So, do I actually even need to write this review? Everyone else has already said everything you need to know about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I’m not gonna beat around the bush here and act like I have a hot-take opinion on it just so I can be contrarian. It’s fucking amazing.
While there’s always some level of yearly excitement around the game of the year (this is the internet after all), I think it’s rarer for there to be a game which truly takes the internet by storm. In recent years the ones I can think of are Baldur’s Gate 3 was a bit of an internet darling, The Witcher 3 and Elden Ring as well. To be clear, I mean something which really caused a splash. I know the internet adores Hades, Hollow Knight and also things like Factorio: each genuinely exceptional games, but I don’t think any of those might really count as MASSIVE (although actually you could probably make the argument for Silksong?).
The point to this silly tangent is that even while there are often truly great titles released every other year or-so, it’s rarer for something to not only exceed expectations but also to truly capture the imagination of the broader world. And given that even French President Macron praised the game, it’s hard to deny that it’s what Expedition 33 succeeded in doing.
Incidentally, as another tangent, after nearly a year of raving about it I still can’t decided whether to call the game Clair Obscur or E33, everyone else seems to prefer the latter, but for me it’s always felt a bit like a typo in a retrospective of the old E3 games expo.
ANYWAY, let’s actually talk about the game. I think that quite a lot of the online discourse sucking off the game seems to stem from the fact that it was basically a tiny team working on a passion project, flying in the face of the big soulless corporations and underdogging their way to the win. But I think it is important to say that this isn’t just schadenfreude, there is quite simply an exceptional game here.
At its most basic Clair Obscur is an action-RPG game with turn-based combat in a very JRPG style. Actually, when I first started playing it, the similarities between it and Persona really cannot be understated. The menus felt the same, the format of the combat, using elements to hit weaknesses, using guns for quick and tiny boosts of damage and to hit weak-points. It would all be very familiar to anyone who has played any of that series. On top of that Persona always had a huge amount of style and flair, and E33 also doesn’t lose there with a pretty heaping dose of its own unique French-y panache.
What Clair Obscur succeeded in doing though was keeping me actually entertained by this format for significantly longer than Persona ever did. Persona was always a sort of crap-shoot of searching for elements to damage your opponent’s weaknesses (and then the system would fuck you over by having major bosses and encounters with absolutely no weaknesses). At some point though this did become quite rote: hit the enemy, zone out while it attacks you, then hit it again. Where Clair Obscur spices up the mix is by add a dodge/counter system, meaning you can’t just switch off during combat and rapidly tap through fights to get to the end. You need to focus up to hit dodges and counters, which become increasingly essential to actually succeeding (particularly with post end-game bosses requiring some genuine focus to beat).
I think this is helped by the companion combat system too. Through the game you level up and get points to buy new abilities (so-far so standard). You also can collect “pictos” (whatever the fuck that means) which are essentially wee trinkets that provide buffs, and through equipping the trinkets you learn how to keep them equipped as “luminas” (also, never really explained what that means). Through equipping these different luminas and gradually expanding the points with which you use to equip them there is some remarkably deep customisation going on where it’s possible to build some crazy synergies and systems.
While I will admit that, yes, by the end of the game the turn-based system did start to lose its lustre again, I felt entertained by the combat for more-or-less the entirety of my 80+ hour playtime, which is a pretty high bar.
And all of this is on top of the fact that basically every single companion has a different move-set. Lune relies on getting elemental “stains” which increase her powers and allow her to use more powers from that same element, Sciel uses a combination of dawn/dusk cards which play off each other, Maelle utilises a combat stance system where switching between stances is the way to win. It’s quite a lot to take on board and it rather feels like everything is thrown at you all at once, meaning it requires a moderate amount of brain activation to engage with, let alone to git gud with.
I think E33 also benefits from having a just extraordinarily unique setup. You are a one of a bunch of 33 year-olds in a devastated and crumbling Paris-adjacent city. In the opening prelude for the game, which is easily one of the most gripping 90 minutes in video games, you learn that the city lives in the shadow of a distant figure: the Paintress. She is a gigantic statuesque woman many miles away on the horizon who once a year paints a number on an obelisk next to her, erasing the previous number in the process, counting down from 100. At the beginning of the game she rubs out 34 and replaces it with 33. In the process then, everyone who is over 34 years old “gommages” and crumbles away into flower petals.
