Go! Go! GOTY! '25: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, otherwise known as the second most daring thing to happen to the French art world this year, is a turn-based RPG created by Sandfall Interactive, a new studio founded by ex-Ubi people. It presents a dystopian vision of late 19th century Paris after it was destroyed and twisted by some cataclysmic event and left behind survivors that are getting picked off in droves by a malevolent force majeure called the Gommage (FR: "to erase, or scrub away") that disintegrates into rose petals anyone as old or older than the number printed on a massive monolith in the far distance. The citizens blame this gradual ageist genocide process on the Paintress, the colossal female figure seen writing on the monolith during every Gommage, and those unwilling to quietly disappear when it ticks down to their age in a year's time tend to posse up and go on "expeditions" to the dangerous mainland to end this event before it can eliminate everyone capable of making a stand against it. To say it has a saturnine tone would be an understatement given the amount of senseless death that occurs on a frequent basis, and the cast and its actors do an excellent job finding that balance between the existential dread, anger, and grief that define their lives and the moments of levity and joy they're able to wrest from that morass of misery that motivates these expeditioners to risk everything for the sake of those that may one day follow them: as a result, there's a certain fatalism that accompanies each group (since no-one's been successful yet, hopes are not high) and it's often enough for them to rest easy knowing they've made the trek slightly easier for the next expedition to come along. The prologue sets up both the stakes and the brunt of the worldbuilding as you escort Sophie, a former squeeze of protagonist Gustave and a woman resolutely looking down the barrel of her imminent annihilation, to the harbor so she can join the others in saying goodbye; you meet several others facing the Gommage along the path, each struggling with the inevitability of it in their own ways, while some of the most beautiful orchestral music plays in the background. It's a vibe that persists throughout the game, giving you as genuine a first impression as you could want.

An RPG cannot subsist on a fantastic presentation alone, however, and under the hood there's plenty going on in pure mechanical terms. It's a game that's followed the route of quite a few Indie turn-based RPGs I've played lately where they built on the "timed hits" mechanic of Super Mario RPG to make it both more fleshed out as well as far more integral to your long-term success. This is not a case where you'll get a tiny damage boost or damage mitigation (depending on who's attacking) but frequently a matter of life or death: for some late-game superbosses having an excellent command of when to parry, which requires much sharper timing than the more passive dodge, can alone determine success since that damage will often be a one-hit kill. Dodges are easier to nail but parries allow you to counterattack if successful, encouraging you to work on getting the timing down for some free retribution. Beyond that you really need to study each individual character since they all operate with a different ruleset, and it's evident quickly when you start recruiting characters like Lune and Sciel that they're going to involve more than just the standard RPG balance of normal attacks and specials whenever you have the AP available for the latter. Lune (pronounced "loo-nay"), for instance, is a scholarly mage DPS that acquires elemental "stains" on her palette that can be effectively traded in to make some of her skills more powerful, and you'll cycle from a fire element skill that might produce a fire stain that will empower your next water element skill and so on down the chain becomes a viable strategy until more options open up once you have more of her weapons (each possessing their own significant gameplay passives that will affect your strategy) and skills become available. Sciel's deal is even stranger: normally a scythe-wielder, her skills have her using empowered tarot cards that attach "foretell" to enemies and can be cashed in for more damage with other skills. Most of the skills that add foretell have a sun element while those that use them up are typically of the moon element, and by employing one of each Sciel temporarily enters a "twilight" state that significantly boosts her stats. It's a lot to wrap your head around but the further you dig into any individual character, the better your understanding of how to use them and the more effective your builds with that character become. It's a game that requires a level of dedication to its systems that would otherwise traditionally need to offset a mediocre story (as was the case in Tales of Graces F) but here complements what at first blush was the game's main strength. Clair Obscur is the very uncommon total RPG package in that regard: something I've only seen lately with Falcom's Trails series, which had you equally involved with NPC conversations and dramatic story cutscenes as you would be tinkering with your quartz and orbments for the right balance of elements and the abilities they impart before the next pivotal boss battle.

