Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 review

It hurts so good

clair obscur

August 2, 2025

Categorization: Fantasy

Where played: PS5

Mild story spoilers ahead, but you will find these out within the first 10 minutes of playing the game.

Mid-game thoughts: I picked up this game on the back of all the hype surrounding it, without knowing anything about it except that it was developed by a lesser-known French company and has been hotly anticipated for some years.

OK well it scored a 9 on Gamespot and garnered comparisons to Final Fantasy for its turn-based combat, and that was enough for me. French honcho President Macron even made a special speech praising it, apparently, which is just plain weird.

I was on a video game high as I had just completed Metaphor: ReFantazio to my endless satisfaction and booted up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 expecting to be taken on a grand new adventure.

And got a completely rude shock instead.

From the very start of the game, you are hit, or rather, bulldozed with an incredibly depressing story premise. I mean, my first reaction was literally, wtf French people. That’s how you’re gonna start me? There is a monster who counts down every year and kills everyone once they reach the age of 33 and below? 33!!! And the truly creepy and horrifying thing is that the people have for the most part accepted this fate and make the yearly culling of their friends and family past a certain age into a fiesta of some sorts, which fiesta you are forced to participate in until a loved one is erased before your very eyes. These tragic folk have found various horrific but realistic psychological ways to cope with the sudden death in their world, which is simply to avoid having any meaningful relationships or just not have children.

I swear to God, I almost put the game down after being forced to play the introduction to this story. I had just saved the world in Metaphor: ReFantazio and I was not in the mood! I wanted a happy go-lucky start in your town and pack some bread and your trusty walking stick and go on a journey adventure! This freakin' existential crisis and facing the inevitability of death trope so early on was just so predictably… French… that I cursed my decision to start this instead of porting myself into the comforting vampire and demon-filled world of Oblivion remake. God.

Worse… very early on the game tells you that you had better learn how to effin' parry and dodge with perfect timing or you are going to be so dead it’s not even funny. This is, to put it mildly, not a skill I ever bothered to master, and is the reason why I avoid all Souls—like games like the plague, and is also why I have been forced to put down games that I would have otherwise been rather keen on playing the story of (see my post here).

So here I am grumpily playing Robert Pattinson “Gustave” on his last year of life (he is 32 I guess) and going an “Expedition” which the people of Paris Lumiere send off once a year after every “Gommage” (a pretty French word which literally means “Erase” and which is the euphemism the people of this fucked up world use to refer to the culling of everyone above a certain age). Each Expedition is of course to find and kill the monster behind the Gommage and therefore save everyone. And so Gustave sails on the ship towards where the “Paintress” (euphemism for tall scary murderous lady) is and his entire crew lands in some island and ninety percent of them are immediately killed Alien vs Predator style.

At this point I am convinced that the French people are just enjoying giving everyone a truly miserable time and sullenly continue to play just to see how anyone could have enjoyed this slice of psychological warfare on what once was my peaceful existence.

But then slowly, unobtrusively, amazingly, this game which I was convinced I would hate and not want to finish, drew me in.

And it is incredibly difficult to describe how it happened. It wasn’t at first because of the beauty of the landscapes or fantasy world, which is usually how Fantasy games first draw you in and make you want to discover more. Your first environment just looks like a pretty forest and I was too traumatized by the story premise and the callous killing of my entire team to take it in, at first. My guy was bloody and in tatters and accompanied by a member of his crew who was Chinese, unfriendly, and rambling about protocol at a time when I was desperately trying not to get killed by the not-animal not-vegetable things roaming the forest and coming for me at every turn.

Nope, it began with the music.

After a few stressful battles where I got my ass kicked repeatedly trying to master the dodge and the elusive but rewarding parry move, I suddenly noticed that I was starting to feel a little… epic… when a battle started up. Every battle starts with gentle but thrilling harmony and a gorgeous animation where Lune (my sorceress) spins around with flames in her hands, and my fencer (Maelle) does a couple of graceful practice swipes with her foil. Hey… was I starting to look forward to these difficult and godforsaken battles? Say it isn’t so!

And was exploring through these beautiful and desolate landscapes actually starting to get me somewhere? I was starting to accumulate powerful weapons and abilities and slowly but surely getting the hang of dodging and healing and how to draw forth my characters’ different powers, and was the process of figuring of this out actually starting to get kind of fun??

And there is something truly wonderful and epic-feeling about this dodge and parry mechanic. I did better when I wasn’t trying so hard and just let my instincts take over. I tried to feel in my bones what to do and when to do it using my enemy’s movements and the sound (dare I say, poetically, battle-music?!) of its actions, the small tells and fidgets… which is just how you are supposed to swordfight according to ageless Fantasy lore, am I right?? It was like learning how to surf for the first time… you don’t look down at your feet or at the board, you look straight ahead and let your body decide what to do.

Am I starting to feel like… a hero in training???

This genius dodge-and-parry mechanic makes these the most engrossing turn-based battles I have ever fought.

