Each year, an entity known as the Paintress awakens to paint a new number upon her monolith. And each year, anyone of that age is erased forever. With the number dwindling down every time, the eldest people of Lumiere set out with their final year of life to defeat the Paintress, so that she can never paint death again. Lead the latest expedition in a race against time, in this turn-based RPG with real-time mechanics, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33!
Release Date: April 24, 2025
Developed by: Sandfall Interactive
Published by: Kepler Interactive
A Work of Art
Clair Obscur is, in a word, beautiful. The environments are pretty and striking, and the story is a heavy one with mature themes of death, grief, and overcoming despair. It grabs you right from the beginning, with a Prologue that heralds the tragedy to come and asks you to shed a tear for its protagonists (which I heartedly obliged). There are light moments within the story - looking at you, Esquie and Monoco - but they know their place and are utilized at the correct moments when you the player are at your most disheartened. The story's pacing can suffer a bit when you're busy exploring the optional areas - a natural consequence of having a world map with goodies laden throughout. But even those periods of respite know when to draw back and leave you open for the hammer drop that is to follow: multiple shocking moments occur throughout this game, and while I (thankfully) did not anticipate them, I thoroughly appreciated them and the foreshadowing that came before.
It's hard to speak on anything without opening myself to spoilers, but it is a heavy burden to lead an Expedition that is almost certainly doomed to fall. Thankfully, there is an underlying message of hope and perseverance throughout. "Even should we fail, we pave the way for those that come after...right?" It is blanketed on you from the very outset, and you are encouraged to press on much the same as the characters you control. I would argue this is a very difficult story to tackle without the agency of the player; to employ it in a different medium would be challenging at best. You feel as they feel, and you process and overcome these feelings alongside your characters within the same timeframe, given the pacing of the story. Could this work in a 150-minute movie? I'm not sure.
Crying-over-people-that-are-not-real aside, there are moments of elation and happiness to find as well. Perhaps the most important emotion for a player to feel is fun, and this game is definitely fun. Traveling with Esquie around the world map, besting challenges you encounter and looting items and new abilities from the environment is a joy. Hearing the banter of the characters, or witnessing their bonding moments brings a smile to one's face. Gustave's optimism and dry sarcasm, Monoco's comedic antics, Maelle's excitement and determination; everyone has their own means of assessing and appreciating the world around them. It's intoxicating.
There is beauty in a tragic tale well told, but there's also a beauty in just simply enjoying the ride. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is able to capture both sentiments - perhaps not simultaneously, as that would be very jarring, but in waves of peak and valley that ultimately satisfy you as the player and leave you wanting more...long after the credits roll.
Beauty in Death
"Enough with how the game makes me feel; I want to know how the game plays!" Alright, alright, I'm getting there. In spite of its French origins and inspirations, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a JRPG through-and-through. The way it handles turn-based action, leveling up your characters, unlocking skills and building your team; these are classic gameplay elements of the JRPG. Even with Monoco, who uses the skills of his enemies and exists as a Blue Mage, for those Final Fantasy fans who recognize the term. The major difference comes down to the "real-time mechanics", referenced in the open.
When engaged in a battle with a "Nevron" or similar opponent, turn-order is displayed in the top-left corner, as shown in the image below. On your turn, you pick one action to take - using one of your six skills, a simple basic attack, or a consumable item - then your turn ends. In addition, you can utilize "Free Aiming" to literally point at your enemy and fire projectiles at them, possibly shooting a weakness for bonus damage or effects like their arm falling off. You can attack multiple times in this manner - so long as you have the AP for it - and you have to account for the enemy's sway and movement if you want to hit the right spot. An entire build can be created around this mechanic - the "machine gun" build - and it is very satisfying to pull off a hundred shots in a row. There are also Quick-Time Events for skills - button presses you have to time for positive effects - but thankfully they all require the same button and the overall timing is the same so there's only one thing to practice/memorize.
Most of the real-time agency comes on defense. When attacked by a Nevron, you are given three options at the start: you can take the hit (which is not advisable: enemies can really hurt in this game!), or you can attempt to Dodge or Parry. Dodging has a more open window of opportunity for success, resulting in no damage taken, while a Parry has a tighter timing window: if you can pull off a Parry through the enemy's entire combo, not only will you take no damage, you'll generate AP after each hit and initiate a Counter which deals damage back to them at the end. A few enemies demand you Parry them, but they are optional: you can get by with Dodging for the vast majority of the game. And hey, who knows: if you can get good enough to see "Perfect Dodges", that's the game telling you you're ready to try Parrying instead!
Defeating enemies nets you experience towards the characters who participated in the encounter, as well as progresses your "Pictos". Pictos are like your equipment in Clair Obscur: rather than bolting on a metal shoulder guard, or wearing a goofy helmet, Expedition 33 relies on Pictos for their stats and some of their passive bonuses. After four victories with a Picto equipped, the passive becomes permanently available for all party members, equippable as Lumina. Powerful Lumina require more points, which are gained from spending Colours of Lumina and can be found throughout the world as pickups or rewards for a quest.