Just as the combat is complex, so is the character development. Much of what determines what your characters are built for is found in their weapon and the Pictos they have equipped: the former will change the way you use that character while the latter can boost certain stats as well as confer more expensive skills you might be lacking the points to equip from your Luminas menu (where you have a limited amount of points to equip skills you've learned). The weapon variance is truly remarkable in the way it'll modify your approach: for instance, I found a weapon for Lune early on that adds two random stains just from using normal attacks along with a Pictos that added an extra step to the normal attack chain. This meant that, in one turn using a normal attack, Lune had a full set of stains for her subsequent turn which she could spend on whatever elemental skills employed them or instead go for a skill called Mayhem, which burns all the stains you have for the same number of powerful attacks and can potentially stagger enemies if you spend the maximum of four at once. Finding that weapon through pure chance (it wasn't super out the way or anything, though I don't recall quite where I located it) really changed the way I looked at Lune and she pretty much stayed a party fixture ever since, especially once I acquired her Elemental Genesis skill which completely devastates the field with eight powerful consecutive magical attacks but required one stain of every element to pull off (which I'd occasionally be lucky enough to randomly draw). Maelle had her stance-switching mechanic which made a weapon where she starts in Virtuose stance—her strongest, since it triples her damage output—an easy choice to make, though I was tempted by a handful of others later on—while Sciel had a risk vs. reward weapon that ensured she could inflict the maximum amount of foretell in a single skill use but she incurred double damage as a drawback. The game is full of these sorts of choices and accommodates both those who are cracked at parrying by giving them the opportunity to become glass cannons while also providing for those unwilling to engage with the perfect timing involved with those parries by handing out weapons that have more of a defensive and cautious air to them. Just as "Fortune favors the bold and the desperate" is a recurring theme of the game and its expeditions, so too is that sentiment made manifest in its mishmash of risky strategies and builds.

I loved the characters in this game though it feels like we didn't get to spend as much time with them as I'd prefer even with the optional "social link" scenes found at the camp screen, which could either be a criticism or an approbation depending on how you choose to take it; that I'm this fond of this group that I wanted to talk to them more, especially the foot-loving dog-man Monoco who equates fighting to bonding and how the studious and pragmatic personality of Lune sort of clashes with her appearance as a free-spirited barefooted magical songstress who floats around as her main means of conveyance. Sciel's a salt-of-the-earth survivor hardened by personal tragedy that is still able to tease and lend a shoulder to cry on in a sisterly way, Verso's a brooding enigma that opens up to the group as we learn more about him and what he's been through as a solo explorer, Gustave and Maelle's sibling bond is very sweet, and even brief encounters with NPCs like the no-nonsense gestral leader Golgra or the genial yeti-like Grandis leave a strong impression. Esquie will forever be my bonhomie homie. Even the antagonists, too, all felt like deep and sympathetic characters with nary a cartoonish moustache-twirling villain in the group; there's one that might initially stun players with their callousness but even that is sort of explained once you learn more of their perspective. Incidentally, my main team throughout the game was Lune, Maelle, and Monoco. The last of those was mostly for that achievement for collecting all the nevron feet (my masked dog-man loves the tootsies, what can I say?) where Monoco had to be present for it to count but I really began to appreciate the versatility of his Blue Mage skillset once I'd grabbed enough of those grippers. Even though I ended up underutilizing them Gustave, Verso, and Sciel all had some depth I wish I found the time to explore; Verso especially seems like someone better suited for a second playthrough, given his true strength only manifests if you're already well-practiced at parrying since you need to stay "perfect" for all his buffs to activate.

The art in the game is frequently breathtaking and, as with the Ori exploraction games, I don't believe it's possible to take a bad screenshot of it. You could snap a pic that looks right up Gustave's nostril and it'd still come out immaculately framed with floating rose petals and surreal background imagery lending adroitly to the game's impressionist aesthetic. Well, not that I feel in any way artistically qualified to talk about the hows and whys of just how pretty this game can be even at the crew's most dirtied and bloodied state after a Pyrrhic victory of a fight; it's just so much to take in whenever you're exploring somewhere new that I have to believe to some extent is the reason this game is a turn-based RPG is so it can patiently wait for you until you've had your fill of the scenery. Like, I'm familiar enough with clair obscur by its English term—chiaroscuro, referring to the juxtaposition of light and dark in paintings to create a stronger impression—but my half-remembered highschool art class lessons have left me entirely unprepared to dig into this game's many inspirations, motifs, and visual references.

Man, can we talk about that music too? I guess I can because it's my review and all. It's insane that it all came from a single person, one Lorien Testard, from whom I anticipate big things in the future. Not that it's unusual for a talented composer auteur to take over the musical side of things and be responsible for a large part of what makes the game memorable—Uematsu's just the most notable name of many able to weave a whole tapestry of emotions and vibes and musical styles bespoke for every purpose—but that the soundtrack is so impressively vast and varied is incredible. If you look up the full game OST on YouTube it has over 150 tracks and is eight hours long, and there's not a weak link in the bunch: nothing that feels superfluous like it's settling in the background to let the visuals take over or anything of the sort. It pivots from orchestral to rock to what I can only describe as French house (and I ain't talking maisons and chateaux here) to the jazzy upbeat tracks that accompany Monoco and the other fun-loving gestrals. My personal favorite is Rain From The Ground, an early boss theme that pops up occasionally in other places later on like the superboss Sprong (whom wanders around the world map as if daring you to bump into him, like FF7's notorious Weapons), which starts out familiarly enough as an orchestral track building up with a killer bassline but then suddenly switches to a glitzy electro style that sounded absolutely nothing like anything else on the soundtrack that far in. The music contributes just as much as the visuals in making the world of Clair Obscur so singular in its conception and its commendable breadth and quality should make it a shoo-in for every VGM GOTY award going (the Grammys already dropped the ball, sadly, but fortunately they're the Grammys so no-one really cares).

