Decades ago, the Fracture tore the world apart. Every year since, a godlike entity known as "The Paintress" has risen from her slumber to paint a new number on the side of the colossal Monolith. Every human of that age immediately dies, vanishing in a cloud of petals. Every year, an Expedition leaves the city of Lumière, vowing to be the one to defeat the Paintress and stop the slaughter. Every year, they fail. This year, Expedition 33 plans to break the cycle.
That "thing" for 2025 is Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. A French-made, Japanese-influenced roleplaying game with a premise China Miéville would have killed to have thought of. The product of ex-Ubisoft developers whose creativity had been caged and nearly killed off by years in the Extruded Product Mines, but here allowed to explode forth without restraint, the game makes an immediate, often stunning impression.
In the tradition of the best JRPGs, the start of the game sets out the premise and establishes an initial group of playable characters, with a single "focal" POV character (here Gustave, voiced by Daredevil star Charlie Cox). As the game continues, additional characters join the party. Each character has different abilities and combat skills, which can be developed by levelling them up. As a JRPG-influenced game, Clair Obscur's mechanics are almost wholly focused around combat. You will spend more time fighting than doing anything else, there are no dialogue choices, and the game is built around its central quest and main storyline. Whilst there are side-quests, optional areas and optional bosses to fight, the main appeal here is the main story.
Thankfully, the story is very good. The setting is basically the New Weird meets the Belle Époque, the French period of optimism that extended from the Franco-Prussian War to World War I. It's no coincidence that one of the striking images of Clair Obscur is a melted Eiffel Tower, its top weirdly canted. The story sees the people of Lumière threatened with total extinction and mounting increasingly desperate missions to save themselves, only to fail every time. Obviously, the hope is that the Expedition you happen to be part of succeeds.
The game is predominantly played in third-person, as you guide the party through successive areas. These areas are linear, but most contain branching paths leading to extra resources, money or optional battles (which will also yield resources and money, with the added bonus of experience). Your party usually has an objective in each area, with well-acted cut scenes explaining major story beats and filling in new plot revelations.
After completing the first area, you'll find yourself on a very beautiful, very Final Fantasy-esque world map, offering different locations you can go to. The next story-critical location will be clearly marked, but you can also visit optional areas for stiffer challenges, find merchants to trade with or find enemies wandering the wilderness to challenge (these periodically respawn). Initially you are very limited where you can travel, but you'll quickly make a key ally who can carry you around for faster traversal, and can eventually gain the ability to swim so you can move onto other landmasses. Borrowing a cue from the likes of Half-Life 2, which puts the Citadel in the skybox of almost every area so you can always see your destination, Clair Obscur puts the Monolith and its ominously glowing number "33" in the background of almost every level and on the world map, letting you know how far you have to travel.
Combat is mostly turn-based, with you and the enemies exchanging blows. A key feature of the game is that you can completely negate enemy damage by either dodging or parrying blows, by hitting the appropriate command at the right time. Dodging means you suffer no damage, whilst parrying means you build up action points (allowing access to higher-tier abilities on your next go) and you may also trigger counter-attacks, dealing devastating damage. Dodging is easier but gives you less advantages, whilst parrying is more useful but the timing has to be more precise, and failure will result in taking damage. Enemy animation and sound cues have to be learned to fully master parrying. I know some people dislike the intrusion of real-time, even Soulslike*, mechanics into a turn-based game. I found it refreshing and interesting, but occasionally frustrating.
I do have to say that playing on keyboard and mouse (with a second screen) seemed to confuse the game on a semi-frequent basis so that parries and dodge inputs would be missed (you can see your characters reacting onscreen to commands, even if the timing is wrong), and if I ever replay I'd probably use a controller, which is annoying for playing a game on PC, which has a rich history of running turn-based games perfectly fine. Oh well.
During combat you can execute basic attacks, use character-specific skills (you can unlock new skills using experience points) and benefit from abilities gained from pictos and lumina, which are this game's equivalent to, say, Final Fantasy VII's materia. Pictos are magical skills that can be assigned to characters. Each character can wield 3 at once. Once you have used a picto in four battles, it becomes "learned" as lumina. All party members can then "learn" the lumina (unlike a picto, which can only be assigned to one character at a time), using a pool of lumina points. There are no limits to the number of lumina that characters can learn, apart from their pool of points (the number of points available rapidly escalates as the game continues). As an example, there's a powerful picto called "Cheater," which allows your characters to take two turns in rapid succession. You equip the picto on your party-member Maelle. After Maelle takes part in four battles, "Cheater" is added to your list of luminas, and now your other party-members can all learn "Cheater" as well, so the whole party can now go twice in rapid succession.