Upon leveling up, you are given 1 skill point and 3 attribute points. Attribute points are your character's stats: Vitality, Might, Agility, Defense, and/or Luck. These directly influence your character's secondary stats, such as Speed (how often you get your turn), actual Health points, and Critical Rate. Early in the game it is advised to dump points into Vitality for the Health gains, but later on you'll start to equip weapons which benefit from the other stats; depending on your weapon of choice, you can eschew Vitality altogether for more power. Eventually I dropped Vitality from everyone save for one or two who had Vitality-scaling weapons, because their natural Health gains on level-up became acceptably high. You can see my Lune build below, having 99 in Might (for maximum Attack Power), Defense (which ups her Defense and her Speed a little), and Luck (to get as close as possible to 100% Crit Rate). Her chosen weapon needs Defense and Luck to give her higher Attack Power, so that's why I upped those stats. I then equipped Pictos to round out her stats, giving her enough Health, Defense, etc. for a well-rounded character!
Lastly, you need to assign your skill points as you level up. Each character has a "skill tree" of various shapes, and reaching the most powerful abilities usually means you have to buy the lesser/complimentary skills first. The earliest skills cost 1 or 2, but some can cost 9 or 10, resulting in you hoarding your skill points for a while to unlock what you want. You can also "respec" your character's Attribute or Skill points at checkpoints with a consumable item, so you can absolutely experiment with different skills and weapons to find what works best for you. By level 99, you'll have just enough skill points to buy all the skills, and your three stats of choice will be 99 as well (unless you spread them out more thinly).
For Those Who Come After
In terms of difficulty, I found myself to have little trouble with button timings after some early "figuring it out" sessions, so the vast majority of my time was spent on Expert mode. Those who might struggle can play on Explorer difficulty - the lowest setting - but one thing I originally knocked the game for was the overall lacking separation between the difficulties. The differences at release were so slight that they were practically imperceptible, but (presumably) future patches fixed this: Explorer now has more generous Dodge/Parry timings and you take less damage, versus the split-second timing and one-hit-knockout damage of Expert. Upon reaching Act III, you can even scale the Health of your enemies and/or the Expedition's Damage Cap for further tweaking of your experience, freely at any checkpoint flag. Want bosses to last forever? Give them a 100x bonus to Health; want to really strain the system? Give them 100x Health and set your Damage Cap back to 9999: they'll have millions of hit points while you tickle them, giving you every opportunity to learn their Parry windows or otherwise revel in the feel of the music and the combat.
Speaking of the soundtrack, this game has simply the most amazing music. Sandfall practically found Lorien Testard off the street, brought him in to make his first album ever, and he nailed it out of the park. The team - rather famously - found him and their head writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, off the internet, with Jennifer coming from Reddit of all places. That they could capture such a masterpiece of emotional storytelling together just hits home the creative efforts of Sandfall Interactive, their approach as an indie studio, and how deserved they all were of their roses at the Game Awards.
They are, quite simply, an inspiration, and I hope the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 challenges other game studios and pushes the medium to greater heights. "For those who come after!" is the guiding aspiration of the Expeditions, after all.
A Note on the AI "Controversy"
I'm certain that, eventually, someone will come to my review, read all of my gushing and counter with "trash opinion, game is made with AI". And they would be emphatically wrong, so let's talk about it.
There was some "controversy" surrounding Clair Obscur shortly after release, with certain subsections of people suggesting the game is all AI and thus not worthy of value. These "haters" continued their jabs even after Clair Obscur won Game of the Year, arguing that their victory across 12 categories invalidates the very concept of Geoff Keighley's award show. And, I must concede, that the game did launch with AI assets in the files. What can be lost in the conversation, though, and what makes context so important, is the breadth by-which the assets existed.
Would you like to know what assets existed in the base release of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? Here you go:
This is it. This pillar, an unimportant piece of architecture that people might run right by, contained AI-asset "newspaper clippings" on its base. You could tell upon getting close, given AI's propensity for producing garbled text, but otherwise it would look innocent from a distance. I can't even show you the proper image, because Sandfall removed the assets and replaced them shortly after release; this image was captured later.
When people cry "foul!" for the use of AI, this is what we're talking about. Sandfall used AI to slap fake newspaper artwork on a pillar so they could focus on the rest of their work. AI assets used as placeholders is a common tactic to save time during game development: it is usually stripped from said game before release, replaced with actual work when the developers come back around. We wouldn't even had known had their quality assurance caught the error; instead, Sandfall missed it, they apologized, and they removed the assets. Nothing generational was used: no music, gameplay, dialogue, or major art pieces in the final product were created with AI.
So when I tell you this game is a beautiful work that should be appreciated, respected, and played by everyone, the AI counterargument holds no weight here.
Conclusion
Simply put, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was my Game of the Year 2025 back when I first saw the trailer during the Xbox Showcase in June 2024. I knew right away that the game was going to hit all the right notes for me, and I was rewarded for my faith in the product. The game is a masterful demonstration of the medium's potential, and the marriage of story, art, music, and gameplay to provide a game that will instill emotions in the player. There's apparently a movie in the works, and even if that goes off without a hitch, I can't see myself rating it higher than the game: like I said above, gaming is a perfect vehicle for this piece of art...and if anyone has a problem with calling a video game "art", they can take it up with me.
My love for this game goes beyond Game of the Year 2025. I declared it to be my Most Favorite Game of All Time, recency bias be damned. I even went a step further and did something...rather permanent to express my feelings about Clair Obscur: I tattooed the Expedition 33 armband onto my left arm - just like they wear it in-game. My first ever tattoo, so...yeah!
I beg you: play this game, love this game, talk to me about this game.
Have you played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? Did it hold up as your Game of the Year 2025, or did a different game deserve the title in your eyes? Am I foolish to consider it my Favorite Game of All Time? Let us know in the comments below!
Leave a Comment