Game Review: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
2025-Dec-22, Monday 14:30![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
Have you heard the good news about French Final Fantasy X?
In late 2024 a trailer dropped for a game called Clair Obscur. We see a twisted Eiffel Tower, broken, with fragments still hanging impossibly in the air. We learn about the Paintess, who paints a new number on the Monolith every year and everyone older than that, turns into dust and flowers and blows away on the wind. I first saw the release date trailer back in January, and I watched it multiple times until the phrase "The Paintress Must Fall" would randomly play through my head. I bought it at full price, a week after release, something I never do with games anymore.
And then I didn't start playing until November because I was playing Vintage Story back in April. Oops.
When the game rewards happened and Clair Obscur swept them, I posted a meme with a screenshot from the game. "Game Awards? More like Festival de l'Expedition." That's around when I picked it up again after a couple weeks of playing Noita and getting mostly nowhere. And now, having beaten the game (but not all of the postgame, I'll admit), I can say that Clair Obscur--despite a couple major flaws--absolutely deserves all of the awards that it got and is one of the finest games I've played in years, so when you read the rant that occurs below just remember that it comes out of love and out of a wish that the game was even better than it was.
Also, there will be a ton of plot spoilers here. I'm going to put a warning down below before the part where I really get into it, but if you haven't watched the trailers and want to play the game totally blind, maybe come back and read this later.
Good thing it's not Expedition 67.
What you know going in is basically encapsulated in the trailer I mentioned above. You're in "Lumière," obviously Paris due to the Eiffel Tower and since the name is from La Ville Lumière, "The City of Lights," but now it's an island due to a disaster called the Fracture. You begin as Gustave, a citizen of Lumière, on the day of the Gommage (Fr. "Erasing," though hilariously it can also means "exfoliation"), when everyone is dressed in their best clothes and walking down to a festival at the harbor. You get a tutorial about how to move around the world, climbing and jumping and using grapple points, you fight some friendly duels against your friend and younger-sister-figure Maelle to teach you combat, and walk around and talk to the other Lumièrans. And at sunset, as everyone gathers at the water's edge and watches the Monolith across the sea, the Paintress awakens. She stands up, erases the giant number 34 on the Monolith, and paints a 33, and as the suns sink below the horizon, everyone older than 33 turns into dust and flower petals and blows away on the wind.
Those are the stakes. This has been happening for 67 years, and the people of Lumière know they're running out of time. Every year they send out an expedition of people in their last year of life to the Continent to go kill the Paintess and stop the Gommage, and every year, the Paintress awakens, paints death, and nothing changes. At the time the game begins, the grand parties held to send off expeditioners have dwindled to private events for the expeditioners themselves--they complain during the party about having to bus their own tables and provide their own food--and the town council open discusses among themselves how they're on the Last Generation. Lumière keeps sending out the expeditions because doing something is better than doing nothing, but it's not clear that anyone except the people going on the expedition actually think that they're going to defeat the Paintress.
And it's not clear how much the expeditioners believe either. The two mottos they keep repeating are, "When one falls, we continue" and "For those who come after."
On the day after the Gommage, the ships of Expedition 33 sail across the sea from Lumière, beyond the dome that keeps the city safe and to the continent, where they are almost immediately ambushed by nevrons, the monster who infest the Continent. Gustave manages to survive and escape, though nearly all the other expeditioners are killed. For a time, he does think he's the only one left until he meets the wizard Lune (she's not called that in the game, but she's the party mage) who reminds him of their mission. The Paintress Must Fall. And so the two of them, alone of all the expeditioners, set out on their impossible task to cross the Continent and save their world.
Every zone is gorgeous.
This initial journey across the Continent was one of my favorite parts of the game because of the fantastical landscapes. Whatever happened during the Fracture totally mixed up the Continent, because you travel through a bunch of different environments that mostly have no relation to anything mundane. The rally point the expeditioners were supposed to meet up at if they were separated, the Indigo Tree, is a giant tree with glowing blue leaves that lights up the entire second part of the first zone you're in. Some places you go it's night and then day in another part of the zone, or the entire area is lit by a permanent partial eclipse. The second zone, Flying Waters, is an above-ground ocean, with fish swimming through the water-air, vast forests of seaweed, coral reefs growing around and through ruined buildings, WWII-style floating spiked mines, and diffuse light from the sun shining through the waters. Other zones are in permanent spring, or permanent autumn. There's an enormous WWI-style battlefield just filled with bodies everywhere. The diversity of environments is astonishing, and I was always curious what weird and wondrous new location I would find next. It kept me moving forward.
The music is, in a world, glorious. There's one song I can't post because the title is a spoiler, but you can watch the release trailer if you want to hear it--they played it during the Game Awards, and if you look up comments about it you get people saying things like, "I was too young for Final Fantasy VII, this is my One-Winged Angel" and "The moment the lyrics started, I knew this was going to be Game of the Year." But this isn't like Final Fantasy X, where the soundtrack is mostly middle-grade except the songs that everyone always brings up (Hymn of the Fayth, To Zanarkand, Auron's Theme, Servants of the Mountain, etc). Pick any random song off the soundtrack, like Lumière, the song the game plays during the intro, or Warding Blades, the battle music for the Stone Cliffs, or Autumn's Brush, the battle music for Falling Leaves (yes, separate zones have separate battle music, and many bosses have their own unique themes), the mournful Lost Voice, or River Dream, the theme of the Sacred River.
Though, look up any song's lyrics and, well, it's a good thing I don't speak French or I would have started asking some pointed questions about the plot long before the reveals started.
The entire soundtrack was composed by Lorien Testard, who apparently just posted some demos on a tiny French gaming website that the Clair Obscur devs happened on. That led them to his Soundcloud profile and some posts he had made about wanting to work in game development, and now he's the primary composer for the 2025 Game of the Year and people are saying he's on par with Martin O'Donnell or Uematsu Nobuo. Like Corey Bunnell, who went from a high-school graduate posting on a forum for advice about how to work in Japan to being a game designer that's in the credits of Breath of the wild. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right place at the right time.
C-c-c-combo!
That's an apt line to transition to talking about the combat system. I've heard people call Clair Obscur's combat "parryslop," and my official response to this is "lmao git gud."