And are the environments actually wonderful? There is the obligatory village inhabited by charming yet mysterious denizens, there is an icy wonderland and the sea and the beach and of course, fourth-dimension parallel universes and... am I having an a amazing time discovering this rich and beautiful world???

And is the pervasive atmosphere that you are about to die actually contributing to how much you relish every interaction and every beautiful landscape as you would the last thing you see before you die???

I need to play more.

Update after maybe 75-80% of the game done (not sure exactly how much I have left): Well, it did it. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has totally sucked me in. I am now in that phase of an open-world game where I am trying to explore all of the world and finish all of the companion side quests and defeat all the kinds of enemies before approaching the final boss. Gamers know that you would only do this if (a) the world is so beautiful and the story so rich that you want to milk every last bit of content out of it, and (b) you are so emotionally invested in the story that want to linger in it as long as you can before finishing the game.

And while the story is engrossing and environments are enchantingly bizarre and the characters are now my bosom companions, and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a magic conjured by more than the sum of its parts, I am going to make special mention of two parts in particular that hold the game head and shoulders above other games now.

Number 1 is the battle system. Its unique battle system may have changed turn-based gaming forever. As I previously described, this active hit-dodge-parry turn-based battle system is just oodles of fun to play. The characters’ fighting animations during the battles are right up there with God of War-level visuals and were obviously given priority by this small developer, and more than make up for the rote and sometimes wooden social interactions. They are clever, these people. They allocated their animation budget to making the gameplay visually epic, and trusted the story and simple conversation and narration to carry the player through social interactions. Brilliant, brilliant work.

Number 2 is the music. After I finish this game, I am going to find the OST on Spotify and lock onto that playlist. The music is this gorgeous, echoing, haunting, French operatic style that has become an essential part of what makes this world unique. It is frightening and ethereal at the same time. Listening to it, it is no hardship for me to spend hours wandering around the world aimlessly and look for more music and fight every stray Nevron I come across.  Again, for the small developer to take a look at its resources and say "we are going to make Lord of the Rings-level music and give SO MUCH love to it" is such a power move that it makes me giddy to think of. The distinctiveness of the game’s music is going to make this game a classic in its own right, much the way that Final Fantasy’s music has become an indelible and recognizable part of its world and its history as a franchise.

Anyway, I will update once I finish the game, but it has already been such a magnificent experience that I doubt whatever ending I get will be capable of diminishing it.

Take a bow, French ex-Ubisoft developer people. Take a bow. You deserve all of the acclaim you got for pulling off this feat with a brand-new brave new world IP. Whatever you have in store next, I am already on it.

Post-game update: No spoilers. So I woke up this beautiful rainy Sunday morning and decided that this was the day I was going to stop dicking around and actually finish Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. By this time I had scoured the little world, fought the enemies I could fight, helped the Nevrons I could help, and proudly levelled up my guys so much that I barely broke a sweat during the final battles.

And I finished the game and I straight out of nowhere got gobsmacked by the best ambiguous game ending I have gotten if not in my entire life, then in a very long while.

Take notes Final Fantasy XVI – this is how you do an ambiguous ending. It didn’t leave me guessing as to what happened, but as to whether or not the decision I made was the right one. In true f-cking Clair Obscur French people style (I admit I am a little annoyed, and I would have bit a lot annoyed if it weren’t for the sheer f*cking brilliance of it all), I got what I wanted but am now questioning whether that is what I truly wanted. It forced me to reflect on basically life, existence, what it means to be alive, the very definition of life, and whether getting what I wanted was truly the best thing to have happened to me.

ARGH!!!!!

What was supposed to be a day of happy closure and plugging into my next game is now going to turn into a day of quiet self-contemplative introspection on existence.

F**&&^^7!!!!!

French people, y u do this?????

Why did you make something so f*&*&^ ambiguously brilliant!!! Sometimes a girl just wants a happy ending, you know! I am not the type of person who enjoys contemplating the meaning of existence for fun! And yet with the sheer brilliance of this game you turned me into exactly that! I would be so mad if I wasn’t so awed at the same time. The ending, all FIVE minutes of it, really hammered into unpleasant places the full implications of the choice that I made. The choice that I spent all of the game believing was the correct one!!!!! Damn it!!!!!

What is that saying… death makes philospophers of us all… that can’t be right.

Well guess what, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 makes philosophers of us all. And will provide the appropriate moody soundtrack for you to do that.

And (plaintive voice addressing the game developers) are you really going to make me play it all again to see what the other ending would be?

That is just plain cruel.

And yet, maybe someday, I just might do exactly that. I am not a game-repeater as a rule, but maybe a few years down the line, this might be something I would devote time to. This game has proven to me that it will be completely worth it. Goddamnit.

PS: The soundtrack is on repeat on my Spotify and I have been reduced to groupie-levels of adoration for the composer Lorien Testard. Like, if I saw him on the street I would throw my bra at him. Poor guy.

Clair Obscur review