So now, with only a year left to live, many of the diminishing civilisation’s 33-year olds form an expedition (which happens every year) to try and kill the Paintress before next year’s gommage.
It’s a super unique hook and presents a lot of very interesting ideas and questions right from the get-go. Like the woman who you encounter in the first 15 minutes who has a 9-year old child, but then gommages, leaving him orphaned. You, as the affable and lovable Gustave also then have to watch the love of your life dissolve away in front of you too. It’s heart-wrenching and just insanely effective.
When disaster falls upon the expedition Gustave ends up having to take the lead, now forming a party with your companions Lune, Sciel and Maelle (a much younger girl, who is a sort of ward of Gustave’s) and it is on these four who the expedition hinges. You do meet a couple of additional companions through the course of the game, including my personal favourite Monoco, who is just fucking hilarious, but that’s largely your lot.
This then also falls back into the relatively classic JRPG format. You run around an semi-top-down open over-world map, then entering different zones which become more 3rd person with enemy encounters scattered around.
I actually think that, in a minor break with tradition for me, the thing which I find the most compelling about this game is the overarching plot itself. Normally with RPGs I think I engage most with characters and companions. Even when I also love the story, like with Baldur’s Gate 3, the companions are what really make everything shine for me. With E33 I actually think that while I loved the companions and all of their interactions, what really kept me pushing forwards was the plot itself. It was just so fascinating, so intriguing and so full of twists and turns.
I mean, the end of act 1 on its own caught me so off-guard I genuinely could barely comprehend it (it took massive balls on the part of the devs too) and then act 2 managed to do it all over again. This is in spite of the fact that by that point I was spending the entirety of act 2 trying to figure out what the act 2 twist was! Even with my sus levels dialled all the way up, I was still totally caught off-guard a second time and had my mind blown. And I think it’s actually a testament to the game that any time I’ve listened to a friend theory-crafting about the game while they play it for the first time, they ALSO can’t predict the big twists (with one spoiler caveat I’ll mention at the end).
It’s quite-simply a masterfully told story. It presents extremely interesting questions and dilemmas whilst also being just insanely engaging from start to finish. The characters are wonderful to interact with, each one a person you genuinely want to get to know more (even if I stand by the fact that they aren’t the major draw here) all with just absolutely PEAK presentation.
While I’m on the subject of “start-to-finish”, I will actually amend that statement somewhat. The introduction to the world of Clair Obscur is super compelling, drawing you into this world with death, stakes, love, instilling in you a desire to protect your friends all with a surprisingly hopeful theme. But, I won’t completely fawn over the game here and say it had me totally hooked by then. No, that took a bit longer, and I will admit that following the introduction, the slower first few levels and gradually getting used to the counter-combat system took just a little bit to grow on me.
It doesn’t help that in this time there are one of a few moments throughout the game which stood out to me as being weirdly inconsistent with the rest of the story. In particular after the entire theme of the expeditions is touted to be “for those who come after”, I.e. the aim of each expedition is to lay the groundwork so that the next one can get just a little further, at the VERY FIRST setback in the game, Gustave really nearly completely comes apart and ruins it all. I guess it is, when it comes down to it, a very human moment, but it did make it feel a little bit harder to engage when it felt like the main character kept flip-flopping in the first few hours. But this is a tiny niggle in the face of everything else being just incredible.
I mentioned that the overall “theme” of the game is a very hopeful one, and that is certainly true. That theme of “we’re going to keep on trying and doing our best, because if we don’t win the next expedition might” is a constant presence. It’s a sensation of community and self-sacrifice, the characters giving themselves up for the greater good. So, yeah, it’s very idealistic… However, it’s hope in the context of a dying, post-apocalyptic world where everyone has dealt with death since they were children. So, while it’s a hopeful presentation it’s within the context of being depressing as absolute shit at times.
