The second half of this article contains full story spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. All images are in-game screenshots.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards 2025. It was made by Sandfall Interactive, a French studio of a few dozen people, and it is their first game - a new studio with no back catalogue took the top prize on its opening submission.
1. A correction first: this is not a soulslike
This is probably the most widely repeated misunderstanding about the game. It has tight parry timing, it has bosses that leave your hands shaking, and it has a world soaked in end-times dread, so a lot of people filed it next to Sekiro and Elden Ring - some going as far as to describe it as "Sekiro's parry plus Elden Ring's exploration."
The skeleton is nothing of the sort. Expedition 33 is a turn-based role-playing game. Combat runs on a turn order, and on your turn you pick skills from a menu, spend action points, and decide who is standing where. That lineage runs straight back through the Japanese RPG tradition, and Sandfall has never pretended otherwise. The one thing it genuinely shares with the Souls games is this: defense is executed by your hands, not by your stats.
The distinction matters, because that is exactly where the game's real design innovation lives. In a conventional turn-based RPG, the enemy attacks and you watch your HP drop; mitigation is a number problem solved in advance with gear and buffs. Expedition 33 cuts that half out. When an enemy winds up, the game snaps back to real time and you have to answer with dodge, parry, or jump. Read it right and you take nothing; land a full parry chain and you counter outright with a Gradient Counter. Your own attacks carry QTE timing checks, and there is free-aim shooting on top.
So it is not "a turn-based game with some action elements bolted on." It is a turn-based game whose most passive half has been replaced wholesale with an action game. On your turn you are playing a strategy game; on the enemy's turn you are playing a character action game. Almost nobody had seriously attempted that structure before.
The price is a steep difficulty curve. Early and mid-game enemies telegraph broadly, use short strings, and give generous windows. Later, the serious threats deliberately vary their timing to bait a wrong input, and alternate five-hit and seven-hit strings; one misread can wipe the party. Fortunately there is no death penalty, checkpoints are dense, and there is an easier difficulty plus plenty of build options that take the pressure off the timing. It is hard, but it does not punish you for being hard.
2. The Monolith, the Gommage, and Expedition 33
The story begins in a city called Lumiere, transparently modelled on Paris. At some point in the past a colossal Monolith rose across the water, bearing a number. Every year that number drops by one, and at that moment everyone in the city older than the number dissolves into petals where they stand. This annual mass death is called the Gommage.
What makes the premise cruel is not the dying, it is that the order of dying has been inverted. The old go first, then the middle-aged, then the young. The city gets younger every year, and every single person knows exactly how many years they have left. For decades Lumiere has sent expeditions across the sea to break the curse. None came back. The only thing that ever came back was a name: the Paintress.
In year 33, Expedition 33 sets out. At the moment they make landfall a man named Renoir appears and erases nearly the entire expedition in seconds. Four survive: Gustave, Maelle, Lune, and Sciel. Ten minutes in, the game has already closed off the road marked "rousing adventure."
Verso and Monoco join later. Six characters are playable across the campaign, but only three can be fielded at once (some fights lock in specific members), so party composition and the weapon and Pictos setup genuinely matter.
3. Presentation: almost every frame works as a wallpaper
The art direction takes its cue from the title - clair-obscur is chiaroscuro, the play of hard light against deep shadow - and the surfaces sit somewhere between oil paint and photography. The world map unfolds in layers, from the lower continent all the way up into the air, with self-contained diorama-like zones nested inside it; those zones are where the real exploring happens.
The cutscene direction is a clear step above what a project this size usually manages, and the voice work is unusually considered: English and French were both recorded as complete performances, with Maelle played by Jennifer English and Adeline Chetail, and Verso by Ben Starr and Slimane Yefsah. A French team building a world modelled on Paris, insisting the French version be a full equal rather than a dub, tells you something about their priorities.
The built-in photo mode is thorough enough to be worth using constantly.
4. Full spoilers from here
If this game rolled credits when the Paintress fell and the celebration ended, it would be a very well-made fantasy RPG and nothing more. It does not stop there.
The truth is that the entire world - Lumiere, the Monolith, every person and every creature in it - exists inside a painting. It was made by the Paintress, and the Paintress is a mother in the real world. Apart from a handful of members of the Painters' family, everyone is a painted thing. The characters you have controlled for the whole journey, including the ones who died along the way, are brushstrokes.
The reason lies outside the canvas, and it is a family tragedy. This family can paint worlds that people actually live in. A fire killed their son, Verso, and left their daughter Alicia gravely injured. The mother could not face it, so she retreated into a world of her own painting and remade her family there as copies. That is the Paintress.
The father, Renoir, is trying to drag her back out. The Gommage - the ritual that kills thousands every year - is his method. He is erasing the painting stroke by stroke to force his wife to admit that what is inside it is not real. The monster who has been slaughtering a city for the first thirty hours of the game is a husband trying to bring his wife home.
The final choice lands on the player, and there is no right answer.
Choose Maelle - Alicia's identity inside the canvas - and the painted world survives, Lumiere lights up again, everyone lives. The cost is that Alicia never returns to reality, and the painting itself is slowly consuming her.
Choose Verso - strictly speaking, Verso's copy - and the canvas is erased, taking everything inside it and him along with it, leaving the real family to face their loss and their guilt.
Neither ending is good. One leaves the living inside a lie; the other makes every fictional life pay for one real awakening. The game refuses to tell you which is right. It simply shoots both paths beautifully and makes you press the button yourself.
Collapsing from the scale of a world down to four people in one family is the single most accomplished move in the whole production. Looked at again from the end, every piece of grand worldbuilding earlier on is evidence of one mother refusing to wake up.
5. Why it won
Big-budget games rarely get narrative and mechanics right at the same time. Expedition 33's answer is that it never treated them as two problems. The tension of hammering the correct input on the enemy's turn just to stay alive, and the condition of living in a world where everyone knows the year they will die, are the same feeling.
It is not a successor to Sekiro and not an imitator of Elden Ring. It is a group of French developers who read the entire history of the Japanese turn-based RPG carefully, then decided to tear down the one half of it nobody had touched.
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