"Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" Review - We Continue

Publisher: Kepler Interactive

Developer: Sandfall Interactive

Platforms: Playstation 5 (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S, Microsoft Windows 

I'll get this out of the way right from the get-go: everything you've heard about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (hereafter referred to as Expedition 33) is true. It's exactly as great as everyone has been telling you, and if you have one of the prerequisite platforms on which to play it, what on earth are you waiting for? In a world where detestable sycophants like the leadership at Nintendo and Xbox are trying to get away with charging both arms and both legs for their subpar systems and blaming it on his majesty's tariffs, Expedition 33 asks only for $50. And for the quality and quantity of content it provides, that price point seems like a steal! Yes, just like Baldur's Gate 3 before it, Expedition 33 definitively shows that the AAA industry is lying about every hardship it claims to face. 

"Games are too expensive to make" claims the industry.

"No, they aren't" retorts Expedition 33 with only minor publisher backing.

"We have to add hundreds of extortionate and predatory microtransactions or else it's impossible to make a profit!" whines the industry.

"No, you don't" replies Expedition 33, sitting atop a 3 million sales milestone within a week of its launch.

"Players want live services," the industry wails through tears as they try to pretend there's a market justification for the fad-centric directions they were already planning to go. 

"No, they don't" Expedition 33 responds, pointing to the fact that it's the highest user-reviewed game of all time.

Like Baldur's Gate 3, Expedition 33 embodies the Chad side of the infamous Chad-vs-Virgin meme, but all of that is just the principle of the thing. Yes, Expedition 33 represents a positive narrative that contradicts the industry's lies, but even if it didn't, it's still the current frontrunner for my GOTY, as well as almost everyone else's if the Metacritic scores are to be believed. But I've lingered here for long enough. So, we continue!

I obviously won't be giving any spoilers in this review, but I have to say that if you haven't played Expedition 33 already, you need to do so. I find it hard to imagine that anyone could go into this fully blind given all the hype, but I think it's worth going in as blind as you can. So for our purposes, that means I won't be giving any character names or any details outside of the basic concept. I'd recommend you go out and play this before you read further, but if that isn't an option for whatever reason, know that you won't be in any danger of spoilers if you read onward.

Expedition 33 takes place in an unmistakably French fantasy world, starting out on an isolated island city known as Lumiere. This city was forcibly split off from the land's main continent following the arrival of a gigantic goddess-like entity known as "The Paintress" 100 years ago. But as bad as that is, it isn't the half of the citizenry's problems. The Paintress sits in front of a monolith with a number painted on it, and every year, she erases that number and decreases it by 1. Once this happens, so does "The Gommage": a mass death event where every person older than that number suddenly dissolves into flower petals. In this way, the population is getting progressively younger, meaning there's a palpable ticking clock element to the world. With this in mind, after every year's gommage, Lumiere sends an expedition of brave souls in their last sanctioned year of life to the continent to gather intelligence and, hopefully, kill the paintress. However, despite upwards of 70 expeditions having been launched, not one has managed to accomplish this goal. At the start of the game, a gommage has happened, and the number has decreased to 33. You are Gustave, a 32 year-old man, and like all other expeditions, your team bears a moniker consistent with the monolith's warning: Expedition 33 (hence the title). 

Hell of a concept, right? It would be easy for a story to rest on its laurels with such a premise, but Expedition 33's narrative is top-notch stuff. You'll hear people online talk about how it's the greatest story ever told in a game...and I always hesitate to throw that kind of label around, but if you asked me to put a shortlist together to make such a decision, this one would go on that list without delay. Since reaching 100% completion and finishing my first playthrough, I've been going through a New Game + run while waiting for Doom: The Dark Ages, and it's one of those stories where you start seeing about a million things that wouldn't have meant anything to you in a first go-around. This is simply the tightest-written story I've experienced in years. Plot details are doled out intelligently and respectfully (in regards to player intelligence). Likewise, side details are introduced in ways that don't distract from what's going on but still stick in your mind if you end up having the conversation in which the payoff for that detail comes. 

