On the horizon, the number 34 glows on a black monolith. Beside it is the Paintress, an immense humanoid creature with long white hair that covers her face. She waves her hand at the number and it fades away, only for her to replace it with ’33’. Just as she does so, everyone in the world who is of that age turns into smoke and dies, blowing away in the wind. Gustave, is preparing for Expedition 33, the 77th expedition to venture into the fractured world and attempt to defeat the Paintress.
That’s the delightfully weird setup for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a theme that runs throughout the game. It’s not just felt through the story or the world either, this is a turn based RPG with real time parrying and dodging elements. It’s got tiny creatures made of wood and giant mythical creatures that are somehow all equally eccentric. And it’s got a protagonist that looks a bit like Robert Pattinson, who played Batman, yet he is voiced by Charlie Cox, who played Daredevil. Like I said, it’s weird from top to bottom.
Gustave is from Paris, or at least from a fragment of Paris that found itself torn from its usual place and left as an island in an ocean after the apocalypse. It’s from here that you set out to reach and defeat the Paintress, after the above setup of course. Then, after everything immediately goes wrong as expected, you find yourself exploring a world made up of the remaining fragments of the old world as you find the survivors of your expedition and make your way towards your goal.
Of course it’s not just a pleasant hike, there’s a variety of strange creatures in your way, so it’s pretty handy that you’ve got magic powers. The turn-based battling here is distinctive and very satisfying. In a manner not too dissimilar from Mario’s RPGs, quicktime events are sprinkled throughout each encounter, boosting your attacks to deal more damage if you time button presses just right, increasing healing, or causing additional status effects, like burn. When on the defensive, timing your dodge will let you avoid damage entirely, while parrying all the hits in an attack let you launch a counter to deal quite a bit of damage in return. Dodging and parrying don’t have onscreen prompts, so you’re left to work out the timing based on the attack animations, some of which can be fiendishly deceptive, and if you miss the mark you’re going to soak up the damage instead.
Each member of your party is radically different, yet exceptionally powerful in their own way. Gustave, for example, builds up charges that can be used to deal very large amounts of lightning damage to enemies, whilst Maelle has skills that switch her between stances that have different effects, such as an aggressive stance that increases damage or a defensive one that increases defence and action point accumulation.
As they level up you’ll naturally be able to unlock more attribute points and new skills to tailor them to your preferred playstyle, but then there’s also the Picto system. Each Picto provides your character a bonus, such as a perfect dodge granting an additional action point, or a basic attack having a chance to apply marked to an enemy, increasing the next damage it takes. Once you’ve had a Picto equipped on any character for four battles, anyone in the party can equip this effect by spending Lumia points, which are only limited by how many of a certain resource you can find.
Basically, you can add a suite of additional effects to each character to further customise them to your playstyle. The combat system is intricate and full of depth, enough that finding another character can sometimes feel a little overwhelming with all the new information you suddenly need to learn. Thankfully they’re carefully explained in a tutorial for each, so it doesn’t take long to get used to things again.
The enemies you’re fighting are a varied bunch, too. From little wooden creatures to gigantic creatures made of stone and glowing runes. They’re admittedly not the most unique designs and could slot quite easily into a few other games, but most importantly there’s a lot of variety in how they fight. Sure, one area tends to have a lot of the same enemies wandering through it, just waiting for you to run up to them and hit them so you get the first hit once it transitions to combat, but the regularity with which the game introduces unique and novel mechanics, sometimes even just for a single fight, keeps things fresh. A couple of highlights include fighting off the Gestrals, the aforementioned wooden creatures that fight inside huge suits made of cloth, hay, and cannons, and a battle with a turtle who couldn’t move.
One of my favourite aspects of the game is its sense of humour. The Gestrals, which caused immediate dread in me when I first encountered them after the many adorable and annoying creatures I’ve seen through my gaming life, turned out to be quite funny in a chaotic way and managed to not outstay their welcome. Then there’s Esquie, a giant flying mythical being who is equal parts powerful, eccentric, and disinterested, another irreverent bit of comic relief. More than that, the conversations between the main characters are well written and really helped along by excellent performances from the voice cast and very expressive character models as well. The lighter moments really help you warm up to the characters and make them feel far more convincing, so when the darker, more serious moments hit they stand out better and hit harder.
This is helped by the frankly incredibly music as well. Sometimes it’s beautiful orchestral music, sometimes it’s choirs, or polka-esque, other times it’s metal with a strong lead guitar, or my favourite, which was incredibly jazzy. Whatever is playing, it’s always absolutely brilliant. I’m not someone who listens to video game soundtracks outside of playing them, but I fully intend to for this one, it’s that good.
Another contender for favourite aspect of the game, however, is the storyline, which is one of the best I’ve experienced in a game for quite some time. It regularly goes in unexpected directions that other games would shy away from, often delivering very emotional and resonant cutscenes from the very beginning, helped by phenomenal performances from literally the whole cast. It’s genuinely quite a beautiful game in amongst all the melancholia.
There’s a handful of minor issues that will affect your adventure. The lack of a map whilst you’re exploring locations is the biggest one. These places are quite large and it’s easy to get lost, running around in circles trying to spot the one path you managed to miss because you don’t have a map for reference. I’ve skipped doing side quests specifically because I couldn’t be bothered trying to find where I had to get back to again to finish them off. You’ll also find yourself getting caught on bits of the floor when you’re running around, which is a minor inconvenience and hopefully something that can be helped with patches.
There is some padding as some areas go on longer than they need to while you fight a legion of the four or five enemy types in the area in groups of one to three at a time. Completing the main story takes around 30 hours, so it’s far from the worst offender when looking at the JRPG grindathons of old, but if you die, they all respawn and you’ll have to do it again. The active nature of the combat can also wear you down as enemies can have many, many turns in a row whilst you try desperately, in vain, to parry everything.