It seems evident while playing that the creators of this game were devoted fans of Japanese RPGs, and of the Final Fantasy "golden trilogy" of the PlayStation 1 era in particular. You see it with little nods everywhere, from aesthetic details such as the way adversaries Verso and Renoir have given each other conspicuous facial scars (which seems far too coincidental to not be referencing FF8) to mechanics like how the Pictos accessories all carry passive skills that you'll eventually have permanent access to, if not necessarily the points to equip, once you've engaged in enough battles while wearing said trinkets (such as in FF9). The ambitious presentation recalls a bygone era when Squaresoft/Square Enix had the dedication to their flagship series to go overboard with the music, visuals, and narrative. The type of spectacle SE eventually had to scale back on when they adopted their current more cautious if varied strategy to their output, only seen these days in the increasingly intermittent entries for their core entries in Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and even then mostly just in the guise of relatively safe remakes, but I'm wondering if the financial and critical success of Clair Obscur won't light a fire under their asses since there's evidently still a market for big, bold, and unapologetically elaborate RPGs like this. Even beyond SE though, playing through Clair Obscur and soaking up all that pathos while figuring out character builds during the quieter moments had me feeling the same way I did when I checked out Lost Odyssey, which might actually be the true spiritual predecessor here: a deeply melancholic game about how immortality can become a curse if it means watching every friend and loved one wither away from old age while you remain in stasis, very much mirroring the journey of the Verso character.

Calling Clair Obscur this generation's Final Fantasy VII might be an exaggeration, especially since the Final Fantasy VII remakes are already doing a fine job being this generation's Final Fantasy VII, but I absolutely believe that this will go on to inspire and encourage many more development teams looking to create something both aesthetically unique and personal even with only a fraction of the budget—there's a real indication that a significant chunk of the gaming public has rejected the AAA ordained move to service games and online multiplayer by repping hard for narrative-focused single-player games like this or Metaphor: ReFantazio from last year or Baldur's Gate III from the year before that, and we RPGs fans have certainly not been hurting for choice recently as a result. Yet even divorced from the current gaming climate there's themes and emotional beats and that idiosyncratic presentation to Clair Obscur that will persist in the memories anyone who plays it for years to come; that's more what I mean when I say this will make a similar impact to the original FF7 that we won't truly be able to perceive until a decade or two from now. It's a wonderful if occasionally brutal (in more ways than one) experience that I'm glad I was able to witness before the year was out. It's going to be a tough contest in the months and years to come for anything to dethrone it as my favorite for 2025.

/Edit: Oops, almost forgot the now-customary gameplay demonstration video. Here's me struggling real hard with a mini-boss of sorts:

Spoiler Zone!

I've got plenty to say about specific details of the story and some of the characters but given it'll all be heavily spoiler-laden I figured I'd drop it here and spoiler-block everything. Click away if you've completed the game or have watched someone else do so; I just had an overflow of thoughts afterwards that I needed to pour out somewhere.

The Gommage

The Gommage is a horrifying concept; not just the idea of dying long before your time because of some arbitrary ritual a la Logan's Run but doing so with the knowledge that it will continue to tick down and kill even younger people in the future until eventually there's nothing but scared and hungry little kids left is just beyond bleak. Yet the true horror was a little lost on me due to the concept's undercooked utilization; it was frequently the source of the biggest logical flaws of this universe. To some extent, these can be forgiven due to the fantastical, illogical nature of the world, but that feels too much like a condescending "a wizard did it" hand wave for my liking. There's this chain on Bluesky that goes into how no-one can get the math right on how the Gommage actually functions or whether you actually pass if you're a year below the current number but will age up to match it before the next Gommage happens. Another is that you'll find journals from prior expeditions which, like the titular Expedition 33, are primarily crewed by people with only a year left to go before the Gommage takes them and therefore have little to lose risking what time they have left to save the rest of Lumiére: some of these expeditions set out quite a while ago, like the buff (and apparently nude) loons of Expedition 60 or the trailblazing Expedition 70 who were the ones to craft and set all the handholds you're reliant on while exploring vertical areas. However, their found journals also talk about them being satisfied they spent their remaining year helping those that will follow, which suggests that it was actually a bunch of 69-year-olds running and parkouring around, fighting hordes of nevrons, and climbing up cliffs to set handholds, which... not to be ageist, and I know the French elderly tend to stay healthy due to the amount of exercise they get relative to the rest of us, but it seems a bit unlikely they could do all this when so many other, younger Expeditions got nuked at the starting line or otherwise ran afoul of overwhelming resistance. The Gommage a wonderfully twisted concept to hook a very desperate, high-stakes adventure upon but maybe it doesn't work if you think about it too hard.