Clair Obscur is turn-based, but with quicktime events, very similar to Super Mario RPG. Whenever you use a skill, you get a popup on screen that requires you to press a button. Do it perfectly and you get a damage bonus, whiff it and you get a damage penalty. Some very powerful attacks cause even worse penalties for failing this timer--sometimes the attack simply cancels, but Lune's more powerful fire damage attacks hurt her instead if you fail the timer. Basic attacks don't have this problem, but there's no mana or anything. Rather, you build up AP by attacking and parrying and use your AP to fuel your skills, and the AP limit is 9, so there's never really any reason not to use a skill if you have the AP for it. Later on in the game, when you have more ways to generate AP, you can basically use a skill every turn unless you're using one of the bug 9 AP burst skills constantly, and that is indeed what I did. You get an XP bonus for taking no damage, so I always wanted to end fights quickly.
But none of that is the reason it's called parryslop. That's because the combat is entirely balanced around active defense. Almost every single enemy attack and special abilities can be either dodged (more forgiving timer) or parried (tighter timing but you counterattack), and doing either of those means you take no damage from the attack. There are a lot of ways the game tries to prevent this from trivializing things--the camera shakes and moves during enemy attacks, they'll do fake-outs and feints to make you parry early and get hit, or they'll just attack incredibly fast and try to hit you at least once during a flurry. In addition to counterattacks, parrying also gives you one additional AP per parry, so if you get parrying down you'll kill enemies much faster than if you dodge, and definitely faster than if you just take the hits and try to heal through them. Especially since combat is often balanced around you avoiding at least some portion of attacks--for much of the game, getting hit by everything will wipe your party.
Quicktime events on attacks have an accessibility option that lets you set them to automatically succeed, but there is no such option for parrying--there can't be, since if you could auto-parry you would never take any damage at all. You can change the difficult to make parry timing tighter or looser, but you still have to press the button in a reasonable approximation of the right time.
Well, unless you install the mod with the "disgustingly easy" setting that gives you two full seconds to push the button. If you just want to see the story and have a PC so you can install mods, the path is before you.
Cheaters do, in fact, prosper.
In addition to skills, the two other major ways to customize your character are Pictos/Lumina and Weapons. Weapons are obvious and I don't need to explain why they're an option, but the benefit to weapons in Clair Obscur is that they're elementally-aligned (fire, lightning, ice, or earth) and each has abilities that unlock at certain levels of the weapon (always 4, 10, and 20). You can pick the weapon that suits your playstyle and tune your builds around that. For example, for some bizarre reason I had more lucky parrying than dodging even though dodging is objectively easier, so I set everything up based on parrying--I picked weapons that give benefits on counterattacks, let me start the battle with buffs, and used the extra parry AP to fuel more skills. This pretty much served me for the entire game.
Pictos are equippable items that give you extra bonuses, like +1 AP on base attack, being immune to the Burn status, always going first in battle, auto-buffing yourself when fighting solo, doing 50% more damage if you have 10% HP or less, that kind of thing, in addition to adding passive stat bonuses like extra speed, HP, defense, or crit chance. You can equip three of them, but if you have one equipped for four battles, you learn it and it goes into your Lumina pool. Learning it as a Lumina does not give you the stat bonuses but it does give you the main abilities, so as you explore the world and increase your lumina pool you can equip a lore more bonuses. There are also farmable enemies that drop Color of Lumina, so once you get to the end-game, if you really want to increase your power you can farm Color of Lumina for a while, gain a truly enormous amount of passive abilities, and destroy everything in the game. I've seen a video of someone doing 1 trillion damage with an attack, in a game where the normal damage cap is 9999. It's the Dragon Quest principle--if you're not skilled enough to beat the game with your awesome parrying ability, you can farm levels and Pictos and set up combos to one-shot bosses instead.
One thing I appreciate is that in-game, Pictos are a well-established way of fighting but Lumina are described as a new invention by Gustave and his team that previous expeditions never had access to, so that's why the survivors of Expedition 33 punch far above their weight in terms of combat ability. It's a nice way to tie the systems into the story.
Phenomenal Cosmic Powers...itty bitty attention spam.
After Lune and Gustave meet up, they set off to find other survivors. The first person they look for is Maelle, a teenage girl who volunteered to go on the expedition even though she has years before her own gommage because she was a misfit who never fit in among the inhabitants of Lumière, who Gustave thinks of as a younger sister. They eventually find her in an odd manor house inhabited by a stranger creature without a face who has been caring for her, and the three of them continue their quest. They need a way to cross the sea on the other side of the Continent that lies between them and the Monolith, and after visiting the village of the Gestrals, a race of dim-witted living paintbrushes, they meet another expedition survivor named Sciel and learn that Esquie, the legendary most powerful being in the world, the only one who might be able to help them cross the sea since all their ships were destroyed in the ambush, lives not far away and set out to find them.
The dialogue and characterization is fantastic and really the heart of why the game is so good. Esquie is endlessly happy and earnest, with incredible powers that they mostly just choose not to use, and in the hands of lesser writers they could quickly become the most annoying character in the game. But Esquie never inserts themselves into a conversation where they aren't wanted, their sincerity always comes across as genuine, and there's a reasonable explanation for why they don't just fly you to the Monolith immediately after you meet them--because they lost all their pet rocks that give them the confidence to use their powers to the fullest. Similarly, after the ambush Gustave sits down next to a pile of expeditioner bodies and is ready to give in to despair when Lune finds him. As he's arguing what the point of their quest even is, she repeats his own words back at him--"When one falls we continue." It'd be easy to think of Gustave as a sniveling coward, but his behavior after this more than makes up for a moment of weakness, and one that's understandable when he's just seen almost all of Expedition 33 wiped out.
This is true for all the interactions. Gustave and Sophie in Lumière, Gustave's interactions with Maelle, any time you talk to one of the dumb meathead Gestrals, I haven't played a game this well written in a long time. Every single camp dialogue, every time I talked with people, I actually let all the voice acting play out which I don't think I've done for a game in years. I can read much faster than people can speak, so I almost always just skip past all the voices. Not this time. I even let the voice acting from diaries of previous expeditions play out, because they are all great. The expedition who met their end on poisoned mushrooms because they didn't ask Esquie (who is immune to poison) if the mushrooms were dangerous, the expedition who gave up all thought of winning and lived peaceful lives in a hidden valley until their Gommage, the expedition who saw the Monolith up close and decided to just out by killing as many nevrons as possible, or the expedition who spent all of their time placing the grapple points you find throughout the Continent. Every diary is a new story.
