All too immersed in its own artistic merits, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 forgets that it needs to have quality level design, non-repetitive gameplay mechanics, and dialogue that isn’t below average to warrant high praise. Apparently, the gaming community disagrees.
The game is strikingly dissimilar to anything released, most likely, ever. While borrowing a lot of its mechanics, level design, and story progression from many different genres and titles, the party-based, narrative driven piece from Sandfall Interactive is decidedly its own beast. With an overwhelmingly positive reception from the Steam community (and everyone else), it isn’t difficult to see how the gaming medium sets a precedent for itself that is quick to reward mediocrity so long it’s paired with originality.
It Sounds Amazing.
The Soundtrack for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, plainly, is masterful. There’s no denying that Lorien Testard composed almost complete winners with this game. Additionally, his recruitment of Alice Duport-Percier was nothing short of a stroke of genius. His ability to recognize who he needed to compose the songs with to make them as memorable as they are speaks to his vision as an artist. Even the main menu theme, Alicia, haunts anything lucky enough to hear it. A player might find themselves dumb-struck as they flick through the settings on a first-time playthrough, unable to keep their focus upon the DLSS percentage thanks to the voice gracing their ears. This experience is akin to opening up to Dark Souls 2’s vocal and piano composition for the first time, if only better.
Most games keep the soundtrack in a supportive role. But Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does something very interesting by making the music a sort of narrator. The songs, sometimes written in an unused, archaic form of French, for example, give tell of the game’s story, themes, or otherwise narrate on what’s happening on screen.
In many ways, this is ambitious. Although it has to be said that it doesn’t always come off, like in the fight against painted Renoir within the monolith, where the lyrics, lost-in-translation shenanigans notwithstanding, are a tad dramatic and self-interested while the male vocals grind against each other in a battle between annoying falsetto and unconvincing, driving, masculine yelling. Altogether, a lovely collection of music.
The World Looks Better Than it Plays.
The world is originally conceived, gorgeous, cleverly organized and, in the very same breath, can be described as underwhelming, poorly thought-through, and desperate to hide the fact that among its scenic facets of content are entire locations that take no more than a few seconds to explore the entirety of. That is, they are eye candy that make the game look bigger than it is.
Where the open-world, known as the continent, fights with itself in trying to keep the players moving forward while also encouraging them to forever back-track, the traditionally designed, closed, instanced locations try to outmatch the open world by laying paths that the player feels obligated to backtrack through while losing their location thanks to Clair Obscur’s poor ability to keep the player from becoming disoriented. Levels somehow manage to be both narrow in the way you’d expect a PS2 game to be, while also giving the player more opportunities to forget which direction is forward than previously thought possible.
Then the late-game hits and the player gains vertical traversal so as to access the host of challenge-run-esqu(i)e boss fights. This isn’t a strict negative for some people, but it isn’t a definite positive to reserve some of the more challenging fights for pure “after you’ve beaten the game accomplishment” feelings, either.
The Combat Is Okay, Sometimes.
The gameplay is optimistic when it works and comically obtuse when it doesn’t. Clair Obscur’s parry mechanic, borrowed from the Dark Souls Trilogy, takes all of the things that make party-based gaming fun and dismantles their attributes one by one as the player comes to the irking realization that each attack from the enemy, no matter the damage type, no matter the visual appeal, needs to be dealt with in the exact same way: Parrying. Even the alternate movesets, like gradient parries and jump counter-attacks, are just the parry mechanic with a different coat of paint.
When figuring out how to best build your party, the ultimate realization comes from the fact that if you don’t parry, you don’t progress through the game. In other words, if you do progress, you won’t be taking damage, which means tank builds have diminishing returns.
Sure, being able to tank one or two more hits from a boss in the mid game might help a player learn the parry system, but ultimately you have to learn the parry timings for a boss to beat it, which means that once you can beat it, having less DPS is nothing but a difficulty multiplier, not an asset, as it might be in other games where tank builds generally make the game easier.
