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clair obscur: expedition 33

Jun 12, 2025 - digitalily


Sometimes, despite your best efforts at chipping away against other games on your to do list and not having the time, a moment comes when the critical acclaim, general internet hype, and the whole large-number-of-your-friends-all-begin-playing-something-at-around-the-same-time-and-are-raving-about-it all intersect, and you have to acknowledge that fate is really pushing you in a particular direction. Well, I don't know that I'd call it fate, but it was certainly a good enough collection of reasons to put other things aside and sit down and begin Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Initially I was only sort of peripherally aware of Expedition 33- I knew it was an outsider take on a JRPG that was from a smaller studio that sort of came out of nowehere, reasonably concise, with good visual presentation, and with something weird about its title, which, mostly is just a mouthful. Something that would go on the list and that I'd get to eventually. As friends started picking it up one by one and singing its praises, I came to recognize that this was probably something I wanted to be a part of, as in- a game can be good forever, but to play a new good game around the same time as others early enough in its lifespan that massive spoilers haven't leaked into the ether is an uncommon thing, so it's worthwhile to put other games aside in order to do this. Armed with the golden mindset of 'okay, okay, but is it really thaaat good,' I sat down to begin.
Incidentally, I ended up driving a friend to a local Micro Center a couple weeks prior to adhoc build a new PC because his current one couldn't handle this game -at all-. It was an older PC at this point, so fair enough, and a trip to Micro Center is always a good idea. My first experience of Expedition 33 then, fittingly, was trying to figure out what combination of video settings I needed so as to not experience major slowdown and lag in the opening area. My PC is old enough and was never cutting edge, so I don't expect to run the latest games on max settings without issue, but this was the first time in a long time that I had to ensure no other processes were open in order to play smoothly, at least at first. This actually ended up with me almost losing my browser session, which was a little frightening, but all was resolved in the end. I think specifically the opening area was one of the more graphically intense areas, or at least slowdown was more noticable there, as later on I forgot to close the browser and things played mostly fine, with only one major exception I can think of in a very graphically intense optional boss fight. In general the game is gorgeous, with each area standing out in its own way. While at times the environments can be a little unclear as far as what is meant to be traversible vs boundary, something which isn't helped by the lack of a minimap, once you develop a feel for how layouts are generally designed, it flows quite nicely. Some areas play with light and color in particularly striking ways, something that in retrospect is very fitting, as I came to learn that clair obscur is a French translation of the Italian chiaroscuro, which describes a particular technique of heavily contrasting light and dark in an artwork. That's some good follow through on the art direction. Apart from the game being graphically beautiful and consequently demanding though, the next thing to strike me was the music. I first heard Lumière, the theme of the city the game begins in, out of context in a hotel room. There is perhaps a little clowning to be had in the context of 'check out this awesome game and how good its soundtrack is,' and the track just contains vocals which keep repeating half the title over and over again. Little did I know that I would be the clownèd on, because in context, what can I say but this slaps 🔥. In terms of atmosphere, Lumière does a phenomenal job, and as a leitmotif appears again and again throughout the game. It gives off a somewhat fanatastical, almost pseudo-steampunky sort of aura that fits the setting quite well in the end. I certainly tried to stand around in the opening area to just listen to it play, but the cool thing about it is the sense of urgency and forward momentum that is has, which is very fitting in context, and appreciated to keep things moving early on.
The game world itself is also a fitting mix of a sort of childlike whimsy as seen in many environments, as well as in the Gestrals and in characters like Esquie, and ominous foreboding and hostility, as seen in the monolith itself, corpse strewn fields, and bizarre enemies that are at times uncannily human, and others thoroughly alien. You learn of an event known as The Fracture early on, which tore much of the world asunder, and you can see the impact of this event everywhere- from the bent and broken Eiffel tower, to tears in the landscape and buildings, and rocks and landmasses ripped into the sky and floating magically. The main city of Lumière itself, while one of the more familiar environments for a player overall, was torn from the main continent the game takes place on, so evidence of this breakage in the world can be seen even there, but it still doesn't prepare you for how weird things can get on the other side of the ocean.