Beyond this point are major plot spoilers for the rest of the game.
Ah, the City of Lights.
As you've been traveling, Maelle has had strange visions of a white-haired, masked girl and an old man who was at the ambush at the beach, and just as Expedition 33 is preparing to cross the sea, that old man catches up to them. He kills Gustave and tries to capture Maelle, but she is saved by a man in an old-style expeditioners uniform who grabs Maelle and leaps onto Esquie. The man introduces himself as Verso, a member of Expedition Zero 67 years ago, who is over 100 years old and immortal. His explanation is that the old man, Renoir, was also a member of Expedition Zero and some members of the first expedition somehow became immortal, so Renoir is killing new expeditioners because he doesn't want to lose his immortality. Verso offers to help Expedition 33 reach the Monolith, but tells them that it's surrounded by a barrier and they'll need to kill two extremely powerful nevrons called the Axons to get in, but along the way he needs to go collect an old friend, a Gestral named Monoco.
Monoco and Verso's relationship is one of the best in the game. They rib each other constantly but still care for each other, bring up old escapades that they don't bother to explain to anyone else, and Monoco has most of the funniest lines in an otherwise very serious game. Like this exchange at the Sacred River:
After defeating the Axons and making their way to the Paintress, Expedition 33 fight their way through Renoir and finally defeat him with the help of the Curator and then defeat the Paintress once and for all. They plant the flag of Expedition 33 on top of the Monolith and return to Lumière, where an enormous party breaks out. As they are celebrating, children dancing with Esquie and the citizens dancing in the streets, we cut to Verso sitting on the pier, reading a letter from a woman named "Alicia." A letter to Maelle, that Verso never delivered, explaining that the Paintress was not the one causing the Gommage, she was the one saving the Lumièrans from it, and the number she would paint every year was a warning of how her power to protect them was gradually waning. And as he lets the letter fall into the sea, a wind washes out from the Monolith and Lune and Sciel, Gustave's apprentices, every citizen of Lumière, every man and woman and child in the midst of their dancing, all of them turn to dust and flowers and blow away on the wind.
All we are is dust in the wind.
I was not expecting this, and, despite my jokes about thinking this was actually about a French family in the nineteeth century countryside that I made to people as I played, I also was not expecting what happens next. The ultimate twist is that Lumière, the Continent, the Monolith, the Gestrals, the nevrons, and everything in that world is all a painting created by a member of the Dessendre family (Fr. des cendres, "From the ashes"). They are Painters, gifted with the ability to create worlds from paint and canvas and enter those painted worlds, and the Canvas was created by Verso when he was young. Verso Dessendre, however, died in a fire that also scarred Alicia Dessendre horribly, and the Verso in the Canvas was Painted by Aline Dessendre, Verso and Alicia's mother, as a memory of what she had lost. Painted Alicia--the girl in the mask--and Painted Renoir filled out the remainder of her family, and Aline spent all her time in the canvas because she couldn't face her grief outside of it. Renoir Dessendre, aka the Curator, had entered the canvas to try to pull Aline out before she spent so long in there that she would damage her health, and he was the one causing the gommage to try to remove all of Aline's ties to the Canvas, which he intended to destroy.
Yes, Clair Obscur is actually about loss and overcoming grief. It's a very French game.
The Maelle in the Canvas is actually Alicia Dessendre, who entered the Canvas at the urging of her older sister Clea Dessendre. Alicia was caught up in her mother's power, however, and reborn as Maelle in the Canvas, living a full life in the painted world where time passes much faster. The gommage of Lumière awakens her memories of her past and some of her power as a Painter, and using those powers she resurrects Lune and Sciel and they determine to convince Renoir Dessendre to rePaint the people of Lumière and, when that fails, to defeat him.
This is where the debates about Clair Obscur continue to this day, because after Renoir Dessendre admits defeat and leaves the Canvas, Verso and Maelle argue about the fate of their world. Verso wants to destroy the Canvas--he is tired of living and has accomplished his goal of freeing Aline Dessendre, whereas Maelle wants to restore Lumière and keep the last creation of her brother alive. In the end, you have to choose one and fight the other, and that determines your ending. Save the Canvas and remain within, or destroy it and let Verso be free?
Choose your destiny.
And this is really where I think the game falls down--the devs stuck a massive thumb on the scale at the ending.
If you pick Maelle's ending, as I did, you see the citizens of Lumière going to a performance at the opera house. You see Gustave and Sophie, alive and together, and you see Sciel reunited with her formerly-drowned husband Pierre. Maelle walks in and takes a seat and...the music cuts out. The footage turns to black and white. With the camera angle slightly askew, an older-looking Verso walks out onto the stage, pauses slightly before a piano, and sits down. He extends his hands and a thundrous, jangling cacophany arises from the keys before he starts to play a melody and the credits roll. In contrast, if you pick Verso's ending, Esquie and Monoco hug Painted Verso before dissolving into flowers. Sciel clasps hands with him and similarly fades away, and you see Painted Verso walk off with the soul of the young Verso as the Canvas dissolves arond them to the sound of soft violin and a woman singing. Cut to the Dessendre family, united at a graveside. Renoir Dessendre lays flowers at Verso Dessendre's grave as Alicia and Aline Dessendre looks on. The other family members also lay flowers, and Aline puts her head on Renoir's shoulder. As the rest of the family walks away, Alicia Dessendre sees a vision of all her friends in the Canvas, waving goodbye to her. She lays an Esquie doll on Verso's grave as her friends blow away into flowers, and the credits roll.
Do you see the problem? The devs say that there is no good ending, that it's up to the player, but bluntly, that comment does reflect the endings they actually put into the game. Maelle's ending is shot like a horror movie and Verso's ending ends with a beautiful sunrise--regardless of their intention, they've positioned Verso's ending as correct.