I have one spoiler-free example I can think of to describe what I mean. There comes a point early on in the story where our heroes are told to go and find a certain being to help them cross a stretch of land. In response to this, the team reacts with sheer glee, asking "wait, he exists?!" In the hands of lesser storytellers, you likely already know what would've come after that: the main character would be confused and ask who that is, while another party member would elaborate, probably with some degree of righteous indignation. Not so here. We're just given amazed reactions in response to this being's name, and we're shown enough respect to feel that we'll know what we need to know when we need to. It also goes a long way to making the world feel organic to not have a break in the dialogue to catch us up to speed. It's a tiny thing, I realize, but imagine that kind of care on a bigger level and you have the Expedtiion 33 experience in a nutshell. 

Just as great as the story itself are the characters. I'm not going to go into names for literally any characters save for Gustave, so serious am I about keeping this as spoiler-free a read as possible, but I'll still give you a little bit of an idea of what I mean. It would be beyond easy to have party members fall into tropes. Hell, it would be easy to have them fall into exceedingly well-written versions of tropes. But that doesn't happen in Expedition 33. Nearly every character in this story is written with unfathomable eloquence and honesty, and they each feel uncannily like real people as a result. I said "nearly" every character there, which is usually my way of segueing into characters that aren't well done, but thankfully the reason is different this time. Rather, there are a handful of characters that are by no means meant to be deeply written, and it would be frankly ridiculous if they were. So, not every character is a shakespearean exploration of the human condition, but the ones who need to be are....trust me, you'll understand EXACTLY what I mean if you play the game yourself. This feels like such a bastardized way of discussing characters because I could (note: I had written "would" there at first) easily write pages upon pages of analysis on the paintress alone...but that isn't really possible in this kind of context, so I have no choice but to be a little vague, no matter how much I don't want to.

Before I move on to the gameplay side of things, I do have one note that I have to disagree with people on. It isn't a negative, per se, but it's a thing I think you ought to keep in mind. Reviewers have been pointing out that while this is a pretty grim story, there are moments of levity, and these moments of levity are woven in so organically that it doesn't distract from the tone. Therein lies my disagreement. A lot of the time, the moments of levity are, in fact, well done and not distracting. However, there's maybe 2% too much levity. A comedic exchange might, for example, last ever-so-slightly too long. For another example, the particular inflection a character uses on a comedic line might make it stand out a little too much. It's never an MCU quip situation, so don't worry about that...but just know that you might find the levity too much (to the most minuscule degree imaginable). Or not. I'm literally the only person on the face of the earth that seems to have this take, so you probably won't notice!

Gameplay...hoo boy! This is a turn-based system the likes of which you likely know from Final Fantasy or (to a lesser degree) Pokemon. But what sets Expedition 33 apart from the rest is in its incorporation of realtime elements into that turn-based formula. Other games have tried this kind of thing before and all have ended up critically panned. But this one manages to do it right. Most turn-based systems have stats and buffs relating to accuracy and other forms of damage mitigation, but Expedition 33 takes these aspects and puts them directly into player hands. When an enemy launches an attack, you have the ability to dodge or parry. If you succeed at either, you don't take damage from the attack. The time window for a successful parry is fairly limited, but if you parry every hit of an attack, you launch a powerful counterattack. Conversely, the window for a successful dodge is more forgiving, but escaping from the damage is the only benefit........"only" benefit is an odd way to describe not taking damage, I know, but c'est la vie. Additionally, each special attack you launch has a quicktime event associated with it to either increase damage or apply extra effects. In this way, Expedition 33 is just as strategy-based as any other turn-based system, but you also have an undeniably active hand in how a given encounter goes. 

As for how things go on a moment-to-moment basis, once a character's turn starts, you'll have a suite of options to choose from. Most of the time, you're aiming to use one of the 6 skills you can have equipped. Each skill costs a certain amount of Action Points (AP), and you gain action points when your turn starts, when you use your base attack, when you use a specific item, and on several other occasions dictated by your specific equipment loadout (which we'll get to later). All this to say that you won't just be firing off your skills willy-nilly until you've got a worthy build set up. 

