Narrative games mostly cater to the desire for victory or a flattering resolution, rarely placing the accent on an undigested loss. That is why Life Is Strange, The Beginner’s Guide and the Last of Us series have etched themselves deep into my memory.
I can now add Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a stunning debut title whose story moves from a grandiose save-the-world premise to a smaller drama about a grieving family, to the list of video games that have left me emotionally shaken when I’ve reached the credits.
Clair Obscur draws inspiration from Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy in addition to the viciously challenging Souls series, but it leavens those influences with a proud Gallic sensibility. (Fair warning: The irascible mimes in this game, by the French developer Sandfall Interactive, are no joke.)
In debonair fashion, Clair Obscur opens with Gustave, dressed in an elegant suit, standing in a rooftop garden and gazing toward a distant shore. There stands a monolith emblazoned with the number 34. As Gustave throws a rock in its direction, his air of defiance slides into one of resignation.
A 33-year-old woman dear to him is about to die. And he wants to bring her a rose.
Flowers are arrayed everywhere throughout the Paris-like city of Lumière, where 33-year-olds are wearing floral necklaces on occasion of their Gommage, an annual ritual when a mysterious figure known as the Paintress will write the number on the monolith that triggers their disappearance.
Gustave, the 16-year-old orphan Maelle and a team of volunteers embark on an expedition to kill the Paintress and free the city from the ritual that causes people to evaporate and leave behind a swirling cluster of red petals in their wake. They are following in the footsteps of dozens of similar expeditions. But not long after leaving Lumiere, Expedition 33 comes to near ruin when it encounters a cane-wielding gray-haired man and the army of monsters, known as Nevrons, at his disposal.
Clair Obscur’s art direction, voice acting and sumptuous score establish a fascinating world, and some of the game’s fantasy aspects are cleverly undermined as the spirit of enchantment — the expedition’s pursuit of an unambiguous goal — gives way to something messier, morally compromised and tragic. The end of each of the game’s three acts arrive with escalating force. Though the twist at the end of Act 1 made me think of a key narrative maneuver in “Game of Thrones,” I was fairly blindsided by the game’s finale, so much so that I had tears well in my eyes.
Let’s just say that there is a moment, in the ending I chose, where one of my favorite characters looks at her erstwhile companion and then slumps to the ground. The disappointment on her face may be the most haunting look I’ve seen on a video game character since the ripple of emotions played out on Ellie’s face at the end of The Last of Us Part I.
Clair Obscur grew out of a prototype by Guillaume Broche, who taught himself to use Unreal Engine while working as a narrative lead at Ubisoft. He was interested in making a game with turn-based combat that explored the passage of time and teamed up with Tom Guillermin, a programmer at Ubisoft, to create an hourlong slice of gameplay.
Incredibly, Broche met Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who ended up becoming Clair Obscur’s lead writer, through a vocal sample that she submitted through Reddit when he was searching for voice actors for his prototype.
After Broche, Guillermin and François Meurisse founded Sandfall in 2020, setting up its headquarters in Montpellier, the team decided to scrap the original scenario of what was then called With Us. Broche, Sandfall’s creative director, was now interested in a story based around a monolith on which a number clocks down and causes people to disappear.
The idea for structuring the game around expeditions came from a French fantasy novel, “La Horde du Contrevent,” which tells the story of groups of people setting out to discover the origins of a mysterious wind.
“We liked the idea of expeditions trying to overcome previously failed expeditions and finding their remains, their journals, their past stories,” Meurisse, Sandfall’s production director, told me.
Clair Obscur is a hard game in which it is best to not get hit. By listening for audio cues and looking for visual tells, players can evade or counter an enemy’s attacks by precisely hitting the correct button. As someone not particularly drawn to games structured around turn-based combat, I was unexpectedly taken with the vigorous fighting mechanics that feature real-time elements.
The timing window for dodging is more generous than that for parrying, but some attacks can only be parried. Even on the easiest difficulty level, it’s important to come to grips with these mechanics. And it’s fitting that Maelle and other characters often invoke the notion of a dance when they strike up a fight. When things go well, fights unfold like a piece of choreography.
Each of the five party members whom players end up controlling has a different fighting style. Characters can equip up to six skills from their corresponding skill trees in addition to three “pictos,” or stat buffs, that can be used interchangeably between characters. After winning four battles with a particular picto equipped, any party member can also make use of that ability — for example, incurring twice the amount of burn damage when using a fire-based attack — provided they have enough “lumina points.”
If all of this sounds like it can lead to some heady decisions over character builds, that’s absolutely correct. Away from the game, I found myself daydreaming about how best to gear up my party to tackle some of the more daunting boss fights.
For the 54 hours that it took me to see Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 through to the end, it ably held my attention. Its world building, character arcs and challenging gameplay are executed with no shortage of finesse. Expect this one to be a serious contender for game of the year.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was reviewed on a PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.
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