This is insulting to me partially because if you actually pay attention to what's going on the endings have a great thematic contrast. The Canvas functions simultaneously on two levels, as both a world filled with real people, during the first part of the game, and as a metaphor for grief and addiction, during the second part. The choice of ending is thus a choice of which of these two interpretations you pick to prioritize, but doing so inevitably denies the other one. Destroying the Canvas means killing all of its inhabitants--something very briefly touched on in Verso's ending when, after Sciel gommages, Lune just sits down and refuses to speak to or look at Verso--and while the people of Lumière are already gone, Esquie, Sciel, Lune, and the Gestrals are not. Picking Verso's ending is actively choosing to murder all of them as the price of removing the source of the addiction and allow the Dessendres to actually process their grief.
I'll be charitable and ignore that "take away an addict's substance cold turkey" does not usually result in them looking on you fondly and especially not them putting their head on your shoulder.
In contrast, picking Maelle's ending preserves the existing inhabitants of Lumière and the Canvas, but Maelle succumbs to the same addiction that Aline Dessendre did. Despite telling Renoir Dessendre otherwise she does not leave the Canvas, since she knows that if she does he will take the chance to destroy it, and now the Dessendre family has lost another member with Alicia spending all her time in the Painted world. The Canvas is preserved, but at the cost of the Dessendre family's peace. This is a great Catch-22! Each position is understandable, each position has good arguments in its favor, but each position also requires you to deny the other one, and there is no happy ending where you can somehow thread the needle. The game would have been better if it had depicted them on equal footing at the end the way it did throughout the rest of the game.
Masculine angst and a good voice actor will get you far in gamers' minds.
This is a great Catch-22! Each position is worthy, each position requires you to deny the other, and there is no happy ending where you can somehow thread the needle. The game would have been better if it had put them on equal footing at the end the way it did throughout the rest of the game.
Sadly, the existing endings have allowed the most media-illiterate people to scrawl their opinions all over the internet. The entire point of the game, with the first half making you think you're in our world after some disaster and the second half twist, is to get you to care about the expeditioners and the people of Lumière before the hammer drops in the second half. Then the second half is to get you to care about the Dessendre family, show how the two groups have an unresolvable conflict of interest, and make you pick a side. They are both important, the game tells you.
It doesn't do a perfect job--for example, there's basically no dialogue from Lune and Sciel about how Renoir Dessendre plans to destroy their entire world and has murdered all of their friends and everyone they know--but you can see what they're going for.
I keep using the word murder, deliberately, and that's the sticking point for a lot of people and, obviously, for me. We see children gommage on-screen during the end of Act II, and you can find a journal from a survivor of the Fracture that talks about constant nevron attacks in old Lumière, how the casualties are mounting, and how they've sheltered children and the wounded in the basement of one of the still-standing buildings. None of those people survived.
These are all conscious acts by Renoir Dessendre. Aline Dessendre Painted Lumière and its inhabitants a century ago, and he is wiping them out to remove any tie she has to the Canvas. The fact that he is murdering other families to save his own is a pretty big moral argument against him, and a lot of people online resolve this cognitive dissonance through the simple means of...claiming that because the Painters created the Canvas, it's basically a big game of the Sims. You don't cry and hold funerals if you delete a game of the Sims, the argument goes, and similarly you shouldn't shed a tear for the people of Lumière. Some even compare them to AI chatbots.
Some people think this is like mourning when you empty your computer's Recycle Bin.
This is, in a word, asinine. Even if you ignore the damage it does to the game's themes to have most of the people you meet be puppet facsimiles of life, at no point does the game actually treat the inhabitants of the Canvas as fake.
I guess they think this moment is totally unimportant.
This is exactly why Clair Obscur won game of the year, though. People are still arguing about this all these months later. I saw a comment thread on a YouTube photo where one person was valiantly arguing against all the, if you will excuse the slang, NPCs who kept coming in saying "They're just Sims bro" and "they're not real." That's devotion that not many games inspire.
And even if you aren't drawn into the story, the environment is great, the music is transcendent--finally we have bombastic JRPG boss themes where the meme could be![[instagram.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/profile_icons/instagram.png)
sashagee would see me parry twelve attacks in a row and then whif the thirteenth attack and instantly die and ask, "Is this...fun for you?"
Yes. Yes it is. And if you're the kind of person who enjoys that and wants a well-told story and amazing world, you should try it to. There's a reason Clair Obscur swept the game awards and took away first in almost every category it was in.
Now off to try to beat Simon again.
In late 2024 a trailer dropped for a game called Clair Obscur. We see a twisted Eiffel Tower, broken, with fragments still hanging impossibly in the air. We learn about the Paintess, who paints a new number on the Monolith every year and everyone older than that, turns into dust and flowers and blows away on the wind. I first saw the release date trailer back in January, and I watched it multiple times until the phrase "The Paintress Must Fall" would randomly play through my head. I bought it at full price, a week after release, something I never do with games anymore.
And then I didn't start playing until November because I was playing Vintage Story back in April. Oops.
When the game rewards happened and Clair Obscur swept them, I posted a meme with a screenshot from the game. "Game Awards? More like Festival de l'Expedition." That's around when I picked it up again after a couple weeks of playing Noita and getting mostly nowhere. And now, having beaten the game (but not all of the postgame, I'll admit), I can say that Clair Obscur--despite a couple major flaws--absolutely deserves all of the awards that it got and is one of the finest games I've played in years, so when you read the rant that occurs below just remember that it comes out of love and out of a wish that the game was even better than it was.
Also, there will be a ton of plot spoilers here. I'm going to put a warning down below before the part where I really get into it, but if you haven't watched the trailers and want to play the game totally blind, maybe come back and read this later.
Good thing it's not Expedition 67.
What you know going in is basically encapsulated in the trailer I mentioned above. You're in "Lumière," obviously Paris due to the Eiffel Tower and since the name is from La Ville Lumière, "The City of Lights," but now it's an island due to a disaster called the Fracture. You begin as Gustave, a citizen of Lumière, on the day of the Gommage (Fr. "Erasing," though hilariously it can also means "exfoliation"), when everyone is dressed in their best clothes and walking down to a festival at the harbor. You get a tutorial about how to move around the world, climbing and jumping and using grapple points, you fight some friendly duels against your friend and younger-sister-figure Maelle to teach you combat, and walk around and talk to the other Lumièrans. And at sunset, as everyone gathers at the water's edge and watches the Monolith across the sea, the Paintress awakens. She stands up, erases the giant number 34 on the Monolith, and paints a 33, and as the suns sink below the horizon, everyone older than 33 turns into dust and flower petals and blows away on the wind.
