The second half of this piece contains heavy spoilers.
Since finishing Expedition 33 I keep hearing the Sirène singing. The tail of that melody sounds like a reminder that a team in very high spirits is still waiting for me to come back.
Surplus technique and an artist losing himself
Reviewing this game, I went in suspicious of everything about its surface — the art that refuses to sit inside any recognisable frame, the lighting that behaves like someone recovering from a fever. It looked to me like surplus technical capability plus an artist enjoying himself too much.
The team clearly decided not to waste a polygon budget that large, and took an extremely risky creative approach to spending it. What they know how to do with a scene is good enough to keep you inside a French romantic tragedy for the entire run.
As almost everyone who has played it will tell you, the art style changes drastically between areas and does not serve one consistent tone. Victorian buildings fall out of the sky while the fragments of a broken clock turn the tip of a warped iron tower. A Roman battlefield is assembled entirely out of human bodies and colossal swords, expeditioners scattered across it under a bleached dawn. A stretch of deep sea is silent and reverent, enormous coral wrapped around wrecked hulls, tin mines drifting past white skeletons.
The one thing all of it shares is a sickly, oversaturated light and a lot of volumetric fog. Walking through it is no different from walking through heaven for the dead or hell for the living. It gives Expedition 33 a quality that is genuinely painful to sit with — like the montage a person runs in the last seconds of their life, in which they mistake the blood in front of them for amber perfume.
The most accurate description of the art is probably that its strangeness and its recklessness reach you by smell rather than by sight — the way the oil in a painting reaches you before you have worked out what you are looking at.
The same sensory displacement runs straight through the combat.
Two islands welded together
Before release, the trailers were already showing action animation and optical particle work that no JRPG had any business having. Nobody expected a studio without a reputation, working in a genre without a mass audience, to put unusual amounts of effort into an area outside its expertise.
By rights this should have been a mirage you could see through from the opening shot, and one that time would quietly file away. Instead the team handled every risk on the list without visible strain and turned a set of experiments into shipped features.
Their first move was to widen the audience for a JRPG without giving up difficulty or depth. Two apparently contradictory genres get welded together: turn-based players are asked to time parries and dodges frame by frame, and action players are asked to think about numbers and party composition. On paper it sounds ridiculous. I never expected my own scattered attention span to fall for a turn-based game.
Dodges that ought to come down to luck and parries that ought to be swallowed by the damage formula turn out, under this design, to be exactly as immediate as they look. The exchange structure has not changed, but with enemy openings this merciless you are never relaxed; the skill pool and its combinations are large enough that quick hands are not sufficient without study.
The one real flaw is that the AI's delayed swings and feints chase difficulty and beauty so hard that some of them stop having a readable rule. It took a long run of beatings before I worked out the obvious: the sensory displacement is in the systems too — parrying is not a problem you solve by watching. It is a problem you solve by listening.
Between the volume of timed inputs and the turn structure holding them, players from either side get something close to what they came for. It is not the usual compromise build that gives everyone a little of what they like so nobody complains — it pushes you towards a way of thinking about games that you did not previously use.
A map with no punctuation
Expedition 33 is so committed to filling its world with content that it appears to have forgotten the map entirely, which turns all those beautiful rewards into an exercise in memory.
In a JRPG, exploration density is supposed to scale with the size of the build system. But in areas this visually loud, with danger markers everywhere and nowhere obvious to start, wandering in circles is the normal experience. Add the campfire system and it gets hard to work out where you are after a fast travel or a death, and every fork you take by default becomes a fight with your own memory.
And at the end of all that pathfinding, the minigames deliver a fresh psychological experience of their own. The homages are genuinely funny — platforming that makes your scalp tighten, plus some eyesight puzzles that were never going to go down easily. Fans who recognise what is being referenced will smile through the frustration; everyone else just gets to swear at it.
The absurd part is that Expedition 33's strengths run so long that everyone ends up treating its flaws as flirtation, and the total lack of structure between areas as a different kind of invitation. When you crest a ridge, fly over a dome, and look down at another patch of ground with something valuable hidden in it, you go and check — knowing exactly what is down there.
Is the numbers collapse deliberate?
In a JRPG, any amount of scaling catastrophe can be explained away as the player performing above expectations. This one is no exception, except that here the collapse interacts with character mechanics in a lot of directions at once.
You can abandon parrying, which runs on reflexes, and invest entirely in shooting instead: take the buffs and talents that pay out for sacrificing a teammate and the game turns into a shooter. Maelle's stance doubles her damage on its own, her skills can extend that stance indefinitely, and with the Pictos that fire on a shot you end up with nine thousand-odd casings going off in direct sunlight.
Failing that, Verso's chains produce something worse. Same reliance on a powerful damage-amplification mechanic, same lone-wolf Pictos and shooting components, except he can turn actions over like an hourglass and put damage down like rain, which means he can raise the stakes at the numbers table whenever he likes.
