Today, I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Before I give a link to the game website, I need to say that I’ve been advised to get into the game without knowing anything about it, and that it was good advice. That said, at the risk of spoilers: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

The game has been recommended to me by at least two people who do not know each other, with the same kind of recommendation: a/ it’s amazing you have to play it b/ don’t read anything about it before playing, just get in there and enjoy. I’ll try, in this post, to keep the potential spoilers to a bare minimum; that said, if you want the pristine experience, you may want to stop reading here, go play the game, and see where you go from there :p

I was tempted from the beginning because this game has A E S T H E T I C S – it is sold as inspired by “Belle Époque France”, with an intriguing premise, and definitely a world that is *not* the one we’re used to. I was, however, a bit scared: the turn-by-turn RPG element is fine, the “with real-time actions in the middle of said turns” was scary. And the “controller advised” was also scary; I really wasn’t sure it would work for me, as I kind of suck at reactive/real-time gameplay, and I’m not a huge fan of controllers. However, there’s a “story mode” difficulty that I had been assured should be playable.

The other hurdle was also “it needs to run on a SSD drive” (fine) “and the download is 40G” (less fine). My 500G SSD had been an issue for quite some time, and there was no way I could actually find 40G on it. Thankfully, my computer had a second M.2 slot, so that issue was solved as well. My 7-year-old graphics card was also on the low-end of the supported hardware, but it still worked out. Eventually, I bought the game and started playing.

The game is indeed very pretty. And the music is also very pretty. This stays a constant during the whole game; I may or may not have a major ear worm with the main theme as I write. The different areas are varied but the general aesthetics stays consistent and absolutely something that I enjoyed.

The main game mechanics are introduced slowly and progressively, and the story mode difficulty indeed makes the basic fights easy if not trivial. I really appreciated that, because it gave me time to get used to the controller and the different enemies and how they telegraph their moves. The real-time elements happen on attacks (you need to hit buttons at the right time, but that time is very well displayed) and on dodge & parry (same thing, but you have to read the enemy to know where that right time is). Overall, I was delighted to see that I was actually getting better as the game progressed, which was nice (and I’m also better at handling my controller in general!). Some larger fights are more challenging and a few of them took me multiple attempts, even in story mode; I expect this would be the case more frequently in higher difficulty modes. There’s a bit of content that’s gated behind 3D-platformer-type-mechanics, but it’s optional, non-story-relevant content (as far as I can tell); I surprised myself by trying these a bit more than I normally would, because I did gain a bit of confidence on the rest of the game mechanics. Cool stuff. Overall, the game is not punishing – if you fail something, either you can retry immediately, or you get back to a save point that’s typically not far off. There’s no penalty that I could see – which again, helped me a lot to avoid frustration!

There’s also good incentives to go and explore a bit off the beaten path, although it’s not necessarily obvious which areas are actually accessible and which are completely blocked and/or not accessible that way. But I did enjoy the exploration part of it as well, although I got lost quite a few times, despite the game having very decent indicators/reminders of the main path (I would almost say it’s railroaded, frankly. Not a bad thing, as far as I’m concerned.)

I won’t say anything about the story or anything; just know that there is a very cool story behind all this, that the fights are fully part of that story, and that there are some truly emotional beats in this game. There are also some incredibly funny tidbits scattered all across the world; these are PARTICULARLY funny if you’re French. The characters are memorable and I haven’t skipped a single cinematic (although I did accelerate a bit of dialogue at times, despite missing on the voice acting).

Overall, it took me roughly 40 hours to finish the main story line (I could have shaved a few hours from this at the end, I think), and I did need a bit of help from the internets to get a reasonable build for my expedition. And I enjoyed every minute of it; I’m considering spending a bit more time in there to go unlock all the achievements I haven’t unlocked yet and/or to try other expedition builds 🙂

Note that there’s a significant amount of trauma, death, blood and uncanny characters in the background/story/game – this may be a reason to skip on this if you’re particularly sensitive to it. But other than that, this is a very strong recommendation from me, even for a game that would be largely out of my usual comfort zone!