Those are the stakes. This has been happening for 67 years, and the people of Lumière know they're running out of time. Every year they send out an expedition of people in their last year of life to the Continent to go kill the Paintess and stop the Gommage, and every year, the Paintress awakens, paints death, and nothing changes. At the time the game begins, the grand parties held to send off expeditioners have dwindled to private events for the expeditioners themselves--they complain during the party about having to bus their own tables and provide their own food--and the town council open discusses among themselves how they're on the Last Generation. Lumière keeps sending out the expeditions because doing something is better than doing nothing, but it's not clear that anyone except the people going on the expedition actually think that they're going to defeat the Paintress.
And it's not clear how much the expeditioners believe either. The two mottos they keep repeating are, "When one falls, we continue" and "For those who come after."
On the day after the Gommage, the ships of Expedition 33 sail across the sea from Lumière, beyond the dome that keeps the city safe and to the continent, where they are almost immediately ambushed by nevrons, the monster who infest the Continent. Gustave manages to survive and escape, though nearly all the other expeditioners are killed. For a time, he does think he's the only one left until he meets the wizard Lune (she's not called that in the game, but she's the party mage) who reminds him of their mission. The Paintress Must Fall. And so the two of them, alone of all the expeditioners, set out on their impossible task to cross the Continent and save their world.
Every zone is gorgeous.
This initial journey across the Continent was one of my favorite parts of the game because of the fantastical landscapes. Whatever happened during the Fracture totally mixed up the Continent, because you travel through a bunch of different environments that mostly have no relation to anything mundane. The rally point the expeditioners were supposed to meet up at if they were separated, the Indigo Tree, is a giant tree with glowing blue leaves that lights up the entire second part of the first zone you're in. Some places you go it's night and then day in another part of the zone, or the entire area is lit by a permanent partial eclipse. The second zone, Flying Waters, is an above-ground ocean, with fish swimming through the water-air, vast forests of seaweed, coral reefs growing around and through ruined buildings, WWII-style floating spiked mines, and diffuse light from the sun shining through the waters. Other zones are in permanent spring, or permanent autumn. There's an enormous WWI-style battlefield just filled with bodies everywhere. The diversity of environments is astonishing, and I was always curious what weird and wondrous new location I would find next. It kept me moving forward.
The music is, in a world, glorious. There's one song I can't post because the title is a spoiler, but you can watch the release trailer if you want to hear it--they played it during the Game Awards, and if you look up comments about it you get people saying things like, "I was too young for Final Fantasy VII, this is my One-Winged Angel" and "The moment the lyrics started, I knew this was going to be Game of the Year." But this isn't like Final Fantasy X, where the soundtrack is mostly middle-grade except the songs that everyone always brings up (Hymn of the Fayth, To Zanarkand, Auron's Theme, Servants of the Mountain, etc). Pick any random song off the soundtrack, like Lumière, the song the game plays during the intro, or Warding Blades, the battle music for the Stone Cliffs, or Autumn's Brush, the battle music for Falling Leaves (yes, separate zones have separate battle music, and many bosses have their own unique themes), the mournful Lost Voice, or River Dream, the theme of the Sacred River.
Though, look up any song's lyrics and, well, it's a good thing I don't speak French or I would have started asking some pointed questions about the plot long before the reveals started.
Here's an example from "Lumière"
Clair-Obscur.
Trouble de rature, courbera Eiffel
Clair-Obscur
Guardéo peinture, trouvera sans elle
Clair-Obscur
Trouble de rature, courbera Eiffel
Clair-Obscur
Guardéo peinture, trouvera sans elle
Au Clair-Obscur
Trouble rature
Clair-Obscur
Guardéo peinture
Meaning:
"Light and Shadow
Blurring from a crossing-out, the Eiffel will bend
Light and Shadow
Guarded painting, it will be lost without her
Light and Shadow
Blurring from a crossing-out, the Eiffel will bend
Light and Shadow
Guarded painting, it will be lost without her
"In the Light and Shadow
Troubled erasure
Light and Shadow
Guarded painting"
-Lyrics and translation from here
The entire soundtrack was composed by Lorien Testard, who apparently just posted some demos on a tiny French gaming website that the Clair Obscur devs happened on. That led them to his Soundcloud profile and some posts he had made about wanting to work in game development, and now he's the primary composer for the 2025 Game of the Year and people are saying he's on par with Martin O'Donnell or Uematsu Nobuo. Like Corey Bunnell, who went from a high-school graduate posting on a forum for advice about how to work in Japan to being a game designer that's in the credits of Breath of the wild. Sometimes all it takes is being in the right place at the right time.
C-c-c-combo!
That's an apt line to transition to talking about the combat system. I've heard people call Clair Obscur's combat "parryslop," and my official response to this is "lmao git gud."
Clair Obscur is turn-based, but with quicktime events, very similar to Super Mario RPG. Whenever you use a skill, you get a popup on screen that requires you to press a button. Do it perfectly and you get a damage bonus, whiff it and you get a damage penalty. Some very powerful attacks cause even worse penalties for failing this timer--sometimes the attack simply cancels, but Lune's more powerful fire damage attacks hurt her instead if you fail the timer. Basic attacks don't have this problem, but there's no mana or anything. Rather, you build up AP by attacking and parrying and use your AP to fuel your skills, and the AP limit is 9, so there's never really any reason not to use a skill if you have the AP for it. Later on in the game, when you have more ways to generate AP, you can basically use a skill every turn unless you're using one of the bug 9 AP burst skills constantly, and that is indeed what I did. You get an XP bonus for taking no damage, so I always wanted to end fights quickly.