Besides skills, you also have a base attack and free aim attacks. A base attack is exactly what it sounds like: you use your turn to hit an enemy with your weapon. That sounds basic, but depending on your loadouts, you can cause any number of other things to happen. Keep that in your back pocket. The free aim attacks are like the gun attacks in Persona 5: you shoot at any enemy anywhere you'd like (mainly to hit weak points) with each shot costing a single AP. Unlike the base attack, these free aim shots don't end your turn, so if you wanted to, you could waste all your AP on free aim shots and then end your turn with a base attack. And just like the base attack, you can add on a whole bunch of extra effects to the free aim shots to maximize the impact. 

There are other damage-centric things that can eventually be done in combat as the plot progresses, but for now I'll move on to the last thing you can do in a given turn: item use. It's unbelievably simple, especially for something following the JRPG formula. You have three items: a healing potion, an AP potion, and a revival tonic. Between rest points in the world, you have a static amount of each of these items, but you can upgrade both the quantity and effectiveness of each of these as time goes on. And just like your damage-dealing options, you can apply additional item effects based on your loadouts.

With all of this nonstop loadout referencing, let's actually talk about them. You have three avenues of augmenting a character's individual build: weapons, pictos, and luminas.

Weapons are self-explanatory, and they're the simplest of the bunch. Each character has a suite of specific weapons to choose from, and each weapon has a different set of stat scalings and base damage amounts. But more importantly, most weapons have special effects that unlock once the weapon reaches certain levels. They can be as straightforward as an extra AP gained on turn start or as complicated as getting the ability to use the character's specific playstyle to an insane degree at the cost of losing the ability to heal. So which weapon you'll use will depend on what kind of build you want to structure around a character, but there's an extra layer of depth to consider with the stat scalings. When you level up, you earn the ability to upgrade the kinds of stats you'd expect (base damage, health, speed, etc), but as I said, different weapons scale with different stats. Each weapon has two stats it depends on, and the extra damage that gets piled on your base damage depends on how much of an investment you have in these stats. Careful consideration of these things can let you have your cake and eat it in some cases! For instance, a character's agility stat determines how often they get to move. More movement means more damage dealt to enemies or support given to allies, so this is an important stat to keep in mind. But if you get your hands on a weapon that has high scaling with agility, more points in that stat also means greater damage. In this way, the only weapons that aren't worth serious consideration are the starting ones. Like I said, weapons are the simplest avenues of character augmentation, but they're also tailored to specific characters. Pictos and Luminas are more all-purpose, and I'll start off by discussing Pictos for reasons that'll become clear.

Each character has three slots in which to equip Pictos. These are essentially special effects that come with supplementary stat buffs. One Pictos (I'm pretty sure that's the singular name as well as the plural) might allow you to become immune to a specific status condition. Another might give you 25% more counterattack damage. Some of the more insane ones can drop your maximum health down to 1 in order to grant a massive attack bonus. And the most insane ones of all can simply cause the character to die once the battle starts. Besides those effects, that condition immunity Pictos might, for example, come with a 500 point buff to defense or speed, you get the picture. Only one party member can hold a given Pictos at a time, but after winning four battles with the Pictos equipped (regardless of whether or not the effect was used), the special effect becomes learnable for any character as a "Lumina."

Each Lumina costs a certain amount of Lumina points to equip, and each character has a certain amount of those depending on their level and the amount of point-increasing resources used on them. However, if a character has the Pictos the effect comes from equipped, the effect is applied without using any Lumina points. 

So, how does one decide which character wears an effect as a Pictos vs a Lumina? 

Let's say character x has a 40-Lumina-point once-per-battle insta-revive Pictos equipped and character y doesn't. Now let's say each character has 80 points to fill up. 

Because character x has that revive effect equipped as a Pictos, I can assign them 80 points worth of other effects to buff them. 

However, if I want character y to also be able to revive, I'll need to take half of those points away to make it happen. 

On the other hand, let's say that character x's build is already more than sufficient and I have more than enough Lumina points on them to assign the Lumina comfortably. Compounding on that, let's say character y's build needs a lot more effects to make it work and I need all the Lumina space I can get. In that case, I might unequip that Pictos from character x and reassign it to character y.

