Years ago, a mentor told me that the most important part of any story is surprise. A few years later, a writer I deeply respect wrote that perhaps the difference between good and great writing is technique, though even that was probably not as important as conviction. But what keeps us invested in a story is curiosity, the gap between what we know and what we want to know, the questions that drive us. Combine all three, and you tend to create something special. Each and every one of us has played a game that grabbed us from the jump, that connected with us in some unexpected way. A game that surprised us. Whose belief in itself was obvious from the first frame. That made us want to explore. I have played a lot of video games, friends, and that feeling is increasingly rare for me, especially in the AAA space. So when I tell you that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 grabbed me by the throat from the jump and didn’t let go for a single second of the three-and-a-half-hour demo I played, twice, believe me when I tell you that’s some powerful magic.
If you’re unfamiliar, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a pretty fascinating setup. See, there’s this being called the Paintress, and every year, she paints a new number. When she does, every person of that age dies. Poof. Vanishes. Turns to dust. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. And the thing is, she’s counting down. Every year, the people dying get younger. So every year, the people of Lumiére send a volunteer Expedition of people with one year left to live on a desperate, impossible, doomed mission: go to The Continent across the sea and kill the Paintress so she can never paint death again.
Expeditions have been going on for a while now; you’ll find journals from Expedition 84, so if you can do the math in your head, you’ll get how desperate this whole thing is and how young (but still older than the average RPG protagonist) your characters are.
Things get weirder once your crew lands on The Continent. They almost immediately run into an old man who nearly dispatches the whole Expedition single-handedly. You play as Gustave, one of the survivors: traumatized and alone, walking through countless corpses from other expeditions and his own. He’s about to shoot himself when he’s found by Lune, another member of the Expedition. She’s not blind to reality (they’re probably both going to die), but Expedition members swear an oath: “When one falls, we continue.” As long as one of them stands, their fight isn’t over.
Lune and Gustave clearly care about each other, but they don’t always get along. When they find an unsigned message indicating another member of Expedition 33, Maelle, might be alive, Gustave wants to drop everything and try to save her and then get out of Dodge; Lune is worried that the whole thing is a trap. Expedition members are always supposed to sign their messages. At one point, later on, Lune asks Gustave if he’s a coward because he just wants to get Maelle and get out. He’s not; he’s just dealing with watching almost everyone he knows die. And Lune? She’s the one that said they should land on that beach in the first place. Neither one of them has it easy. These characters are adults, and they’re written like it. They don’t always agree; they’re dealing with guilt and loss and trauma, and they’re not always kind to one another in the heat of the moment. But they care about each other. And at the end of that exchange, once they’ve calmed down, they share a laugh. Compelling characters are complex and flawed, and Expedition 33 seems to understand that.
Even if they weren’t, Expedition 33 could probably skate by on the world. My demo was fairly linear: there were branching paths with hidden grapple points, platforming, goodies and secrets to find, and tough optional enemies to take on, but this isn’t an open-world game. And it’s better for it. Expedition 33 reminds me of Final Fantasy X; these environments may be linear, but they’re gorgeous, whether you’re standing atop a hill looking at the Indigo Tree or both underwater and somehow not, Expedition 33 is a visual feast and I stopped in every environment I entered to marvel at the beauty and composition on display. There’s even a world map you traverse to get from place to place, like the RPGs of old.
What really hooked me, however, was the combat. Clair Obscur may be turn-based, but it’s not a DVD menu. There’s a lot of depth here. Every character has a melee and ranged attack, the latter of which must be aimed manually. Melee attacks build AP and ranged attacks spend it. You’ll also need AP for Skills, unique attacks that each character has in their arsenal. And on top of that, each character has a particular attribute. Gustave can use certain skills to build up stacks of Overcharge, which he can spend to cash out for a devastating attack; Lune’s spells grant elemental Stains that can supercharge her other spells for additional effects and damage; and my favorite, Maelle (you do rescue her; this is not a spoiler. She’s in Clair Obscur’s trailers), can switch between three different stances offering buffs to attack, AP generation, and defense. Managing your AP, setting up a big combo, and planning ahead matters; like FFX, the turn order is displayed on the left side of the screen, so you can plan every turn in advance, but strategy is only half the battle.
The other half is moment-to-moment execution. You don’t just choose an option and wait for a canned animation to play out. When an enemy attacks you, you can dodge, parry, or jump to avoid it. Dodging avoids attacks while parrying nets you a potentially huge counter-attack and awards AP, but has a tighter window. Sometimes, the only way out is to jump over something. Sure, you can engage in the time-honored tradition of blocking with your face, but the harder fights are gonna force you to engage with these defensive mechanics. And if you parry an attack that hits your whole squad? All of them strike back in a beautifully choreographed counterattack that never gets old.
Early on, I ran into a very powerful enemy who could kill my characters in a single hit. But the thing was, he had to hit me. If I could parry him, I could win. It took me a couple tries on my first run (he had a tricky attack that forced me to parry or dodge twice in a row), but once I figured out I could parry the first hit and dodge the second, I managed to take him down.
Then there’s the backend stuff called Pictos and Luminas. You can equip up to three Pictos to any character, which provide buffs like “shooting this enemy might light them on fire” or “attacks do more damage” or “killing an enemy grants more AP” as well as stat upgrades. Win enough battles with a Picto equipped, and you can have everyone equip its effects, minus the stat bonuses, provided they have the required points. And this is where you can do some really degenerate stuff. Sure, Maelle has a skill that puts her in Virtuose stance (where she does 200% damage) if she uses it while the enemy is burning. Normally, you’d have to have somebody use another skill to set this up, but what if you give Gustave and Lune a Lumina that means their ranged attacks are likely to set enemies on fire? Or maybe you equip a Picto that cranks up your Base Attack damage or that awards more AP for nailing a parry, allowing you to stay on the offensive longer than you’d normally be able to. Then you’re cooking with gas.
Combine all that and battles offer a lot of interesting choices. Does this character dodge or do you risk more to try to land that parry? If someone’s low on health, do you spend an item or AP to bring them back up, or do you bet it all on dodging or parrying the next attack? How do you level up your characters? Who gets what skill as a Picto so they can stack the right stats and they don’t have to spend Lumina points to get that effect? And on and on it goes.
And through it all, Expedition 33 is constantly finding new ways to make itself interesting. What’s a Gestral, and why is Lune obsessed with them? Who is the Paintress, and what does she want? Why is the world the way that it is? Are all these beings actually hostile? Some of them seem pretty friendly, and you have the option to fight them or leave them alone. What’s the deal with that old man? How does any of this stuff work? In my demo, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 didn’t stop to explain itself, and I appreciated that. It trusted me to figure stuff out, and I was more invested in what was going on as a result. Most importantly, I could never predict what would happen next. By the time “Thank you for playing” came up on my screen at the end of my demo, I was thoroughly hooked. On my second runthrough, I found even more hidden areas, and laid the smackdown on one of the optional fights that had flummoxed me the first time around.
When my time Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was up, I wasn’t ready to stop. I wanted to fight more battles, learn more about the world, and spend more time with these characters. Sandfall Interactive is a new studio, but you’d never know this was their first game from playing it. Surprise. Conviction. Curiosity. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 nails all three. It had my interest before I played it; now it has my undivided attention. If Sandfall can stick the landing, they’ll have put together something remarkable.
Add comment