But none of that is the reason it's called parryslop. That's because the combat is entirely balanced around active defense. Almost every single enemy attack and special abilities can be either dodged (more forgiving timer) or parried (tighter timing but you counterattack), and doing either of those means you take no damage from the attack. There are a lot of ways the game tries to prevent this from trivializing things--the camera shakes and moves during enemy attacks, they'll do fake-outs and feints to make you parry early and get hit, or they'll just attack incredibly fast and try to hit you at least once during a flurry. In addition to counterattacks, parrying also gives you one additional AP per parry, so if you get parrying down you'll kill enemies much faster than if you dodge, and definitely faster than if you just take the hits and try to heal through them. Especially since combat is often balanced around you avoiding at least some portion of attacks--for much of the game, getting hit by everything will wipe your party.
Quicktime events on attacks have an accessibility option that lets you set them to automatically succeed, but there is no such option for parrying--there can't be, since if you could auto-parry you would never take any damage at all. You can change the difficult to make parry timing tighter or looser, but you still have to press the button in a reasonable approximation of the right time.
Well, unless you install the mod with the "disgustingly easy" setting that gives you two full seconds to push the button. If you just want to see the story and have a PC so you can install mods, the path is before you.
Cheaters do, in fact, prosper.
In addition to skills, the two other major ways to customize your character are Pictos/Lumina and Weapons. Weapons are obvious and I don't need to explain why they're an option, but the benefit to weapons in Clair Obscur is that they're elementally-aligned (fire, lightning, ice, or earth) and each has abilities that unlock at certain levels of the weapon (always 4, 10, and 20). You can pick the weapon that suits your playstyle and tune your builds around that. For example, for some bizarre reason I had more lucky parrying than dodging even though dodging is objectively easier, so I set everything up based on parrying--I picked weapons that give benefits on counterattacks, let me start the battle with buffs, and used the extra parry AP to fuel more skills. This pretty much served me for the entire game.
Pictos are equippable items that give you extra bonuses, like +1 AP on base attack, being immune to the Burn status, always going first in battle, auto-buffing yourself when fighting solo, doing 50% more damage if you have 10% HP or less, that kind of thing, in addition to adding passive stat bonuses like extra speed, HP, defense, or crit chance. You can equip three of them, but if you have one equipped for four battles, you learn it and it goes into your Lumina pool. Learning it as a Lumina does not give you the stat bonuses but it does give you the main abilities, so as you explore the world and increase your lumina pool you can equip a lore more bonuses. There are also farmable enemies that drop Color of Lumina, so once you get to the end-game, if you really want to increase your power you can farm Color of Lumina for a while, gain a truly enormous amount of passive abilities, and destroy everything in the game. I've seen a video of someone doing 1 trillion damage with an attack, in a game where the normal damage cap is 9999. It's the Dragon Quest principle--if you're not skilled enough to beat the game with your awesome parrying ability, you can farm levels and Pictos and set up combos to one-shot bosses instead.
One thing I appreciate is that in-game, Pictos are a well-established way of fighting but Lumina are described as a new invention by Gustave and his team that previous expeditions never had access to, so that's why the survivors of Expedition 33 punch far above their weight in terms of combat ability. It's a nice way to tie the systems into the story.
Phenomenal Cosmic Powers...itty bitty attention spam.
After Lune and Gustave meet up, they set off to find other survivors. The first person they look for is Maelle, a teenage girl who volunteered to go on the expedition even though she has years before her own gommage because she was a misfit who never fit in among the inhabitants of Lumière, who Gustave thinks of as a younger sister. They eventually find her in an odd manor house inhabited by a stranger creature without a face who has been caring for her, and the three of them continue their quest. They need a way to cross the sea on the other side of the Continent that lies between them and the Monolith, and after visiting the village of the Gestrals, a race of dim-witted living paintbrushes, they meet another expedition survivor named Sciel and learn that Esquie, the legendary most powerful being in the world, the only one who might be able to help them cross the sea since all their ships were destroyed in the ambush, lives not far away and set out to find them.
The dialogue and characterization is fantastic and really the heart of why the game is so good. Esquie is endlessly happy and earnest, with incredible powers that they mostly just choose not to use, and in the hands of lesser writers they could quickly become the most annoying character in the game. But Esquie never inserts themselves into a conversation where they aren't wanted, their sincerity always comes across as genuine, and there's a reasonable explanation for why they don't just fly you to the Monolith immediately after you meet them--because they lost all their pet rocks that give them the confidence to use their powers to the fullest. Similarly, after the ambush Gustave sits down next to a pile of expeditioner bodies and is ready to give in to despair when Lune finds him. As he's arguing what the point of their quest even is, she repeats his own words back at him--"When one falls we continue." It'd be easy to think of Gustave as a sniveling coward, but his behavior after this more than makes up for a moment of weakness, and one that's understandable when he's just seen almost all of Expedition 33 wiped out.
This is true for all the interactions. Gustave and Sophie in Lumière, Gustave's interactions with Maelle, any time you talk to one of the dumb meathead Gestrals, I haven't played a game this well written in a long time. Every single camp dialogue, every time I talked with people, I actually let all the voice acting play out which I don't think I've done for a game in years. I can read much faster than people can speak, so I almost always just skip past all the voices. Not this time. I even let the voice acting from diaries of previous expeditions play out, because they are all great. The expedition who met their end on poisoned mushrooms because they didn't ask Esquie (who is immune to poison) if the mushrooms were dangerous, the expedition who gave up all thought of winning and lived peaceful lives in a hidden valley until their Gommage, the expedition who saw the Monolith up close and decided to just out by killing as many nevrons as possible, or the expedition who spent all of their time placing the grapple points you find throughout the Continent. Every diary is a new story.
Beyond this point are major plot spoilers for the rest of the game.
Ah, the City of Lights.
As you've been traveling, Maelle has had strange visions of a white-haired, masked girl and an old man who was at the ambush at the beach, and just as Expedition 33 is preparing to cross the sea, that old man catches up to them. He kills Gustave and tries to capture Maelle, but she is saved by a man in an old-style expeditioners uniform who grabs Maelle and leaps onto Esquie. The man introduces himself as Verso, a member of Expedition Zero 67 years ago, who is over 100 years old and immortal. His explanation is that the old man, Renoir, was also a member of Expedition Zero and some members of the first expedition somehow became immortal, so Renoir is killing new expeditioners because he doesn't want to lose his immortality. Verso offers to help Expedition 33 reach the Monolith, but tells them that it's surrounded by a barrier and they'll need to kill two extremely powerful nevrons called the Axons to get in, but along the way he needs to go collect an old friend, a Gestral named Monoco.
