One must respect upstart studios taking wild swings for their debut titles, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has all of the makings of an enormously ambitious wind-up, at least from French team Sandfall Interactive. Having been inspired by Japanese titans like Final Fantasy and Persona, their boisterous attempt at a role-playing game with largely Western sensibilities when it comes to narrative, performance, and fidelity has fast crept up my most anticipated list as its four-hour demo painted a captivating image of its vivid world in peril while showcasing the many facets of its combat that blends traditional turn-based systems with reactive, real-time ideas.
As I said, it’s a big swing. Will it be a home run? That remains to be seen, however, the building blocks for the game are awfully exciting.
My first big realisation for this game was that Clair Obscur wasn’t an overseeing Alice McGee or Clive Barker-type figure; rather, it’s a French term that describes a strong contrast between light and dark. This speaks volumes as the game’s dark fantasy setting posits Gustave and his fellow expeditioners against the Paintress, a godlike being who can cut short the life of those whose age she draws in the sky. After the failure of Expedition 34, Gustave leads his team of 33-year-olds into the breach to stop her once and for all, or quite obviously die trying.
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It’s an evocative concept that gifts the narrative urgency and desperation, and the seemingly hopeless struggle of the team itself leads to some beautiful performances from its cast, led from the front by Charlie Cox, who most might know as Matt Murdock in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe. However, I’ll always know him from Stardust.
From the outside looking in, the game’s JRPG inspirations are evident. You trawl regions and hub worlds in pursuit of your goal, all the while battling the Paintress’s minions as you go. While the combat does value order in the same way any turn-based game would, it’s far more dynamic in how your reactive input, whether it’s blocking, parrying, or eventually jumping over low, sweeping attacks, can turn the tide of a battle. It’s a game that always feels in motion and offers you, the player, a semblance of control.
This particular hands-on did a good job of onboarding me to the combat mechanics, despite its context within the game at large. I’m not sure I’ve felt a turn-based system that feels as engaging as Clair Obscur’s is. It’s lively and breathes like something from Atlus would, except I felt like almost every part of the battle relied on some input from me. Whether that’s using my free-aim projectile to engage in a sneak attack to get the standard upper hand at the front end of a battle, using the same aim-and-shoot mechanic to blast enemy weak spots, or using chip damage to dissipate their waiting shield.
Of course, as I’ve mentioned already, Expedition 33’s combat is reactive and unfolds in real-time despite its turn-based housing. There’s an element of pattern recognition at play as you grow more familiar with an enemy’s moveset and what’s required from you to get away unscathed. Based on the few hours I played, there’s a decent escalation to the combat as they continue to fold new ideas into the mix, and though I don’t expect to have seen all the game has to offer, even what I saw began to demand focus and concentration by the end.
Another benefit to the combat’s fluidity, which’ll ultimately see you leaping through the air to dodge a low sweep only to counter with a powerful team-up attack, is that it can remain so cinematic. There’s no grand flourish that goes to waste in any of the game’s exciting battles, and while I might not be a role-playing game aficionado, I do feel as though Clair Obscur’s take on it is likely to be a pleaser.
The areas I was confined to in the hands-on, which from context I presume are earlier on in the game, were very linear. Thanks to tremendous art direction and environmental design, you do get the impression that the location is quite grand, however, the reality is you’re penned in, for the most part, as you move from fight-to-fight, and one story beat to the next. In between these regions, I explored what I’d describe as an overworld, which felt a bit more open and had a more isometric viewpoint to give a greater angle of the land. A few fights notwithstanding, the only thing you could do here that you couldn’t otherwise was set up a camp, which felt like a driver for the story more than anything.
Scattered throughout the linear sections are also flags planted by previous expeditions, at which you can restock elixirs, spend attribute points, and drink in a bit of the lore of those who took this perilous adventure before you. I always enjoy it when games can explain away nonsensical things, like save points, in-world, and Clair Obscur does a lot of this through clever writing.
As mentioned earlier, Expedition 33 is an intoxicatingly beautiful game, it’s a truly dark and twisted fantasy setting that’s worthy of the story and performances I’ve experienced thus far. Like wilted roses in an oil portrait, the image of a melting Eiffel Tower evokes the inevitability of death to me, and I’m expecting a lot of terrific imagery from this team. The fact that the two biomes I’ve seen so far are so starkly different is encouraging when I begin considering what the full game might offer.
The second one, which thrusts you into a breathable ocean, full of coral curios and whales swimming above your head, is breathtaking. And though we only met a sliver of the full cast in this hands-on, the performances, particularly from Charlie Cox, as Temu Robert Pattison, and Kirsty Rider, whose performance as Lune is witty and assured, work so well together, there’s a believable history to this team who are risking it all to ensure a future for their home, Lumiere.
A short callout for the game’s score is also required, as Lorien Testard’s arrangement is everything you’d want for a game as grand as this. It has the needed knack to go big or small depending on the story’s demand, and its ability to drift effortlessly from melancholic to epic, with full choral choirs chanting against an orchestral backdrop, absolutely nails the brief for a game that, based off my few hours alone, runs the gauntlet in terms of eking out emotional responses.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is shaping up to be a promising role-playing game that, story and characters aside, places its eggs into the right baskets, ensuring that it delivers engaging turn-based combat, that promises to pay focus to character builds and synergies, and staggeringly fantastical, pretty visuals that border on hard to believe from not only a small team, but a team putting out their first video game.
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 is out on April 24th on PS5, Xbox Series X|S and PC. The cheapest price is $84 with free shipping.
