Clair Obscur: Expedition is a fantastic take on the turn-based RPG, offering deep characters, a unique world, and visceral story moments. It manages to take itself seriously and feature some truly devastating moments, while also still including moments of levity that the genre is known for. The combat is wildly deep, and offers deep customization and build choices, while tuning itself to be difficult. The parry and dodge system feels like the star of the show, but a lack of quality-of-life features and a late narrative shift take a little wind out of its sails.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Developer: Sandfall Interactive
Price: $50
Platforms: PS5, Xbox Series X|S (reviewed), and PC
An Xbox Series X|S code was provided by the publisher
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an incredible feat of turn-based RPG innovation, fantastic art direction, and strong writing, making it a fantastic journey. While narrative decisions made late in the experience and a few rough edges hold it back from masterpiece status, it’s a must-play for anyone who likes turn-based combat, even a little.
The story follows Expedition 33, the latest in a yearly attempt to defeat the Paintress, who once a year paints a lower age on a monolith, instantly killing anyone of that age in what they call the Gommage. The stakes of this, and just how hopeless the conflict feels, are immediate, with the Gommage happening right before the expedition sets off, before immediately being faced with the horrors of the world. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 excels in showing just how brutal and hopeless the mission is, with many levels featuring hundreds of corpses of previous expeditions, while still finding moments of levity.
The main squad for your Expedition are Gustave, Lune, Maelle, and Sciel. Each person has unique weapons, like Sciel using dual scythes to honor her work as a farmer prior to the expedition. They also go a step further, giving each character a unique combat mechanic that not only dictates how you should build them, but also their own flow in combat. Maelle changes her stance with each attack, but can’t stay in the same form multiple turns in a row, incentivizing you to use your attacks in a smarter order.
Combat itself takes these different mechanics and lets you find ways to synergize your strategy between the three members currently in the party, while also encouraging you to focus not just on enemies’ weaknesses, but also their attack patterns. You have several ways to avoid damage, with your two primary options being dodging or parrying. Parrying has a tighter window, but you can do a powerful counterattack.
While a system like this could break a turn-based RPG, taking away any incentive to focus on healing or defense, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 instead makes it a necessary part of the combat. Enemies can have some pretty long and complex attack combinations and whiffing a parry can often mean losing a healthy chunk of your health bar, but purely dodging leaves too much damage on the table in many cases, forcing you to try parrying.
Combat is given further depth thanks to the Picto and Lumina system, which serves as your equipment. Pictos are loot you collect that come with some stats and a special ability, like gaining additional AP on a perfect dodge. After completing a handful of battles with a Picto equipped, the ability itself becomes a Lumina, which any character can equip. You can only have three Pictos per character, but Lumina’s have a cost, and you can equip as many as you want. Lumina points are increased by leveling and by using an item found in the world, and by the end of the game, you can have dozens of these equipped, letting you not only get granular with your builds but also create some truly busted ones. It’s clear that you are being encouraged to break the game, and once you get the damage limit removed in the later part of the adventure, the possibilities become fun to discover.
The journey is broken up into levels, which are accessed via an overworld map, which you use to travel to each level. These levels take heavy inspiration from Dark Souls, using checkpoints that respawn enemies to refill items, and having winding paths. Each level feels like a completely new area, offering gorgeous new visuals and new enemies to face off against. It does a good job of throwing variety at you, although on occasion, it starts to feel like an incongruous world thanks to the patchwork biomes. These levels also lack a map of any kind, and it does become easy to get lost fairly often, but the levels are never big enough in reality for this to be a real issue.
The item system is a fantastic choice, giving you a limited amount of healing, revives, and extra AP tints, which are refilled when resting. This makes it much easier to use an item in combat, since you know you will get them back later, and it lessens the amount of items you have to keep track of. Not every aspect of the game has smart quality-of-life features, as exploring the world map is frustrating for one major reason.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 does not have a traditional quest system, only ever displaying your main objective. There are side quests, but you will need to track them yourself. This by itself is fine, but the world map offers no way to stamp or label areas, so it becomes difficult to remember where you have and haven’t been. Tracking a side boss I needed to come back to quickly became unrealistic, resulting in me never returning to those areas. The side content is varied, with a variety of mini games that are only ever good, but short enough that you won’t be tired of them. Asking me to keep track of my missions and where to go is fine, but there needs to be a way for me to do that within the game itself.
The story itself is great, but the characters are the true main driving force here. Each of them has incredible depth and personality, slowly discovering their reason for joining the expedition and what tragedy they’ve experienced in this cruel world. While the narrative makes this feel like a party focused game, and you can explore levels as anyone you want, there is a main character once you return to camp, and that person does not feel like the main character based on the narrative, and this choice only gets stranger as the plot continues.
The themes of grief, perseverance, and fighting for a better tomorrow, not only for yourself but for those who come next, resonate deeply during the journey. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swings from pure levity to some of the most devastating imagery I’ve seen in a video game. Unfortunately, the narrative shifts gears heavily in the later part of the game, and while the new focus of the story is compelling, it deflates the narrative I was so invested in, in such a way that it was hard to recover from. I’m ultimately fine with the conclusion we reach, but not just shifting away from the story I was invested in, but deflating its stakes just left me far less excited for the final chunk of the game.
The Final Word
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 not only deftly improves upon the idea of active turn-based combat, but delivers it in a gorgeous and realized world. The characters are incredible, it dodges some of the more grating aspects of turn-based RPGs, and delivers a mature, and at times haunting, story, without falling into the traps of too much violence for the sake of maturity. A big narrative turn flattens the experience, and a few too many rough edges keep it from masterpiece status, but it is still an incredible experience.
MonsterVine Rating: 4 out of 5 – Good