Monoco and Verso's relationship is one of the best in the game. They rib each other constantly but still care for each other, bring up old escapades that they don't bother to explain to anyone else, and Monoco has most of the funniest lines in an otherwise very serious game. Like this exchange at the Sacred River:
Monoco: "Golgra! I demand a trial by combat!"I burst out laughing because the delivery on the last line was perfect. Such an amazing character.
Golgra: "Thanks. I was hoping you'd say that."
Verso: "Do I have to participate?"
Monoco: "Please help me."
After defeating the Axons and making their way to the Paintress, Expedition 33 fight their way through Renoir and finally defeat him with the help of the Curator and then defeat the Paintress once and for all. They plant the flag of Expedition 33 on top of the Monolith and return to Lumière, where an enormous party breaks out. As they are celebrating, children dancing with Esquie and the citizens dancing in the streets, we cut to Verso sitting on the pier, reading a letter from a woman named "Alicia." A letter to Maelle, that Verso never delivered, explaining that the Paintress was not the one causing the Gommage, she was the one saving the Lumièrans from it, and the number she would paint every year was a warning of how her power to protect them was gradually waning. And as he lets the letter fall into the sea, a wind washes out from the Monolith and Lune and Sciel, Gustave's apprentices, every citizen of Lumière, every man and woman and child in the midst of their dancing, all of them turn to dust and flowers and blow away on the wind.
All we are is dust in the wind.
I was not expecting this, and, despite my jokes about thinking this was actually about a French family in the nineteeth century countryside that I made to people as I played, I also was not expecting what happens next. The ultimate twist is that Lumière, the Continent, the Monolith, the Gestrals, the nevrons, and everything in that world is all a painting created by a member of the Dessendre family (Fr. des cendres, "From the ashes"). They are Painters, gifted with the ability to create worlds from paint and canvas and enter those painted worlds, and the Canvas was created by Verso when he was young. Verso Dessendre, however, died in a fire that also scarred Alicia Dessendre horribly, and the Verso in the Canvas was Painted by Aline Dessendre, Verso and Alicia's mother, as a memory of what she had lost. Painted Alicia--the girl in the mask--and Painted Renoir filled out the remainder of her family, and Aline spent all her time in the canvas because she couldn't face her grief outside of it. Renoir Dessendre, aka the Curator, had entered the canvas to try to pull Aline out before she spent so long in there that she would damage her health, and he was the one causing the gommage to try to remove all of Aline's ties to the Canvas, which he intended to destroy.
Yes, Clair Obscur is actually about loss and overcoming grief. It's a very French game.
The Maelle in the Canvas is actually Alicia Dessendre, who entered the Canvas at the urging of her older sister Clea Dessendre. Alicia was caught up in her mother's power, however, and reborn as Maelle in the Canvas, living a full life in the painted world where time passes much faster. The gommage of Lumière awakens her memories of her past and some of her power as a Painter, and using those powers she resurrects Lune and Sciel and they determine to convince Renoir Dessendre to rePaint the people of Lumière and, when that fails, to defeat him.
This is where the debates about Clair Obscur continue to this day, because after Renoir Dessendre admits defeat and leaves the Canvas, Verso and Maelle argue about the fate of their world. Verso wants to destroy the Canvas--he is tired of living and has accomplished his goal of freeing Aline Dessendre, whereas Maelle wants to restore Lumière and keep the last creation of her brother alive. In the end, you have to choose one and fight the other, and that determines your ending. Save the Canvas and remain within, or destroy it and let Verso be free?
Choose your destiny.
And this is really where I think the game falls down--the devs stuck a massive thumb on the scale at the ending.
If you pick Maelle's ending, as I did, you see the citizens of Lumière going to a performance at the opera house. You see Gustave and Sophie, alive and together, and you see Sciel reunited with her formerly-drowned husband Pierre. Maelle walks in and takes a seat and...the music cuts out. The footage turns to black and white. With the camera angle slightly askew, an older-looking Verso walks out onto the stage, pauses slightly before a piano, and sits down. He extends his hands and a thundrous, jangling cacophany arises from the keys before he starts to play a melody and the credits roll. In contrast, if you pick Verso's ending, Esquie and Monoco hug Painted Verso before dissolving into flowers. Sciel clasps hands with him and similarly fades away, and you see Painted Verso walk off with the soul of the young Verso as the Canvas dissolves arond them to the sound of soft violin and a woman singing. Cut to the Dessendre family, united at a graveside. Renoir Dessendre lays flowers at Verso Dessendre's grave as Alicia and Aline Dessendre looks on. The other family members also lay flowers, and Aline puts her head on Renoir's shoulder. As the rest of the family walks away, Alicia Dessendre sees a vision of all her friends in the Canvas, waving goodbye to her. She lays an Esquie doll on Verso's grave as her friends blow away into flowers, and the credits roll.
Do you see the problem? The devs say that there is no good ending, that it's up to the player, but bluntly, that comment does reflect the endings they actually put into the game. Maelle's ending is shot like a horror movie and Verso's ending ends with a beautiful sunrise--regardless of their intention, they've positioned Verso's ending as correct.
This is insulting to me partially because if you actually pay attention to what's going on the endings have a great thematic contrast. The Canvas functions simultaneously on two levels, as both a world filled with real people, during the first part of the game, and as a metaphor for grief and addiction, during the second part. The choice of ending is thus a choice of which of these two interpretations you pick to prioritize, but doing so inevitably denies the other one. Destroying the Canvas means killing all of its inhabitants--something very briefly touched on in Verso's ending when, after Sciel gommages, Lune just sits down and refuses to speak to or look at Verso--and while the people of Lumière are already gone, Esquie, Sciel, Lune, and the Gestrals are not. Picking Verso's ending is actively choosing to murder all of them as the price of removing the source of the addiction and allow the Dessendres to actually process their grief.
I'll be charitable and ignore that "take away an addict's substance cold turkey" does not usually result in them looking on you fondly and especially not them putting their head on your shoulder.