I have reason to suspect the inflation is on purpose. An obvious flaw like this does not only give slower-reacting players another road in; it also lets everyone forget, under a barrage of digits, that the difficulty curve has fallen off a cliff. Once the damage cap is unlocked and the shortcuts are open, the harder hidden bosses tucked between layers of the map suggest that this particular crisis was scheduled well in advance.
It was probably planted early in development. Expedition 33 has an intensely creative team whose ideas are aggressive to the point of irresponsibility, and the numbers problem accidentally exposes their biggest advantage: nobody upstairs was in a position to question whether any of this was a good idea, risk and all.
Why escaping the sirens is the real tragedy
Ending spoilers from here.
Expedition 33 could easily have used a tidier, more conventional ending to reduce its commercial risk, and the shareholders and publishers supervising the project could easily have worn the writers down until they agreed. Instead the game arrived exactly as it is, and the community split immediately and permanently.
Some players resent the script for betraying its protagonist and call it backwards. Some are disappointed by the scope of the ending. Some simply dislike how the story states its position and suspect it of forcing a set of values on them. All three of those reactions occurred somewhere in my own playthrough.
Being annoyed by the protagonist swap is entirely reasonable — the transition lacks any rounding off, which is a narrative failure and not a defect in the player. Being disappointed by the scale of the ending is simply factual: described plainly, the script is a tragedy brewed inside one family, and a very recognisable Western family at that. Tragic mother, self-sufficient elder sister, younger sister full of self-loathing, dead brother, obsessive father — a model household for a prestige drama.
For a long stretch after Gustave's death, my questions about the storytelling were slowing down my progress through the main path. Why remove a displaced protagonist in a manner that theatrical, and why immediately install another character built to a similar spec? I did not get a handle on the reason until the credits.
Calling the whole gorgeous surface of this game "the sirens' song" is not a stretch. I did not want to hear them stop, and I wanted nothing plugging my ears. Verso is the Odysseus of the fable — he believes he is making the right call, and in doing so he breaks up something beautiful between the player and the sirens. When the singing goes, what rushes in is the desolation of plain air.
The companions you adventured with turn out to be a con built entirely out of rests, and those thousand-year hymns to love and courage turn out to be a performer over-reaching on the high notes.
The symmetry between the two men — light and shadow — is that as Gustave's face goes grey, Verso still counts him lucky. He has wanted release himself, and hated his own uselessness for knowing everything. As one of the few who slipped past the sirens, he ends up in helplessness and self-recrimination instead: an immortal playing piece stripped of any control over his own fate, handed the truth about the darkness in the world, so that a man who should have burned to death long ago gets to carry the curse of knowing it alone for decades.
And these are the two displaced men the player is given to play. They share a position, a grief, a purpose and a fate, which is precisely why almost nobody notices that Maelle has been the real protagonist the entire time, hidden underneath a brother's protection.
The Alicia of the real world does not yet understand why the painted world's pull is this strong. She is neither as willing to sink as her mother nor as harsh as her father. After Verso dies saving her, she becomes the only one of that generation who can still make the right choice.
But people in the real world do not only ever make right choices, and least of all someone who has thrown herself into a painting. She acquires the name Maelle and forms attachments there that cannot be undone. As she works out the truth of that world layer by layer, her position and the player's converge, and the game produces its most outrageous reversal: the emotional imprint the player has taken from a fictional world is another life Alicia lived.
So when the game finally forces a choice between the real world and the painted one, that very old question about existence and nothingness lands with unusual force.
The permanent silence of the sirens is the cruellest punishment available to a sailor, and it opens a gap between the player and the character. If the end of the world is death regardless, what is the flag planted at the end of the road actually for? The moment I could no longer feel the sirens anywhere, something close to total emptiness arrived — everything settled, the continent drifting past with companions who were always going to be lost, and by the time you look back the shadow of the sunset is already that far away.
I thought about my parents arguing on my birthday while I was somewhere inside Life Is Strange, watching Max's parents wish her a happy one. I thought about the start of summer in my final year, a friend packing to leave while I watched the last episode of Friends. And about the uncountable days spent in front of a monitor, a phone, a screen.
Expedition 33 is just one more instance of the sirens going quiet.
If I met them again I would ask for that voice one more time. Let the song run a little longer, and turn the flag of Expedition 33 into a rose.
Sources and notes
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was developed by Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive, released 24 April 2025.
- The sirens and Odysseus are from Homer's Odyssey; the comparison is the author's, not an in-game reference.
- Damage numbers and the behaviour of the damage cap vary with build and difficulty; the figures here are what the author saw while playing.
- Life Is Strange and Friends are mentioned as personal recollection only.
Image credits
All images are in-game screenshots captured by the author.
0 Comments