Renoir

Having two different Renoirs be the antagonist was very well done, I thought, because both have a similar dedication to eradicating everything but for significantly different reasons: it highlights that the essence of the man was inescapable in both even if their goals aren't shared. The fake Renoir you fight a bunch of times (and who kills you-know-who) is an extension of the Paintress's will along with the rest of her clan, becoming her greatest defender in much the same way that the real Renoir is a reliable if overprotective guardian to the real Aline (for better and worse, if their apparent estrangement is any indication). That he initially joins Expedition 0 as its leader is an indication both of his talent and of his determination, and that he changes sides feels less like it was borne from selfish desire than it was some instinct to protect everyone he deems a family member: Verso, whom he refuses to kill despite their many clashes; Maelle, whom he seems to recognize immediately due to her resemblance to the fake Alicia; and of course Aline, whom he betrays Lumiére to protect.

I liked the idea that all the fakes had no idea they were artificial creations originally, but traversing to the Monolith and learning about the truth of the world (as well as learning everyone else was a construct also) broke them in differing ways: Renoir held onto some vestigial loyalty to his family and became entirely desensitized towards any of these artificial beings and the harm he was causing them; Verso deep down had the sense that this world would be the only one he'd ever know given his real-life counterpart had already passed away and, despite being more empathetic than Renoir, still had some resistance towards ending the Paintress and the Gommage as it could spell the end for him too (though at some point he eventually realized that his selfishness was harming others, which made his duel at the endgame to let it all go that much more poignant); Clea's fake presumably knew nothing about her true self before the real Clea overwrote her memories and emotions for her own purposes; and Maelle, who decided to keep her false identity's name because that girl's life for as tragic and lonely as it was felt more important and hopeful to her than the broken, compromised one she had outside the portrait and why she opted to fight to preserve everything despite knowing deep down it was just an escape from her problems. That the state and eventual fate of this world boiled down to being the result of family drama reads as very "Greek pantheon" to me.

Clea

I was really into Clea as this enigmatic construct throughout the game, suddenly appearing out of nowhere for many players during the fake Alicia epilogue that initiates Act 3, only to start piecing together her true nature and influence over the story by exploring all the optional end-game content. She first appears as a talented and standoffish older sibling (who reminded me of Tahani's older sister in The Good Place) that Verso and Alicia/Maelle have some ressentiment towards due to being entirely unable to keep up with her prodigious talent, though Verso also specifically feels like the black sheep for wanting to switch from painting to music. Clea's personality in that epilogue has her come off as brusque, mean, and exasperated that half her family are wasting away in some random fantasy world while she's taking care of business by getting revenge on those supposedly behind the fire that took Verso's life and Alicia's face (revealed to be Clea's specific way of processing her grief). And then you find out that, as an extension of that exasperation, she's just been a menace behind the scenes this whole time by sabotaging and messing with Verso's canvas in underhanded ways to expedite her family's evacuation from their shared delusion and join her in the real world in enacting some good ol' family feudin'. She did this first by creating the nevrons to turn this happy fantasy world into a nightmare, then building the Endless Tower just to show off, seducing and manipulating Verso's tall and hunky friend Simon (man, to hell with that boss fight) to mold him into her personal wrecking ball, and effectively graffiti-ing all over her mother's proxy of herself out of spite. Again, some very understandable and relatable reasons for the decisions she made but from the perspective of the citizens of this world who might consider the Dessandres like a family of deities she definitely comes off as the trickster/villain of the group.