In contrast, picking Maelle's ending preserves the existing inhabitants of Lumière and the Canvas, but Maelle succumbs to the same addiction that Aline Dessendre did. Despite telling Renoir Dessendre otherwise she does not leave the Canvas, since she knows that if she does he will take the chance to destroy it, and now the Dessendre family has lost another member with Alicia spending all her time in the Painted world. The Canvas is preserved, but at the cost of the Dessendre family's peace. This is a great Catch-22! Each position is understandable, each position has good arguments in its favor, but each position also requires you to deny the other one, and there is no happy ending where you can somehow thread the needle. The game would have been better if it had depicted them on equal footing at the end the way it did throughout the rest of the game.
Masculine angst and a good voice actor will get you far in gamers' minds.
This is a great Catch-22! Each position is worthy, each position requires you to deny the other, and there is no happy ending where you can somehow thread the needle. The game would have been better if it had put them on equal footing at the end the way it did throughout the rest of the game.
Sadly, the existing endings have allowed the most media-illiterate people to scrawl their opinions all over the internet. The entire point of the game, with the first half making you think you're in our world after some disaster and the second half twist, is to get you to care about the expeditioners and the people of Lumière before the hammer drops in the second half. Then the second half is to get you to care about the Dessendre family, show how the two groups have an unresolvable conflict of interest, and make you pick a side. They are both important, the game tells you.
It doesn't do a perfect job--for example, there's basically no dialogue from Lune and Sciel about how Renoir Dessendre plans to destroy their entire world and has murdered all of their friends and everyone they know--but you can see what they're going for.
I keep using the word murder, deliberately, and that's the sticking point for a lot of people and, obviously, for me. We see children gommage on-screen during the end of Act II, and you can find a journal from a survivor of the Fracture that talks about constant nevron attacks in old Lumière, how the casualties are mounting, and how they've sheltered children and the wounded in the basement of one of the still-standing buildings. None of those people survived.
These are all conscious acts by Renoir Dessendre. Aline Dessendre Painted Lumière and its inhabitants a century ago, and he is wiping them out to remove any tie she has to the Canvas. The fact that he is murdering other families to save his own is a pretty big moral argument against him, and a lot of people online resolve this cognitive dissonance through the simple means of...claiming that because the Painters created the Canvas, it's basically a big game of the Sims. You don't cry and hold funerals if you delete a game of the Sims, the argument goes, and similarly you shouldn't shed a tear for the people of Lumière. Some even compare them to AI chatbots.
Some people think this is like mourning when you empty your computer's Recycle Bin.
This is, in a word, asinine. Even if you ignore the damage it does to the game's themes to have most of the people you meet be puppet facsimiles of life, at no point does the game actually treat the inhabitants of the Canvas as fake.
- The soul of Verso Dessendre, in the Flying Manor, says that everyone in the Canvas is just as real to him as anyone outside it, and he's the one who made it. Similarly, Aline Dessendre is willing to spend subjective decades in the Canvas with its people, and Renoir Dessendre, despite his actions, never dismisses the inhabitants as toys or fake, he just thinks his own goals are paramount. The only person in the entire game who holds that position is Clea Dessendre, and she's also condescending and dismissive toward Alicia Dessendre during the brief out-of-Canvas flashback at the beginning of Act III so it's just her personality.
- After the gommage of Lumière, we see Maelle, awakened to her true identity as Alicia Dessendre, look through the drifting ashes and flower petals and apparently find something, and soon after she rePaints Sciel and Lune. This is one of the arguments against the reality of the Canvas--if a Painter has ultimate power over life and death and can make and unmake people at a whim, what does that make their creations? First of all, this implies that everyone who believes a deity or deities created the world and humanity is implying that humans aren't real people, which is obviously a nonsense argument, but in the context of the game, later on Verso and Sciel have a heartfelt conversation where she reveals that after her husband drowned, she tried to drown herself but someone (Esquie) saved her and dragged her to shore. This is framed as an extremely personal revelation, not something that Maelle could have known, but that knowledge carried over from the previous Sciel to her rePainted version, meaning that it is actually the same Sciel and there is a core essence to the inhabitants of the Canvas outside of the direct control of the Painters. An "immortal soul," if you will.
- Similarly, the nevrons throughout the game are mostly implacably hostile genocide machines, Painted by Clea Dessendre to kill every living thing within the canvas. Despite that, there are a few nevrons you can find who are drained of color, immobile, and passive, and when spoken to, they question if battle and death is the only purpose in life, or speak with you and ask you to complete a task for them. You can even find a nevron explicitly Painted to wipe out all the nevrons who had such doubts and that nevron is itself having the same doubts. Even Painted beings that are directly infused with a personality and mission from their creator can overcome these restrictions.
- The final argument I have here is just that based on the way all the inhabitants of the Canvas act, they're people. I could make the argument that the real world was created by G-d for my benefit ten minutes ago, my memories were implanted to give me a fake history, and everyone else I meet is a simulacra also created by G-d to provide meaning to my life. Is there a way to disprove this? No--I have no access to anyone else's inner life and cannot show that they actually have one. All I can do is observe their behavior and treat them accordingly based on it, and none of the inhabitants of the Canvas that we meet are depicted as anything less than full self-aware individuals.
I guess they think this moment is totally unimportant.
This is exactly why Clair Obscur won game of the year, though. People are still arguing about this all these months later. I saw a comment thread on a YouTube photo where one person was valiantly arguing against all the, if you will excuse the slang, NPCs who kept coming in saying "They're just Sims bro" and "they're not real." That's devotion that not many games inspire.
And even if you aren't drawn into the story, the environment is great, the music is transcendent--finally we have bombastic JRPG boss themes where the meme could be
The boss's health bar refills.and the gameplay is fun. Admittedly, I'm the kind of person who enjoys smashing their head against a difficulty wall, as you probably know if you've been reading my reviews for a while, but I'd find a difficult boss, I'd smash my head against it over and over again until I got the parry timing down and finally win.
The theme song suddenly has lyrics.
They are inLatinFrench
sashagee would see me parry twelve attacks in a row and then whif the thirteenth attack and instantly die and ask, "Is this...fun for you?"Yes. Yes it is. And if you're the kind of person who enjoys that and wants a well-told story and amazing world, you should try it to. There's a reason Clair Obscur swept the game awards and took away first in almost every category it was in.
Now off to try to beat Simon again.
