Oh hey, it’s a post! It’s a post that, like a lot of posts, contains spoilers for the thing. But worry not! I have employed a special technique called structuring my post to make it so you can read it up to the little horizontal line. If you go past the horizontal line, there will be spoilers. Before; you’ll be fine.

Okay, so first of all? Excellent name. Brilliant name. Remember when people were making fun of the name a little bit before it released? Well they’re not making fun of it now! Probably. Since release, my head has been swimming with various ways to say Clair Obscur. It works so well. You can say “Oh I’m just halfway through Clair” and people know what you’re talking about. You can say “Yeah? Expedition 33? I’ve played that game” and people know what you’re talking about. You can even get a bit zesty with it “Man! The parries in Obscur are proving to be quite a challenge for me” and people know what you’re talking about. This is a tiny spoiler, don’t worry about it, but you even fight Clair and Obscur at one point. Those are the enemy names. You can literally say “Just ran into the Clair and Obscur from Clair Obscur.” That’s amazing. More games should have names such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A really good name.

Unfortunately, there is more to a game than a name. As much as I’d like to spend the next eight or so paragraphs going “Hey, the game even says its own name when you die!”, I should probably talk about it in a bit more detail.

Actually, it’s worth noting that a big part of the experience early on is knowing exactly nothing about the premise of the game, so if you do have Extremely Real plans to play Obscur, now might be the time to go and do that.

You are Gustave (great name) living in the world after The Fracture. The Fracture is, as you can probably guess, an event that has messed everything up a little bit, with the island city of Lumiere (it’s Paris) being the only safe haven for humanity. While that might not sound too bad, there’s one small problem.

The Paintress looms in the distance, a big “34” emblazoned onto an even bigger monolith. Today is the Gommage. You don’t quite know what that is, though the day appears to have a tinge of melancholy about it. You meet up with Sophie, the estranged love of your life. You clearly both still love each other, so why not simply try to work things out? Everyone is gathering down at the docks. In a few short moments, the Paintress awakens from her slumber at the bottom of the monolith, erasing the 34 and inscribing a new number: 33. Within moments, one by one, people begin to disappear. This is the Gommage. Next year, everyone who reaches the age of 33 will die. Humanity has 33 years left.

The only resistance offered is the Expedition. People who are approaching their gommage make the journey to the monolith to take down the Paintress and stop the cycle. 66 expeditions have been sent out so far, and Gustave, after losing the love of his life, has volunteered to be a part of the 67th.

And so, Expedition 33 is underway. They make landfall at the outer shores from Lumiere and are met with an old looking man, surely in his 50s, if not 60s. As quickly as the tides, the team of Expedition 33 are massacred. After the struggle, Gustave awakens. The only survivor. Somehow, you must make it to the monolith and finish what your comrades started.

It’s a little harrowing! Even when compared to other games of its kind. The lands of Clair Obscur are hostile, with death lurking around every corner. The combat is a suitable match - enemies can take your party down with a few well-placed strikes. Instead of relying on Mana Points to limit your party, or a one-more system to tip the scales in your favour, Clair’s enemies are highly tuned from the start and demand that you dodge and parry your way through each and every one of them.

That’s right! Obscur Clair kind of flips the meaning of a turn based game on its head. When an enemy attacks, you have to parry. While not an entirely novel concept, our memories can only go back to around 2020 (five years ago btw) so you have to give it credit for being a pioneer or whatever.

Make no mistake - combat is not the relaxed turn based affair you might think it is.

Ultimately it changes the dynamic of the turn based RPG completely. No longer can you finish up a long day of work by unwinding and lining up against the dragon and pressing the A button on your controller. You have to be on the edge of your seat at all times, ready to handle whatever kind of patterns the enemy throws at you. The harrowing atmosphere of the game doesn’t do much to help things either. Make no mistake, this is a very physical game. It is the first game to give me hand cramps since Sifu. This is a game where you have to be, as the kids say, locked in. No looking at Bluesky on your phone while you’re doing it.

It’s also important to note that this is the game. There is very little to speak of in the not-combat realm. You do briefly speak to your quirky cast of party members round the campfire and learn about their hopes and dreams, but if you’re looking for a one-two hit of Fighting and School that you find in Persona, then you’ll be a little lost here.