Just about every single one of the characters has a backstory that skipped “troubled” and “dark” and goes all the way to “cartoonishly morbid”. Even with the broadly upbeat attitude of most of the characters, that backdrop can be a little bit grating at times, with one wishing someone might have a nice story to tell at SOME point. Y’know, you don’t ALL need to have become friends through trauma-bonding (as much as I guess it does make sense for a world like this one).
The music also matches this whole thing to an absolute T. There feels like a lot of inspiration from stuff like Le Onde, Clair de Lune and of course Opera. Most of music is operatic, with lots of dramatic singing and poignant strings and powerful crescendos and I’ll be a bit contentious here in saying that I think it’s really good, but literally every single piece sounds the same. Yes, the operatic singing is hauntingly beautiful and the music is super evocative and saws at the heartstrings… But so that was also the case of the last three songs and now they’ve all somewhat blurred together into a mush of “generic depression wailing” in my memory.
I exaggerate a bit, but that’s largely because the music isn’t precisely to my taste in terms of what I listen to in isolation… However, it needs to be said that when it’s in conjunction with the rest of the game, it’s a totally different story. For one thing, the soundtrack gives Clair Obscur an absolutely iron-clad identity. You could play me any one of the tunes from the game and even without knowing any of them, I would INSTANTLY be able to tell you it’s from E33. On top of that, throughout the game I never once actively felt bored by the music and even regularly felt uplifted or inspired by it. At the end they even succeeded in properly hammering me in the feels and leaving me feeling genuinely emotionally drained… So, despite my whining, I’m willing to admit that Lorien Testard really cooked here.
If you want me to REALLY rave about someone cooking though we can talk about the visuals. From the very start of the game, the city of Lumiere seems to be basically “modern era Paris” except wrecked by the supernatural. Here it’s only a hint of what the rest of the game will be like but as soon as you’re out of the city, it almost instantly becomes next level. Physics defying geography and scenery. Impossible floating mountains, water which rains upwards, a skybox which changes colour from one place to the next. It’s never explained either, but it does add to that feeling of a world which has been torn apart by magical forces. And it’s just absolutely fucking STUNNING. Because the devs weren’t limited by anything silly like “physics” or “realism” some of the settings and locations in the game are just absolutely iconic. To say nothing of some of the monsters and boss fights, which are equally memorable and visually spectacular.
As yet another aside here, the post-end-game boss fights as well were just absolutely insane… I fucking loved them.
Even better actually is that at some point, even this crazy and nonsense aspect of the game genuinely has an canon explanation, which is really just *chefs kiss* for me. I genuinely think that Clair Obscur’s visuals are some of the most beautiful, creative and fabulous to come out of video games in the last decade.
I did have my frustrations with the game, of course. Number one at the top of the list was the map system. There is an overworld map which shows you where you are and then the various instances you can explore to find mobs and complete quests and so-on. But there is absolutely no instance maps. Any time you enter a zone, fuck you, you’re on your own for navigation. And it’s not that it’s easy to get lost (although that can also happen) but rather that it would be bloody useful to know where you have and haven’t been. Also some way of tracking objectives and side quests would really have been lovely. The game really has a whole thing where it will throw extremely difficult combat encounters and even end-game bosses at you when you are massively underlevelled. And OF COURSE, if you’re insane, you can grind your way through these fights. However, if you do what the devs intended and leave them to come back later, there’s absolutely no way to keep track of where you need to go back to.
For me, a particularly infamous moment is when I had literally finished the game and was in the sort of post-end-game fuckabouts when I entered a location which had a WHOLE story beat I hadn’t seen before. Probably would’ve been nice if I’d seen that prior to the end-game because it really didn’t make any sense afterwards.
On that note as well, following the end of Act 2, the game map fully opens up and you can explore anywhere. At this point you are told all you have left to do is to do the final mission… Except, that’s not really true. There were still the companion “loyalty” quests, a number of optional side missions and genuinely a like a dozen new locations to explore all of which came under the purview of “optional”. Personally, I feel like this transition was really, really difficult. Going from “you need to explore to get stronger and progress to reach your objective” to “your only objective is point A and if you really wanted to you could explore points B through Z” feels like it really kills the momentum of the story. It even somewhat ruins the fact that you’re supposed to suddenly be in a crisis at this point of the story, but are then just told you can take as long as you want to deal with it.