For one final example, what if both characters have their builds firmly in place with plenty of Lumina room to spare, but I also want both of them to be able to insta-revive? How do I decide then? Well, then it's time to look at the Pictos stat buffs. Perhaps the Pictos has a massive bump to speed? In that case, I might choose to equip it on the slower of the two characters. These decisions and more are the kinds you'll be making throughout Expedition 33, and I promise that as alienating as the terminology probably sounds, it's actually quite intuitive.

Now that we've discussed the building blocks of build crafting, let's talk about how one might use them to create something special. Here's an example from my playthrough: It all started when I picked up a sword for a character that touted burn stacking on base attacks as one of the side effects of the weapon. Burn is a status effect that inflicts damage every time the affected enemy/character moves, and it can be stacked upon itself to cause greater and greater damage each time the effect comes in to play. So 2 stacks of burn might inflict 50 damage on an enemy when they move while 4 might inflict 100, etc. So, I equipped that weapon on the character with the thought that he'd be setting enemies up for some chip damage even when he wasn't using his skills. But then, as I was scrolling through the Pictos and Luminas, I came across an effect that allowed one to double their burn stacks no matter the source. Then I found one that provided a chance of applying burn stacks when shooting an enemy with the free aim shots (again, doubled by that double-burn effect). Then I realized that the weapon allowed the amount of burn stacks applied to the enemy to increase the more hits I landed and turns I went without taking damage (again, again, doubled with that one effect). Then I came across Pictos/Luminas that allowed the character to go from one slash in a base attack to four in total (adding exponentially greater burn stacks with each hit AND doubled on top of that). And this was just the tip of the iceberg of effects I found that would build nicely off the burn stack base attacks of that weapon. It got to the point where this character could, over the course of two turns wasting AP on free aim shots and ending with base attacks, inflict over four hundred burn stacks on an enemy, easily dealing over one and a half million damage every time the enemy moved. So, particularly fast bosses would end up taking as much as 5 million damage between my turns and the next time that character got to move. Do you know how much damage this character's strongest skill would do at the highest? Around 398,000. And that was at the cost of the maximum 9 AP points, so this character would almost certainly never get to use this skill right off the bat. And that would only be when he moved, not the enemy. With careful planning and build crafting, I'd rendered any and all of this character's skills completely useless given how thoroughly and literally I could melt enemy health bars just by launching mamby-pamby base attacks and doing a bit of magic shooting.

And the kicker? That's just one character. You can have three characters in your party at a time. So just imagine the possibilities! I also ended up crafting a build for another character wherein over the course of a couple turns, she could be set up to deal something like 500% of her base damage. This resulted in her being able to land hits for about 5 times as much as one turn of the burn damage, but it wasn't nearly as much fun of a build to craft.  

Another example is one I've seen but never used, and it revolves around that seemingly terrible insta-death Pictos I mentioned in the last segment. There are several Pictos that apply benefits to living allies once the character falls in battle, so this strategy involves having two party members die right at the start, bestow those abilities upon a massive damage-dealing ally, then have those party members insta-revive. I'm not a huge fan of that one, but it once again goes to show the sheer wealth of strategies and build diversity that you can get up to!

But here's the thing: it might not sound like it based on what I've described so far, but I suck at these kinds of RPGs. I simply don't have the patience for the kinds of micromanaging that some of these build-specific turn-based affairs encourage. But there was something about this system that made it different for me. Maybe it was just the simplicity of the burn idea and how naturally the specifics came to me that spurred me on, but I've gotta say if you're like me and you don't normally mesh well with these systems, you might find a build you enjoy creating!

So, that's builds, how they're made, and some examples. But even if you don't partake of the buildcrafting (like I typically don't) there's more than enough variety to be found in gameplay anyway. Each character has the same basic things they can do in a turn, but they each have a gameplay facet specific to them. Gustave, for example, has a right arm that charges up when he hits an enemy. Once he has 10 charges stored up, he can launch one of his unique skills for massive damage. He is, by far, the simplest of the bunch. 