Gustave

It was a genuine if somewhat evil masterstroke in killing off poor Gustave so early on and leaving the possibility of his return as an open question mark for the rest of the game's runtime, largely because of a mechanic where whenever your team gets wiped out you can bring in your reserve members for one last stand and that feature would've made more logical sense if that reserve team also had a full three members. But no, he's permanently dead despite being presented as the main viewpoint character (which then alternates to Verso and eventually to Maelle with each subsequent Act). That they gave him perhaps the highest profile actor—at least in a more multimedia sense, since no-one's going to argue that Ben Starr isn't the most ubiquitous video game VA right now—really added more gunpowder to that explosive twist. I noticed early on that his moveset is far less involved than the others—his only real quirk is powering up that arm of his—as opposed to the stains and foretells and ranks and monster abilities that made the other party members more complex and appealing to learn, which should've probably been a hint that he was an "easing you into this layered combat system" type of tutorial character. But hey. Hindsight is 20/20, right?

I dunno, I get why RPGs love offing major characters unexpectedly beyond the usual practice of fridging folks to heighten the stakes, but sometimes it can read as a little too manipulative or deceitful; like it's the cheapest trick in the book to get us invested and pull the rug away (I don't feel this way about the most famous of these PC deaths, by the by, since that story was already building towards the dramatic exit of that character). I do wonder if there's going to be some kind of DLC campaign where he somehow fights his way back to life with Alicia's help and perhaps joined by some moonlighting previously-gommaged expeditioners (I'd love if one of the buff geriatric Expedition 60ers was one of them) and, depending on when you engage with the DLC during the main game, might mean him rejoining you shortly after his devastating death in a bathetic reversion. I did find it conspicuous that he didn't participate with all the other temporarily revived expeditioners during that climactic push into Lumiére at the game's end so... well, maybe they have plans, or maybe they'll get to work on a sequel or do something else entirely. Pour one out for the bearded Pattinson rock-tosser.

The Ending

I kinda love that you spend the entire game trying to stop these waves of killing and save everyone for a happy ending, and when the end finally arrives and so much is put into fresh perspective that it's the option of gommaging everyone that remains that is debatably the superior one (plus, there's something poetic about Maelle being the first and last opponent you fight in the game). I feel like this is a decision that the developers of the game worked towards making a really tough moral coin toss based on the players' affinity for that world and the more healthy choice of putting it out to pasture so that the Dessandre family can heal and move on as a unit. I'll have more to say on that in just a moment, but having Verso be the one to decide to force Maelle to move on with her life and having Maelle resist the notion of losing her remaining brother and all of her friends to stay in a comfy delusion is a real gut punch with no easy answers. In my mind it hearkens back to the final choice of the original season of Life is Strange, where the audience was cleanly split between resetting everything they've done so far and letting Chloe die, or else allow many more characters die in a catastrophe of the protagonist's (inadvertent) making. I knew there was a rational choice to be made there, but with a strongly emotional choice opposing it I was a little surprised but ultimately understood why so many players were evenly split. I wonder if the same is true here; it doesn't do the Telltale/Life is Strange thing of showing how many players opted for one choice or another (maybe for the best, since it can be a little immersion-shattering to know just how many other players had gone on ahead of you) but I suspect the developers might've figured out how to retain that information one way or another—they could've given them different achievements and checked the completion rates for both, but then there would've been way too many completionist weirdos like myself skewing the results by going back to get both for the full set.

So the one thing that stuck in my craw about the otherwise benevolent "erase everything and move on" ending is due to something called the simulation hypothesis. In short, the idea that humanity and our universe is a simulation created by some other, more advanced civilization. It's the sort of philosophical musing that gained some traction after The Matrix movies and has continued to become part of the lexicon, along with the Mandela effect and alternative dimensions borne from branching decisions. Not a day goes by where Trump does something typically monstrous and we all collectively wish we weren't stuck in a malfunctioning simulation that hit some enormous runtime error or one of those Elder Scrolls caching bugs a while back and stranded us in a virtual world of increasingly fracturing logic. The world of Clair Obscur feels like that too: a version of simulated reality indistinguishable from the real thing by those that live there (putting aside the weird monsters and magic powers) crafted by a family of creative geniuses who could end things on a whim had they the inclination and there's something existentially disquieting about that notion, more so than the Gommage even, and how flippantly we can turn off the switch because Lune, Sciel, Monoco, Esquie, and the rest don't actually matter since they were never "real". Of course, you could argue that as a fictional product none of what happens here or in any game is ever truly real but I don't know, if still feels kinda callously dismissive to toss everyone under the bus like that even if it's arguably the morally correct choice. I suppose that's why I'm assuming the vote was split in this scenario too.

Man, the rest of my Go! Go! GOTY! slate for 2025 is going to have a heck of a time trying to follow this game. I'll have more of these uncharacteristically timely reviews in the weeks to come, or at least for as long as this free Game Pass lasts, so watch out for those if you're also in that GOTY eleventh hour cramming grind. Bonne chance, mon amis.