The real power of pictos and luminas is how they can stack effects in ways that build to ridiculous levels. If you gave Maelle skills that allow her to double damage, then double damage again if under 10% health, do two attacks in a row, and give her a weapon that puts her in high-damage mode at the start of every turn, she turns into an absolutely ludicrous death machine (to maximise insanity, you can make sure you pair her with Sciel, who's skills allow her to give another party-member maximum action points and make them go immediately). The synergies in the system allow you to build very capable and powerful characters. Learning the ins and outs of this system is part of the experience, though if you are too good at it, you can break the system and one-shot most things in the game (and, by now, there's also tons of online guides and YouTube videos on how to do that).
Fortunately, the critical path is somewhat forgiving and doesn't demand that kind of attention to detail, instead allowing you to more fumble through and experiment. If you want to take on some of the optional superbosses, though, you definitely want to make this system work for you at maximum efficiency.
As well as exploring, combat and undertaking story missions, you can rest at camp, in the best RPG tradition. At camp you can upgrade your weapons and skills, re-equip and talk to other party members, gaining new insights into their backgrounds and stories. Later in the game you can start to build relationship levels with characters; maxing out these levels unlocks new combat abilities and can lead to exclusive, late-game quests. Romances are possible, though low-key.
Graphically, the game is impressive though maybe not the most cutting-edge. The game's visual triumph is more in its art design and constant imagination, throwing environments like cities torn in half by the Fracture and deposited on opposite sides of the continent, an area which appears to be underwater (complete with fish) but you can breathe normally, a battlefield with a truly stupendous amount of bodies left lying around and a vast arena you have to descend through whilst the massive boss monster dances tauntingly at you as you fight through their minions. At other parts of the game you can travel inside paintings to fight a powerful monster, descend into the pits of the Abyss to confront a betrayed soul (and the toughest fight this side of Ruby Weapon), or explore a mansion that can be accessed from all over the maps, and slowly unlocking all its rooms becomes a key sub-objective as the game unfolds.
On the audio side of things, Clair Obscur might be one of the most ear-pleasing games ever made. The voice acting is outrageously good (from the likes of Charlie Cox, Andy Serkis, Ben Starr and multiple Baldur's Gate III veterans, including Jennifer English) but the soundtrack from Lorien Testard and Alice Duport-Percier (among many other musicians) is absolute class-A. Calling it the "best video game soundtrack of all time" might be a bit premature, but it certainly sails immediately into the Top Ten. Whether it's the operatic and sweeping "Alicia," the singalong "Lumière" or synth-bass-funky boss music "Rain from the Ground," the soundtrack (all eight hours of it) never stops impressing.
The game's story is well-thought-out and impressively weird and off-kilter. The backstory revelations of why the world is the way it is and what relation it has to our world (Lumière appears to be a warped version of the real Paris) are given out sparingly over the course of the game's runtime, with a powerful emotional impact accompanying the story's development. If possible, try to avoid spoilers and go in cold with this one, it's well worth it.
The game also has very laudable, focused pacing. A story-first playthrough will take you around 30 hours, but an exhaustive exploration of all optional areas, bosses and battles will double that to about 55-60 hours, a very laudable amount of content for what is not a full-price release.
So, outstanding worldbuilding, writing, characterisation, music, combat and graphics? Is the game flawless? Not quite. As mentioned earlier, the game is really not too happy with mouse and keyboard controls (especially if you have a second screen), and after 60 hours mashing the "E" button to parry with such force I literally injured my finger, I wish now I'd played on a more forgiving controller. Something PC players might want to bear in mind. The game also had some technical issues, ironically introduced by a patch; on launch the game was technically flawless but after the patch started crashing occasionally, at random. This wasn't frequent (four times total in 60 hours) but enough to mildly irritate. The game's UI could be sharper, rotating through different menu screens - some accessible anywhere, some only at camping flags - to sort out weapons, lumina, pictos and skills could be cumbersome. The lack of a minimap in larger areas is mildly irritating if you're trying to track where you've been and not been. The story's progression becomes a bit more divisive as it goes along.
Relatively minor problems, which can't detract from the overwhelmingly impressive artistry that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (****½) exudes from every pore. This is a fun video game, an astonishing musical jam, a great story and an atmospheric, at times eerie work of art. Highly recommended, the game is available now on PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and via Xbox Game Pass.
* Mechanics derived from the Dark Souls trilogy and other games by the same team, such as Sekiro and Elden Ring, which heavily favour parrying, dodging and countering attacks based on audio/visual cues.
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