Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 review – Revolutionary combat meets masterful storytelling

As I rolled credits on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I sat at my desk with my head in my hands, still processing the journey I’d just completed. This is everything I love about video games — emotion, great characters, mysterious world, and one of the best video game stories ever told

The world is oppressively grim.  Every year, a giant known as the Paintress rises from her seat and paints a number on a monolith, instantly ending the life of everyone at that age, with the number decreasing each year. To give the people of Lumiere any glimmer of hope, volunteers in their last year of life will go out on an expedition with the goal of defeating the Paintress once and for all. We follow Expedition 33. Many have come before them, all have failed, yet somehow we’re expected to succeed.

This premise creates an incredible tonal balance where this dark and cruel world is constantly penetrated by the optimism of its inhabitants. Even when the odds seem insurmountable, there is always someone, somewhere in this world who is willing to stand up and say no, which is what allows the story to have a whole host of memorable, humorous moments to break up that darkness.

It helps all of the characters feel incredibly well-rounded. Yes, they all have their moments when they can do nothing but sit and wallow in their despair, but they still find time to make each other smile, finding the light despite the tragedy; and trust me, this story has more than its fair share of tragedy. I refuse to give even a single moment away, but it has a spectacular talent for blindsiding you with twists that force you to reconsider everything you thought you knew.

Speaking of, if you’re a JRPG fan, prepare to rethink how you approach the genre’s combat systems. While the team at Sandfall is French, Expedition 33 is heavily inspired by JRPGs. However, rather than trying to recapture the genre greats, this game innovates in just about every aspect, taking some of the best ideas from Western action games and melding them with classic turn-based action.

The most important mechanic is the parry system. While the combat is turn-based, when an enemy attacks, you can press the parry button at the perfect moment to repel the attack. Doing so grants you AP – the resource you need to use your skills – and if you parry every attack in a chain, you launch a counterattack.

This means that it is theoretically possible to go through the entire game without taking a single hit, but that’ll take an awful lot of practice, as the game pitches the difficulty of the parry system perfectly. The window for parries is spot-on, with them being narrow enough that you really have to focus on the enemy animations, while not being so narrow that it feels unfair. It makes nailing a series of parries incredibly satisfying, especially as you’ll likely have had to work quite hard to reach that level of skill.

There is a huge variety of enemies in the game, all of whom have unique attack patterns, and each area will have you encounter them enough times that you can slowly feel yourself getting better at parrying them. At first, you’ll be guessing, trying to work out how long an enemy is going to hold before lunging forward, or which of their big swings is just a fake-out, trying to make you flinch before going for the real strike. However, eventually you’ll understand the pattern and find that perfect moment to parry, and let me tell you, launching a counterattack on a new enemy for the first time feels amazing, with the SFX and camera effects conspiring to give those return strikes as much impact as possible.

When it’s your turn, you’ll have a whole host of strategic options. Each party member has a unique skill tree that determines what they can do in battle, with every character’s abilities helping the others in some way, letting you craft a whole host of different strategies. This goes double when you factor in that each character also has a unique battle mechanic.

Gustave uses his strikes to charge up an extremely powerful attack; Lune uses her magic to gather spirits of each element, which power up her other spells; and Maelle’s skills make her switch between stances that augment her attack, defense, and AP gain. There are a few more that I don’t want to spoil, but careful consideration has been paid to how each of these mechanics interact, allowing you to craft a three-member party that works as one cohesive unit and deals incredible damage. As we all know, it’s very satisfying when numbers get big, and Expedition 33 lets you get some very big numbers indeed.

Then we get to the Picto/Lumina system, which is another brilliant innovation. By exploring and defeating enemies, you’ll collect Pictos that boost a character’s stats and give a unique passive effect – things like “basic attacks inflict burn” or “healing skills also cure status ailments”. Each character can equip three Pictos at a time, but after a Picto is used in four battles, it becomes a Lumina.

A Lumina is equippable by multiple characters simultaneously, and while it doesn’t confer the stat boosts of a Picto, it does give them the passive effect. This means you’re constantly switching your Pictos around to unlock these powerful effects for your entire party, with the effects getting pretty creative as you get into the late-game too, giving a new layer of complexity to party building.

To stop it feeling like a massive spreadsheet, a character’s stats are kept very simple – there are just five stats that deal with the basics: HP, Attack, Defense, Speed, and Crit-rate –  with the complexity coming from how your Pictos and weapons modify them. Oh yeah, weapons also modify stats, can be levelled up separately, and give passive effects – this rabbit hole goes very deep.

It’s a lot to deal with, but the game is very good at pacing itself, introducing each mechanic one at a time and giving you a moment to get comfortable with them before piling too much on. You get Pictos at a steady pace early on so that you’re used to managing them when the game starts throwing loads at you. Tutorials are one aspect that even some of the greatest JRPGs fail at (looking at you, Xenoblade), so the great design here is yet another example of how the team at Sandfall took the perfect ideas from Western games to inject into this genre.

Then we get to the world, which, if you didn’t already realize from the stills showcased, is absolutely gorgeous. The game’s use of light and oversaturated color makes every environment pop, with each new area having a unique visual spectacle. 

The consequence of this is that you can see the budget spreading a bit thin in other areas. Often, when two characters are chatting about doing something, the screen will simply cut to black and describe what they did rather than showing it, which is a shame. Still, that is a minor flaw at best, and I think that the team made the right decision on where to focus their resources.

Ultimately, the reason I seek out games with epic narratives is to chase the exact feeling I felt during Expedition 33’s finale (which I’m not about to spoil, don’t worry). It’s this intangible, almost dream-like feeling, where the rest of the world around me simply doesn’t matter because in that moment I’m existing in that world, with those characters, and feeling every ounce of what they’re feeling. It’s the kind of feeling where, when the credits roll, I feel like I’m gasping for air because I’ve been holding my breath waiting to see how it all turns out, and I feel the weight of the narrative on my chest.

Very few games I’ve ever played have captured that feeling, and even fewer have done it as masterfully as Expedition 33 does. It’s the kind of story I will always carry with me; its messages of loss, grief, and acceptance are second to none. Add to that incredible combat that mixes careful strategy with skillful reactions and unique mechanics, all wrapped up in a world that is a treat for the eyes everywhere you look, and you have a game that I will never stop praising.