking new skills to try out while increasing the limit of luminas (passive effects of pictos) you can carry. So you’re always switching up your build and trying different techniques to see what works. I did not expect the combat to be so deep and so fun, and it’s amazing that it’s so fun and so replayable. Dodging and countering is so satisfying in a way that keeps encouraging you to do it more with high-risk, high-reward playstyle that have big payoffs if you pull them off. The odds are constantly stacked against you, and the game does a really good job of encouraging you to take risks and experiment with bold ideas for your builds to see what happens. And it’s so immensely gratifying to combo a chain strategy where your characters afflict status and pass along power-ups to inflict a huge burst of damage in one hit. Lots of planning and ideating pays off really well in encounters that still feel tense and nerve-wracking despite being turn-based.
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It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally moved by a game. The story and characters of this game are ones I often find myself thinking about weeks and months after I completed it. It’s such a poignant, touching, and heartfelt experience that really feels like its creators poured their hearts and souls into it. In a world where most people’s knowledge of the gaming medium is limited to big names like Call of Duty, Grand Theft Auto, and Assassin’s Creed, it’s so refreshing to see that a small studio from France can take a really ambitious creative idea and put it out into the world with such a high level of care and quality that transcends all the big names and takes the industry by storm.
I’m not surprised the game swept The Game Awards and many others. It won the highest accolades and set records for the most awarded game of all time. And I really feel like it fully deserves it. This is a true lightning-in-a-bottle moment for the team behind it and the industry at large, and it’s going to really difficult to dethrone this game as the gold standard of Western RPGs that every entry will undoubtedly be compared against in the coming years. The characters and stories of this game’s world have embedded themselves into my long-term memory, and this is a game that I’ll certainly be thinking about often years from now. Tomorrow comes.