Clair Obscur Expedition 33 review: avoir le coup de foudre

Impasto is a technique used in art whereby paint is layered on, thick and textural, with enough mass that you can use your brush or knife to sculpt shapes. The word comes from the Italian for ‘dough’ or ‘mixture’, referring to the way artisans would ‘knead’ or ‘paste’ their materials to make the paint come alive. To use their tools to create something that defies the two-dimensional form and give the impression of something deeper. Perhaps, even, more profound.

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is all about art, really. The existential threat to its world is the mysterious paintress – a being that can paint life in and out of existence on a whim. The collected cast of sort-of French civilians live under the eternal threat of her whims; snatching away lives and forming sentience from nothing. The world is full of grief, of anger, of regret, of ennui, of hopelessness. It’s grim, unforgiving, and doomed. And on the canvas, together, it is sublime.

The impasto technique comes to mind because that’s what this role-playing game feels like; upstart developer Sandfall Interactive has taken the essential ingredients and tropes that all your favourite RPGs have been created with, and somehow molded them with more texture – an avant-garde approach to the genre that puts me in mind of Lost Odyssey, Final Fantasy 10, Chrono Trigger, and (weirdly) Forspoken, all at once.

Ironically, given this obsession with art and painting, the way the game looks is actually my biggest complaint: it’s got something of the Unreal Engine 5 tech demo about it. A stunning cutscene will give way to a ropey interactive element, where your character handles like a drifting speedboat, locked into rigid planes that belie the fluid nature of the environments. Character models sometimes look out of this world – the performance capture for Daredevil’s Charlie Cox, specifically, deserves a mention – but then in menus, your ragtag squad of expeditioners look like a bunch of mannequins modelling clothes in a Parisian boutique.

That’s about where my criticisms end, though. And I can absolutely live with some slightly-too-shiny textures and traversal stutter if I get to enjoy the rest of the experience Clair Obscur offers. The music, the performance, the writing, the combat, the flow, the cohesive experience… it’s up there with my favourite RPGs of all time. For a brand new studio, that is an absurd feat. It must be played to be believed.

So much of the appeal is in the combat. If the world and the story is the oil paint Sandfall uses to build the foundations, the combat is the detail – the brush strokes and knife marks applied with expert skill to bring the whole thing off the page. Fighting works similarly to Final Fantasy 10; a turn queue shows who attacks when, and it’s up to you to find the synergy.

Almost every non-mob battle will have some inventive gimmick that means simply hacking away won’t work; the game delights in giving you tools and mechanics (a habit that continues into the very end portion of the title) that you must experiment with and pluck at in order to find out how to progress. Every single playable character has a different gimmick; from a Devil May Cry-inspired stylish meter that improves when you deal damage and decreases when you take it, to a stance system that opens you up to more powerful moves if you dance and pirouette through a flowchart of your own making.

They are just two examples of unique mechanics. There are so many more. And to complement all that, every single enemy attack can be parried or dodged – meaning seemingly impossible foes can be brought to their knees if you’re skilled enough. It feels like Square Enix has been toying with this since Final Fantasy 8 and Squall’s gunblade trigger – going nearly full DMC by Final Fantasy 16. But, in one game, Sandfall has done what Square Enix could not, and has perfected a way to make turn-based combat dynamic, compelling, and unique.

So many moves will be improved by parrying or dodging during an enemy turn, but the game also gives you a nudge and a wink and says ‘hey, actually, maybe you do want to eat a big attack this turn’ by giving you modifying ‘pictos’ (read: passive skills) that completely recoat your approach to battle. By mid-game, I had a series of skills that revolved around one character auto-dying at the start of battle, coming back to life and granting buffs to the whole team, and then being nigh-unstoppable if he remained at 1HP. High-risk, high-reward. Clair Obscur wants to be broken, and is absolutely delighted when you find a way to unpick the threads of its complicated tapestry. It’s RPG catnip.

You can pretty much double the game’s runtime by engaging with off-the-beaten-track tasks. Whether that’s a collectible hunt, exploring a weird mansion that sits out of place and time like something straight from the pages of House of Leaves, or taking on absurdly-conceived combat tasks against playful wooden creatures made out of paintbrushes, the game has a wealth of stuff to do. The number of times I’d smile when I buggered off somewhere, found some charming nonsense, and thought ‘I’ll have to come back to this later’ put me in mind of golden-era Final Fantasy games. Yes, really.

Sandfall also makes bold and unpredictable narrative choices that I don’t believe your major triple-A studios would. It’s very hard to talk about any of this without veering into spoiler territory, but let me just say that Clair Obscur fires on all cylinders from its heart-breaking opening hour right through to its revelatory climax. I need more time and maybe another playthrough to reflect on the whole tale, but I think it’s up there with Chrono Trigger and Nier Automata.

Recent role-playing games, like Dragon Age: The Veilguard for example, really fell down in the way the cast interacted. They felt like NPCs, not people. Interactions felt stilted, unbelievable, like you could see the flowchart underpinning the meshes. A major victory in Clair Obscur is how it wields the chemistry of its cast, brought to life with impeccable skill by the likes of Andy Serkis, Jennifer English, Estelle Darnaul, Ben Starr, and more. Finding journals in the world left by the doomed remnants of other expeditions breadcrumbs you into the depths of this forsaken world with texture and nuance that, frankly, puts a lot of game writing to shame. Your motivation for sniffing out everything you can isn’t so you can get 90/90 in your collectibles tab, but so you can glean fractional motes of insight into the world.

I fear this may be a rote sentiment, but Clair Obscur Expedition 33 has made me fall in love with RPGs again. It has reminded me of the magic of the genre. You know the meme of the critic from Ratatouille eating the food and being taken back to his childhood? That’s what Sandfall has done to me with this bizarre, bold, beautiful game; coming to the final boss and tinkering with the intricate layers of my team’s build, I flashed back to the first time I approached Ultimecia’s Castle in Final Fantasy 8 and thought ‘f**k, it’s nearly over. I don’t want it to be over.’

They say art is all about eliciting an emotional reaction; if you can do that, all the effort expended in creating it was worth it. I think Clair Obscur does that with aplomb. If you have ever loved role-playing games, ever, you owe it to yourself to play this. It has the capacity to touch you.