Without giving character names, there's also a character who functions as a shapeshifter, turning into a specific enemy type depending on the special attack they use. Supplementing this is a bestial wheel of fortune to the side of the screen with a needle that moves a certain amount of spaces each time a move is used. Depending on where the needle is currently located, certain special attacks can have added effects. Thus, using this character is all about using skills to move the needle to certain parts of the wheel in order to get the augmented skill effects you want to set up. 

Then there's a character whose whole deal is setting up damage to get paid off later. Half this character's skills essentially deal scratch damage that leaves stacks of latent damage on the relevant enemy. From there, most of this character's other skills focus on detonating those stacks either for increased damage or for the ability to heal the party. So, a bit more of a support role.

There are more characters than these, obviously, and each one has their own set of rules and ways their specific playstyles can be augmented through build crafting. As much as I would love to just keep blabbering on about the intricacies of this system, I do think it has to be experienced for you to get a full grasp of just how excellent it is. So, with a heavy heart, I'll keep going.

Yet another area where Expedition 33 excels is in its technical fidelity. Keeping in mind that this is from a 33-person team with minimal publisher backing, it would be easy to forgive a game such as this for being a bit on the janky side. It would be even more forgivable with a fact I haven't mentioned yet in mind: that this is developer Sandfall Interactive's first game...but the game doesn't need to be forgiven, because it isn't janky!

If I had to find something to bring up at gunpoint, I'd say that movement can feel a little inelegant sometimes, but that doesn't really affect gameplay since this is all turn-based. Really, you'll just occasionally get caught for a millisecond or two on terrain. In some games that can be a major annoyance, but not here. It's the difference between getting caught on terrain and going "gah, for the love of-" and getting caught on terrain and going "what, oh, i see"...if that makes sense. Then there's one equally minor thing I could think to bring up under duress, which is that sometimes the skill selection UI during combat doesn't bring up the description of a skill if you swap between menu 1 and 2 too quickly. But if you're doing it that quickly, then you're running off muscle memory in the first place, so again, not really a complaint. Finally, there's one battle track on the OST that has a tendency to cut out once you're close to winning for some reason. But this track also happens to be the one that plays the least out of them all. It's basically one minor boss and one side area where this happens, so more of a head-scratcher than a knock against the game itself. 

So, on to more praise! The game obviously looks fantastic, with art design that puts almost everything else to shame. Character models, enemy designs, little details in the way that gigantic enemies move to grant a sense of scale, I defy you to find fault in the visuals...and that rings especially true when you remember that this is a team of ex-Ubisoft developers. Compare Expedition 33 to literally anything Ubisoft has ever put out and I dare say you'll laugh your ass off! 

But I think the whole world would be ok with this looking like a Ubisoft game so long as the soundtrack stayed as enchanting as it is. With the exception of one song that opens with the words "gone away," this 8 hour-long OST is banger after banger. There are accordion-driven pieces for when you fight the various mime minibosses (in case it wasn't already obvious that this is a French team). There are epic boss themes that wouldn't feel out of place in a From Software title. Then there are solo acapella pieces that made me put down the controller for a little while just to listen. Then there are the major boss themes, dear god, the major boss themes! I find it hard to imagine anything dethroning Expedition 33's soundtrack from the Best Soundtrack award this year.

Beyond aesthetic items, I also never experienced any crashes, framerate dips during gameplay, texture pop-in, or functional glitches. So this is really about as solid as any game can get, especially for its size!

What more can I even say? You've already heard from everyone else that Expedition 33 is a triumph of the indie spirit, and now you've heard it in my words. I can only hope my words have done their job, with that in mind! Expedition 33 is an intricate dive into the most creative premise to come out of this year, a deeply profound exploration about what it means to continue on in the face of dire circumstances, and a beacon of hope that there are still people out there with new ideas and a wealth of passion that this industry hasn't yet snuffed out. Like the many expeditions that have ventured to the main continent in this game's world, Sandfall Interactive has presented a gift "for those who come after." And what a gift it is.

With nothing I intend to take points off for standing in its way, the final score for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is...

10/10 - Masterpiece

Bravo, Sandfall Interactive, bravo!