I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 over a holiday. I had been looking forward to it since the announcement, so I played the whole thing without looking anything up — no spoilers, no guides. It took a bit over twenty hours to reach the ending, and I skipped most of the optional exploration and the superbosses before the final chapter, mainly because Act III has already built its atmosphere by then and I wanted the emotional run to stay continuous. So I went straight back to Lumière.
Story spoilers throughout.
It really does feel like a team's first game
Where it is good, the enthusiasm is obvious: the music, the art, the large-scale battle staging, the effects work that does not care what it costs, the enormous pile of Pictos you can combine however you like.
These are the things you can already picture during design, in a planner's head. "Imagine this area once it's built." "Players are going to lose it when they see this cutscene." "With this many Pictos, building a character is going to be great." You know where you stand with them at the design stage, they appeal broadly, and whether they land is purely a question of the team's ability. If the ability is there, not much can go wrong.
And the team's taste is what gives the game its particular quality. The hazy fog in early distant shots and the slightly deranged tilted camera in cutscenes threw me at first, but I adapted while playing. Between the overall feel and the soundtrack, the price of admission is covered on its own.
The 9999 cap is a solution that postpones the problem
There are a lot of Pictos with a lot of effects, and each character has their own mechanics, even if most of those mechanics feel familiar from somewhere. From a design standpoint you can see the team wanting to give players more choices and more party configurations, and they did in fact stack them up. The instinct is completely right.
The problem arrives with it: this many mechanics and skills are extremely hard to balance. Maybe the design skill was not there, maybe there were not enough hours before ship — either way the team did not have the chemistry between these systems under control. So what do you do? To keep the story experience intact, and to stop a numbers blowout from wrecking the areas and the big-battle atmosphere they worked so hard on, you bluntly cap damage at 9999.
That keeps the narrative run smooth, and it costs something: before you beat the Paintress, your build barely matters, because you hit the cap easily. After you beat her, the build finally gets interesting and the numbers fall apart, with damage climbing out of sight. Early fights genuinely need parries and dodges; once the build comes online, parrying and dodging stop mattering much, because the enemy is gone in a turn or two.
I never went deep on builds, so my damage was high without reaching one-shot territory, and the experience was arguably more coherent as a result.
Which made me wonder whether this problem is unavoidable once player damage is the main axis of progression. Make the increments small and ten thousand options are all worthless. Make them large and the big numbers do confirm that the build works, but what kind of enemy is supposed to hold the pacing together at that scale?
And this is an RPG, not a farming game you speedrun. Combat difficulty is part of the RPG experience. When the presentation has sold a fight as a desperate one and it dies in a few hits, of course it feels absurd. Players are handed too much stat growth, and as the numbers rise, improvising on the battlefield disappears entirely. I would rather see the numbers kept on a tight leash while the variety comes from mechanics and interactions between them — though it is easy for me to say that from out here, and the difficulty of designing it is not lost on me.
Turn-based plus action: I'm for it, and it's exhausting
I'm in favour of putting action elements into turn-based combat. There are a lot of turn-based variants and mechanics, and fundamentally they all want to make the you-go-I-go framework more interesting — sometimes by extending the strategy layer, sometimes, as here, by adding delayed swings until the thing has gone Souls-like. I support attempts to push the boundaries of a genre, even if they betray players who navigate by genre labels, because it is good for the form.
I took to it easily; I like action games anyway, and it feels great and holds attention. But the fusion has its own problem: it is genuinely tiring over a long session. Parries and dodges pay out so well that every single attack demands focus, and the rhythm the combat offers is not, I think, a good one. Enemy chains and delayed swings are ridiculous — a long chain can need nine or ten consecutive parries before the counter triggers, and dropping one in the middle is a real gut punch.
And once you know an enemy's moveset, all that is left is to parry every hit, while still watching a long combat sequence and staying locked in the whole time. Looking back, the fights I found interesting were the ones I was still figuring out, or the ones where I was getting badly beaten up. Against an enemy I fully understood, it got boring — because parry and dodge handle nearly every situation perfectly, and my understanding of that enemy has nowhere left to go.
The real problem is how it's told, not the story
Most of the controversy is about the story, and it is also where I think the team did the worst work. First, to be clear: I accept this story. The themes and what it is trying to say are fine. But the way it is told is deeply unusual, and not the way an RPG is normally told.
The first point is that the writers do not seem to want the player projecting onto any character at all. Gustave's abrupt death at the end of Act I cuts off ten-plus hours of emotional investment with a blunt instrument. Verso's sudden arrival in Act II, and the frankly baffling camp-affinity system attached to him, are set up and handed over very stiffly.
Even at the end of Act III, when the fate of the Canvas is decided, the option offered is "fight as Maelle or as Verso" — and at that moment the player is neither of them. The player is simply the player, outside the screen, being asked from a god's-eye seat which of these two people they support. Compare the end of Ghost of Tsushima, where the player chooses as themselves and as Jin Sakai at the same time, deciding whether to strike down his uncle.
