things I loved about clair obscur: expedition 33
this is not in lieu of a fuller essay or maybe video, which I will probably do because this turned out to be maybe my favorite game of the past decade plus?
spoilers all over this list, you’ve been warned
the eyes, man. unreal engine 5 is I guess a big reason why this game looks as good as it does, but to me it’s the little things it gets right that are most astonishing. non-verbal communication is a huge part of the conversational writing in expedition 33 and the engine allows it to do this with subtlety and nuance all the time. it’s not perfect; I think people are maybe smirking more often than makes sense. but the amount of acting performed by characters’ eyes is stunning to me. there is characterization in the eyes! you see grief, determination, bitterness, fear, wistfulness, anxiety, so much more in flickers; you get very subtle expressions that contradict or flavor the words that are spoken. it’s a sort of thing i’ve just never seen a video game pull off this consistently and successfully before, particularly in-engine.
expedition 33 trusts its player/audience more than almost any game of this type ever tries to. this manifests in a lot of ways but the most notable is that even within its grand reveal it does not labor to explain the mechanics of what’s “going on” beyond what is emotionally necessary. we learn about the Painters, and that there is a war going on with the Writers, but we learn nothing about those groups’ history or context beyond the Dessendre family. there’s so much you could mine from the groups being “Painters” v. “Writers” but the game keeps it all outside the frame, which means a) you can just bask in the subtext and complication without a sci-fi/fantasy narrative making any of it literal, and b) the focus never strays from the actual emotional centers of the game, which are the Expeditioners’ world and the Dessendre family. it’s bold, smart storytelling games almost never manage.
speaking of expeditioners: I still think expedition 33 would have been a great standalone title for this game, and the game knows it, because the concept and throughline of the expeditions is everywhere. your save points are former expedition flags; your grappling points and climbing hooks are explicitly laid by those former expeditions. the climax involves the partial resurrection of those past heroes to struggle and die again in order to assist you in your path to the final boss. the game is suffused with a powerful understanding of collective action and sacrifice, narratively and mechanically.
gustave’s death, and the way the game uses it from that point onward, is a masterpiece of mechanical storytelling. you feel his loss in the party forever even as verso “replaces” him in terms of your spent and available resources. having maelle continue to be able to write in his journal creates a mechanical throughline that never lets you forget him and that he’s gone. gustave is how the game lets you feel the kind of loss that powers the game’s emotional center. if you choose to fight as maelle at the end, your reaction when gustave appears with sofia in the final scene is the game letting you wrestle with the same thing as everyone else in this canvas; for me, seeing him smile like his sacrifice hadn’t happened was gut-wrenching even moreso than the scare-shot of maelle’s paint-destroyed eyes.
speaking of those endings, there is no good or bad ending here; both endings represent emotionally true punctuation marks on the story that’s been told. (it’s telling that the dialogue between verso and maelle is the same in the battle, no matter who you choose.) to simplify it some, the game presents two reactions to grief: to escape it through art, or to embrace the sorrow and persist. but the game does not position one of these as “incorrect” — even in spite of the fight-as-maelle ending, the entire game makes it clear that the people and relationships of the canvas absolutely are real and do matter, and deserve consideration. (renoir himself acknowledges this by respectfully responding to both sciel and lune in the final sequence, particularly his “you grieve for two” to sciel.) but you can lose yourself in escapism the longer you refuse to accept the reality that you’re escaping, just like you can become a husk of yourself if you let grief swallow you whole without reprieve. the two endings simply examine both sides of this, in full, and sees the sadness and relief and humanity present in both choices. it’s gorgeous.
I wish the game tutorialized its mechanics a little better in the early going because they turn out to be a very wonderful blend of streamlining and complexity. pictos are sort of like if your materia was also your equipment; making you win battles with each to make its power a part of your whole team’s arsenal is a great way to encourage experimentation; almost every single one I picked up prompted an out-loud reaction of “ooooh” at the thought of what I could do with it.
my endgame build involved stacking maelle with shell-boosting stuff so that she could start the battle by granting lune and sciel powerful and +2 AP, which then led to lune with a stack of AP-boosting pictos to immediately be able to cast hell, and for sciel to finish it off if needed. this game wants you to break it and feel powerful as hell doing so, and it rules.
speaking of the game wanting you to break it — parries are insanely powerful and even a well-timed sequence of dodges can be tremendously satisfying. despite often looking like they should be the ultimate attacks, an enemy’s jump or gradient attack is almost always a free counter, and none of this feels like bad balancing so much as it feels like the game wanting you to feel that dodge/parry satisfaction even if you’re no good at getting the timing right. I was pretty OK at timing but was mostly playing this game by streaming my PC to my TV and so was dealing with some inconsistent input lag, so I really appreciated this.
the reveal of monoco and noco’s “origin” is so understated and wonderful and I want to hug them both.
speaking of monoco, he got the most consistent laughs from me, because the voice actor has great comedic timing. specifically I think of a) the back and forth between him and verso when verso convinces him to tag along with the party because there will be fighting, and b) his “pleasehelpme” to verso when you confront golgra before resurrecting noco. great shit.
the resurrection of gestrals is also a wonderful detail that isn’t lingered on much but speaks so powerfully to the game’s whole emotional thrust — yes you can bring back everyone you love, but they will never be what they were before you lost them, but you’re still going to do it because if you have that ability why wouldn’t you. you may get them back but the loss cannot fully be scrubbed.
enemies and aesthetics in this game reflect the in-world fact that they were all created by three distinct personalities: renoir, aline, and verso. you can see differences everywhere that provocatively suggest who might be behind this particular detail; sometimes the game just tells you, as with the axons. it’s an incredible thing to have this work so well on top of the game’s explicit french aesthetic inspirations.
I’ll probably have a lot more to say at some point, like I said. still turning this one over in my head.