In terms of gameplay, I think the game is quite good. The combat menu is incredibly reminiscent of Persona 5, which isn't a bad thing as if there's a game that had rock solid stylistic UI, that's it. Actual combat is turn based + reaction parries to enemy attacks, which due to generally low party health pools generally means if you don't parry, you die. And since I opted for the hardest difficulty setting, if you don't parry, you die, BUT if you dodge roll instead you should've just parried in the first place because that's how small the window is. I wouldn't say I'm the biggest fan of this kind of parry based gameplay, but I overall found the game to be very fair in terms of the difficulty of attack patterns, even more so as you progress and, specifically, have enough party members to have a reserve. Having a reserve come in after you get wiped is in my opinion the most important thing, since mentally, you probably already lost, so you can focus on reading attacks and parrying purely for practice, which certainly takes a load off. The game is also to me extremely well balanced numerically, up through the end of Act II, after which you get an item that uncaps the damage you can deal per hit from 9,999. The final encounters prior to that are balanced very well around generally hitting this cap, such that you don't triviliaze the fights and can experience a good amount of the bosses fought there mechanically. And to minimize retry frustration, most of the attacks you run into here have their parry timings telegraphed very well, so while at first they may seem very difficult, once you determine the tell, mechanically you're set. Once you do get access to uncapped damage though, and enemy health bars scale accordingly, balance kind of flies away. Even minimizing optional content before the final boss of the game, simply having one or two characters hit uncapped numbers is enough to make the fight feel, at least for me, far easier than what came before it, though I'm not sure that's a bad thing here, overall. All content considered though it is fairly trivial to develop very strong builds capable of one shotting pretty much any encounter the game can throw at you. Since I dove into the finale of the story prior to doing all the extra content, this ended up being a bit of a boon as I mentally was kind of done drilling enemy attack patterns for upwards of an hour, so being able to say no to that via big damage helped get through some of those final optional encounters.
Now, nice looking environments, fantastical enemies and npcs, a strong visual direction, stellar music, and difficult if not satisfying gameplay- that's one thing. And these things collectively, alongside an interesting narrative hook, are probably the bulk of what rocketed Expedition 33 to popularity, at least initially (although I'm sure a $50 price tag is also helpful). It's a whole other thing to take all that, and provide a phenomenally satisfying narrative with compelling character arcs and thematic throughline thats influence is internally dripping everywhere. It's another thing still to on top of that, and in spite of meta knowledge (i.e., the combat victory screen only showing up when an enemy is defeated defeated), keep me utterly on the edge of my seat as to what was going to happen in the cutscene I was watching. And yet it's another another thing on top of allll that, to make me stop in my tracks, sit, music washing over me, as the game offered a relatively simple choice. I made my choice, satisfied as could be, and let things conclude before immediately hopping into discord and throwing up wall upon wall of spoiler text reaction and thoughts to what I had just experienced. There was a specific moment too, in the midst of the flurry of typing where I sat there and audibly realized: 'god im really convincing myself in realtime of how good this game is.' So circling back- yes, it was really thaaat good. And all this without mentioning hit after hit the game gives you beyond this. If you go into this game- be prepared! I don't really want to go super in depth into spoiler territory about the narrative or themes in this post for a couple of reasons:
So mostly I'm going to be keeping it at that. One thing though that I can't resist mentioning are the similarities Expedition 33 shares with Umineko no Naku Koro ni. Something I very much wasn't expecting, to say the least. Amusingly, what solidified my opinion of Umineko was continuing to discuss it after the fact, similar to what I did after finishing Expedition 33. I think a game that prompts this kind of thing is a worthwhile game.
Overall, I think Expedition 33 is a remarkable work- one that I highly recommend, and I know I'll be looking forward to what the developer, Sandfall Interactive, releases next. I ended up clocking 70 hours to complete all the game's achievements (something I felt it deserved), which is nothing to sneeze at. Fortunately, if you're just focused on the main story, you can expect somewhere around half of that, varying with how the parry system treats you.
For now, I have an OST to ravenously listen to, and a bit of a break to take before diving into the next game on the list, TBD. Need to get some good multiplayer sessions in now that I don't wish to devote all my free time to Expedition 33.
As an aside, I am working on a 3D printed cosplay prop of Verso's sword and dagger for a friend, and just finished printing the pieces for the sword, so will probably post some progress pics of that sometime soon.

until next time!






tagged: games