This is made worse actually by the fact that this is the ONE spot of the game that requires grinding. If you want to just progress the story, you can have at it immediately of course. But if you want to go for those optional side-quests, there was a point in the game where it felt like you needed to jump from level 70 to level 80 in order to progress and for that there was no choice but to grind a few levels. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t a deal-breaker for me and really wasn’t that egregious, maybe 1-2 hours or-so, but that IS one or two hours of just exiting and re-entering the exact same zone over and over to farm XP. Hardly the most exciting use of one’s time.
There’s a few more minor quibbles here and there. The Gestral games are an absolute travesty (FUCK ME, the platforming one) but also a remarkably inconsequential part of the game. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the way the game does its companion moments, where you will one-by-one speak to each companion around the fireside and take them away for a quick chat (very Love Island). You share a bit of banter, some dialogue options and then it will fade to black saying something like “Lune and Gustave spent the rest of the night talking about anything and everything, their bond deepens.” Followed by a big-ol’ exploding cut-scene telling you that your relationship increased by one level. It just felt… I dunno… A little odd? Not really in keeping with the rest of the game? It feels like it would have worked that much better without the level-up meter!
I really cannot overstate it enough the brilliance of Clair Obscur. It is not just my Game of the Year for 2025 but also I genuinely think one of the best games made of all time. Yes. I’ve said it. My rating below is gonna leave it a few points shy of a perfect 100/100 but really at some point that becomes a bit arbitrary and for me this is a game which quite easily slammed into my top 10 (would you believe it actually unseated Skyrim from its long-held position in my top 10?). It’s a game that does everything well. It has absolutely stunning visuals, crazy and creative boss fights, an exciting world to explore, fun and intriguing characters to get to know (even despite their slightly overly trusting nature), music which is just absolutely iconic (even if it’s a bit French and waily), genuinely fun and attention-keeping combat and an overall story and plot which just grab you right in the first 5 minutes and then refuses to let you go for the next 80 hours.
It is, in short, a masterpiece.
I do NOT envy Sandfall Interactive the task of now having to follow up the expectations from this one…
Rating: 97/100
Recommendation: Essential
| Pros | Cons |
| – Incredibly stylish, exciting and engaging combat which will genuinely keep you entertained for the whole game – Fun, varied combat encounters with a genuinely surprisingly deep variety to strategy and tactics – Visually stunning and potentially one of the most beautiful games ever made, full stop – Atmospheric and emotive music which succeds at both the quieter and intense moments – Incredible writing, characters and a plot which keeps you gripped from start to finish – Absolutely mind-boggling plot twists – Just everything man. Everything about it is good. Fucking everything… | – World map is a pain to navigate, it’s easy to miss things and difficult to relocate places you “planned” to come back to – French – For all it’s success, the music is just a tiny bit overly operatic for me – French – A few slightly out-of-place character moments at the start can make it take a little longer to get into – French – Did I mention it’s French? |
* I said there was ONE plot twis that I thought was worth mentioning explicitly and I am going to do so now. Be warned THIS PART CONTAINS SPOILERS. Now, I’ll admit, this isn’t the BIGGEST spoiler of the game, but it WILL spoil Act 1 and at least the first 25% of Act 2…
You have been warned.
So, something which I just keep dwelling on: the similarity of the looks of Verso, Gustave and Renoir. Now, the familial resemblance of Verso and Renoir is obvious, father and son, nothing more to be said there. But, what really gets me is how similar Gustave looks to them both (as well as looking exactly like Robert Pattinson, but enough about that).
Because of this, after Gustave’s death, I thought that the game was setting up some hijinks where Renoir was actually an aged Gustave and then turns out to be Renoir’s father. And I’m not the only one! Several friends who have theorycrafted about the game while halfway through made some speculations about the appearance of Gustave being relevant along somewhat similar lines…
And here’s the thing: it’s not relevant.
At all. There’s no relationship. No familial twist. No time-travel shenanigans. Gustave just dies, dies.
Now, MAYBE this is an intentional red herring? But if so, it’s a bloody weird one. If anything, I genuinely think Sandfall just kind of ACCIDENTALLY made the characters look a bit too much like each other… It’s really just a bit silly.
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