Indeed, while it’s absolutely fine that this is the case, I can’t help but feel like it’s a little too much. Expedition Clair is like constantly eating dessert all the time. It’s great, but feels wrong. The combat is amazingly satisfying to play and figure out. It’s fun upgrading all your little people into killing machines. The skill trees (there has to be some Ubisoft lineage, right?) are fine to navigate and the systems feel breakable, honestly, in a way that reminds me of Dota 2. It’s possible that this will absolutely be your shit. If you love making a bunch of fun decisions in the menus and then pressing a bunch of buttons in the combat and being rewarded for doing both of those things, you’ll love it.

Unfortunately I have to be really boring here and say the menu UI is a bit rubbish, or at least, it doesn’t perfectly accommodate a lot of the systems. While putting your points in stats is okay, selecting your Pictos (they’re like little perks you get from doing stuff) is so fiddly, I gave up fully investing in it half way through and turned the difficulty down to compensate. It’s a nightmare to navigate with a controller. It’s also difficult to tell what’s actually being selected, and even just getting to certain systems is a herculean task.

There’s something about it that feels like it’s a bit too high in sugar. It’s not a balanced meal. There never a point where I’m eating my vegetables. I know it sounds a bit silly to say, but the game is on the highest possible level of engagement from start to finish in an incredibly unhealthy way. Neurons are firing on all cylinders for about 90% of the runtime.

It’s almost a little too laser focused on its premise. This is a game about going to a place, with the only things stopping you from going to the place being the things directly in front of you. There are a few diversions along the way, but I didn’t really feel inclined to go for them. This might just be a me problem, but I played Clair Obscur with the uneasy feeling that I’m being chased.

Anyway, it’s Horizontal Line Time. If you’re dipping here, know that Clair Obscur is probably worth your time. It’s good! It’s fine! 8/10. Yeah. Cool.

At the end of Act 1, the heart of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is torn out. Permanently. It doesn’t come back. Gustave, the protagonist of the game, is killed.

All I can ask is: how intentional was this? The game is noticeably worse for it, with none of the characters left being able to take on the mantle of protagonist until much later on. There is an emptiness felt that, dare I say, mirrors a small amount of the real emptiness felt from a real loss. While it certainly is effective, it once again feels like dessert. It happens too soon for his death to have much narrative meaning and too late to not feel the impact regardless. A death for death’s sake. Much of Act 2 is a press-on-regardless kind of deal - not out of any desire to actually keep playing, but to see if the loss was worth it.

This guy is 33 next year. Feel old yet?

The game has other designs, however. You do end up facing off and defeating the Paintress, only to find out that the world itself, the very world that all of these characters exist in, is not real. It’s a literal painting made by a long lost family member. And victory over the Paintress means defeat for all who reside in this painting.

Clair Obscur is ultimately about the grief of a family who has lost a loved one and their inability to move on in a healthy way. In doing so, they not only hurt themselves, but others around them. When it came to decide the fate of those in the painting, it wasn’t particularly challenging for me to come to terms with the dilemma. Call me off the mark here, but ya gotta let go, ya know?

It’s the phrase that you’ve heard time and time again, and will no doubt continue hearing time and time again: it’s good for video games.

Clearly the developers are experienced at making it all work. The cutscenes and dialogue feels natural; the acting is excellent. It’s getting to the other side of the uncanny valley while still very much residing there.

What I don’t think, is that this is the way forward for games of its kind, or that this game is particularly life changing or that it blows the lid off of every single one of its peers. It does everything pretty well, but so do a lot of other games! Metaphor is still good, even though it doesn’t have Charlie Cox in it! If you’re not familiar with these games before and it “fixed” turn based RPGs for you, then maybe you just like turn-based RPGs. Give them a try.

I have no doubt I’ll remember Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 come the end of the year. It’s a really good game. Pretty much everything it does, it does with excellence. I can’t say that it does it to the perfection of so many of other games that I love, but it also doesn’t need to. It doesn’t reach the top of the mountain, but it undoubtably stands among the pantheon.