And if this is meant to be an ensemble story, there should at least be two camps. When the brother and sister finally fight, the Lumière characters should show up in it somewhere — Monoco with the brother, say, Lune with the sister. The final standoff between two people shrinks the whole thing down to a purely domestic conversation, and it does not read well.
Naming chapters after characters was a good idea
The game's three acts are named for characters: Gustave, Verso, Maelle.
There is a writer I like a great deal, Kotaro Isaka. Most of his books work this way: each chapter is named for a character, that chapter follows events through that character's eyes and builds connections to the others, and the book keeps switching between them until the threads are gathered at the end.
I like that structure, so when I saw chapters named after characters I already half-expected the storyteller to change. Which is why Gustave's death in Act I, blunt as the switch was, was something I could accept — his characterisation was already complete, and genuinely well done.
What I could not accept was Verso in Act II. That character is completely wrong as the player's primary avatar. At camp you can only control Verso, and he even has affinity scenes with the rest of the party. Unlocking those stopped me cold: why include this at all, for a character who has just parachuted in, right after the previous one exited? The new arrival has not integrated in the slightest and is already building rapport with his comrades. As a player, where exactly am I standing? The outsider feeling is very strong.
On top of that, Verso and the player are not on the same information footing. He appears to know everything while I know nothing; he talks in riddles through the plot and I am left guessing. I have not built any trust in him, so treating him as the protagonist is out of the question.
I never levelled Verso, right through to the credits — he finished at the lowest level in the party. Which meant that when the moment came to pick a side, my first reaction was not "who do I want to choose" but "I never trained Verso, how am I supposed to beat her?" The system adjusts for this, but it still had knock-on effects on an emotional beat that should have gone differently.
Was Lumière's resistance really meaningless?
I don't think so, because Maelle is a Lumière citizen in every way that matters, and I am content to treat her as a native.
Read like that, the story goes: Act II ends with the great expedition, built on the bodies of everyone who went before, achieving victory. Act III turns it over — there is a higher order of gods above this world. Maelle, a Lumière citizen in spirit, gathers the fallen veterans of Lumière and launches another expedition, this time against the god upstairs, who is also her dad. Honestly, that last stretch of extremely rousing staging is a straight continuation of the expeditions. The final expedition.
If you then take the sister's ending, Lumière survives, the expedition succeeds, everyone lives happily, and the resistance earlier in the game produced the outcome it deserved. The trouble is that the team does not want to give Lumière a good ending, and the closing cinematic's insistence on the falseness of that world drains some of the meaning back out. Worse, in the final confrontation, the sister comes across less as speaking for Lumière than as running from reality, which dissolves the part of her that was a Lumière citizen — and with it the significance of Lumière itself.
My impression is that by the end the writers simply were not thinking about Lumière, and were very focused on resolving the family. It is also possible the point was to stress that this world's fate rests with the people upstairs and that Lumière does not get a seat at the table, as a study in absurdity. Either way, it could have been handled better.
The player is the character they control
This game made me realise more sharply that games have their own narrative logic. Plot beats that are flat on their own can become superb inside this medium, while certain techniques and structures from prose do not transplant well.
What has to be recognised is that the player equals the character they control. What the character goes through, the player goes through; what the character chooses, the player chooses. The identification runs deep, so making a character decide or act deserves care. If a value judgement is involved, either do not offer a choice, or set up enough information and the right scene for one, or accept in advance that the game will lose a section of its audience — while possibly gaining another. Which is part of why the fragmentary, never-quite-explained Souls approach to story is so well liked.
Honestly, while I was playing, I had a vague sense of all this without ever thinking it through. Immersed in it, with the music coming in over a very cool cinematic at the end, the logical part of my brain was not online. These are things that surfaced afterwards, and the more I wrote, the more problems I found.
Games are a composite medium and a lot of problems get buried. Because of things like the peak-end rule, what a player remembers is fixed while they are playing; participation runs so deep that you cannot watch from the outside the way you can when someone else is at the controls. Sometimes you are just too far inside the mountain to see it.
So if you ask whether I recommend it — yes, I do. It is worth playing. Action elements give turn-based combat real new life, there are a lot of builds, the soundtrack is outstanding, and the game has a distinct style and identity. I am looking forward to the studio's next one, and to seeing them solve the problems this one exposed and find their own road.
Sources and notes
- This is a personal retrospective written after finishing the game; all opinions are the author's and it is not purchase advice.
- "The 9999 cap" refers to the per-hit damage display cap before it is unlocked in the late game; it can be exceeded afterwards.
- The multi-viewpoint chapter structure attributed to Kotaro Isaka refers to the approach common in books such as Remote Control and Gasoline Life; the comparison is the author's.
- The peak-end rule is a heuristic proposed by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues.
Image credits
All images are in-game screenshots.
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