Once a player knows they have to gun it for maximum DPS, the combat can be satisfying provided it’s against unusual or new boss fights, as the combat against generic enemies wears down in novelty quick.
This DPS rush is hampered by the fact that all damage is capped at 9,999 damage per swing until a character gains access to the Paintress’ pictos or its respective lumina. This means that all abilities, until the very, very end of the game, are complete garbage unless they swing multiple times.
Does an ability have 5 swings? It’s worth just under 50k damage. One swing? It’s worthless. For a long while in the mid and late-game, one will feel as though characters simply aren’t getting stronger because their damage is capped arbitrarily. Sandfall likely felt that this was necessary to prevent OP builds from steamrolling the game, but instead of just capping the damage, a more professional developer would have seen the opportunity to tune down damage values or just let players run wild with OP builds. Sandfall did neither.
The parry system destroys the necessity for build variety among the party, and the damage cap destroys the fun of being OP and hampers one’s journey to being able to destroy bosses in less than, say, an hour at a time. This is an example of two systems creating a floor and a ceiling unnaturally.
Who Wrote This Masterpiece/Junk?
The writing of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has a few different faces. Where the macro-story is concerned, it’s genius, original, and has the stuff to keep within the memory of its player-base for decades to come. As for the dialogue, it’s intentionally grade-school at best and incompetent garbage at its worst. The characters are built up to be one kind of thing before continually behaving in ways that betray their development. Their conversations, the vast majority of which are kept within the confines of “the camp”, are equal to none other than mid-tiered romance anime: the dialogue draws flush the faces of 14 year olds everywhere, and how adults can play this game without cringing in perpetuity, there’s not a one with a clue.
Take everything to do with characters speaking to one another and toss it into the garbage. Take everything to do with characters making decisions or having a grand, emotionally charged moment and toss it in the garbage.
Take everything else: the world building, the macro-story, the family drama, the dichotomy between the painted Dessendre family and the real Dessendre family, the intruiging yet vague war between the Writers and the Painters, which hilariously touches upon the two art forms having a hard time understanding one another, and what you can go ahead and do is keep it. That portion of the writing, the broader story, is excellent. More than that, it’s excellence the likes of which not seen in quite a long time. Of all the things that can be said for the writing of Clair Obscure, being unoriginal is not one of them.
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 is a handful of attributes. Some incredible, some horrible. Very often, the incredible attributes can cover up the horrible, and other times one will find the horrible attributes anchor everything else to them in a way that’s inexcusable.
It’s probable that Clair Obscur will win Game of the Year, and whether or not that’s deserved will depend on whether or not Escape From Tarkov releases into 1.0 (No, seriously, it’s one of the greats.) Regardless, Sandfall Interactive would do well to realize that they had a lot stars align to make Clair Obscur the success that it is: Their genius composer was recruited on a whim. That composer, and his following recruitment of Alice Duport-Percier, is nothing short of a miracle. The writers had the talent to craft an original story, and while that wasn’t luck, their inability to deliver on everything in-between the bigger picture shows a weakness that needs to be strengthened. The game’s journey into Unreal Engine 5 gave the developers a title that looked better than anything they would have otherwise been able to make. All of these facts came together to help Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 overwhelm the eyes and ears of its playerbase such that they were, and are currently, unable to properly assess the game in front of them.
I don’t believe we’ll be seeing a poor OST from Alice nor Lorien anytime soon, and those two will likely always deliver art that’s difficult to not be emotionally swayed by, but the graphic fidelity of Unreal Engine 5, the parry-party gameplay, and the underwhelming, immature writing style of Sandfall will all lose their novelty such that no amount of music will be able to make up for the woes of their future titles.
It’s a decent game. But Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, when accounting for the whole of its canvas, lets far too many details slip to actually be up to par with the current praise that it’s enjoying. I pray for Sandfall’s improvement and success in the future.
6/10,
-E
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