Announced less than a year ago, Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is the ambitious debut title from French studio Sandfall Interactive. Expedition 33 tells a high-concept fantasy story: in a world similar to our own, things were torn apart 67 years ago in an event called the Fracture. Physics lost meaning, the city of Paris — known here as Lumiere — was ripped out of the world and flung into the distant ocean, and deadly monsters called Nevrons sprung up worldwide.
At the same time, a mysterious Monolith and an equally gigantic woman appeared on The Continent, visible even in the newly-relocated Lumiere, and painted the number 100 on the Monolith itself… causing everyone in the world of that age or older to vanish in an instant. Each year, the figure who came to be known as the Paintress counts down with the number she paints, wiping out the remaining population each year, all the way to 34 as the game begins.
As the new number 33 is painted, friends and loved ones once again vanish in the event known as the Gommage – those affected by the new number dissolve into a shower of red and white leaves, fading away in moments. Our story follows Expedition 33 – a volunteer group of 32-year-olds who now have only a year to live before the Gommage comes for them too, and choose to spend the time trying to reach the Paintress on the main Continent and stop her before she can paint again.
It’s an immediately melancholy setting – death is a certainty in this world, doubly so for those brave or stupid enough to join the Expedition. The story and the world aren’t about the fear of dying, however; it’s about choosing what to do with the limited time you DO have. After decades of watching people vanish in droves, the reality of how little time is left to save humanity is felt everywhere.
People in Lumiere discuss the Last Generation, as the countdown will soon reach a point where new children won’t even have time to be born and grow up. The Expeditioners know this journey is likely a fatal, one-way trip, but commit to it nonetheless. Surprisingly, Expedition 33 does have one significantly younger member in Maelle, the adoptive younger sister of Expeditioner Gustave. Maelle has, for her own reasons, chosen to join the party years before her own deadline.
After a catastrophic arrival on The Continent the Expedition is decimated and scattered, and the surviving members slowly find each other in pursuit of their end goal. As the elemental magic user Lune says at one point, “When one falls, we carry on. Not IF, WHEN.”
All this might lead you to think that Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is all doom and gloom, but the game is true to its name: “clair obscur” is the French version of the term chiaroscuro, which describes the use of light and shade in a picture or painting. Similarly, Expedition 33 makes sure to balance its heavier moments with lighter beats as well, giving both the player and the party moments of rest between the game’s dramatic beats. As your adventure continues, you’ll have chances to bond with your fellow Expeditioners and learn more about them, unlocking both backstory for these fascinating characters as well as more powerful techniques to use in combat.
Sandfall Interactive have previously cited both the Final Fantasy and Persona series as reference points for the kind of game they wanted to create, and the “Social Link” connection is clear in how these interactions progress. These story beats are a lot more grounded and real by comparison, though – one moment of two Expeditioners attempting to skip rocks stands out as a particular highlight, as something that felt like an unrehearsed and natural exchange between two people, rather than a cutscene between two characters.
For every moment of catharsis between characters though, you’ll also see things like minigames at the Continent’s various beaches or stereotypically-French mime enemies who unlock baguette-toting costumes for each character. The game will happily swing from a melancholic, black-and-white-cinema cutscene about loss and trauma to the tongue-in-cheek mime fights with a wink and a smile, with what feels like a distinctly French sense of humour. This is a game that will ALWAYS do the Cool Thing, in its visuals or storytelling or combat, every time. To me it reads as a love letter to the power fantasy of a fantasy RPG, and I love that maximalist response to the player fantasy.
On top of all this the game also boasts a robust and engaging combat system, with every party member touting a unique mechanic in fights. Successive attacks from Gustave add charges to his robotic arm which can be unleashed as a powerful attack, Maelle pivots back and forth between two fencing postures to maximise her damage in combat, and Lune stacks elemental charges on her weapon to power up her next attack. All of these unique mechanics can seem like a lot to take in at first, but it soon comes to you as second nature to rapidly pivot between menus in combat to keep things flowing at a breakneck pace.
Fights also focus around timed strikes, blocks and dodges with enemies, allowing you to avoid damage altogether, soup up your own attacks or parry for a destructive counterattack. Each enemy has their own rhythms and tells for their attacks, but you only need to fail once or twice before you’re back on track. Prior to launch I did find that the timing windows for parries and blocks in combat were a little too tight and hard to read on the game’s standard difficulty, but the easier mode made these windows a lot more understandable without nuking the combat difficulty overall. Every fight feels like a deadly dance, only enhanced by the game’s operatic soundtrack.
Combats also allow you to use Pictos, a kind of equippable skill that modifies your combat behaviour – extra turns for successfully blocking attacks, added benefits when using healing items, and a huge variety more. Additionally, a Lumina Converter device also lets you permanently learn these skills after equipping them for a few fights, expanding the number of skills you can utilise at once as you level up and gain more skill points to assign.
It’s a hugely customisable setup – between different weapon effects, skills and combat abilities you can gain access to, you can build your party in all kinds of ways. An early party build I found helpful focused on stacking the Burn condition on enemies along with a whole bunch of skills that made fire damage even more deadly, which made me feel like a combat genius. I do wish it was a little better signposted when you had permanently learned a skill, however – the Pictos menu is just a touch unintuitive, but it’s nothing that patching in a “Mastered!” badge on your skill list wouldn’t instantly fix.
It’s clear that a lot of love and time went into this game, both in building a complex and fully-realised fantasy world, and in paying homage to the games that inspired them to do so. The world of Expedition 33 is like walking through a surrealist painting, but you do get to walk around it in a perspective and scale that immediately takes you back to the Final Fantasy games of old. Every location is a fresh and entirely unique marvel, like an “underwater” city with seaweed blowing in the wind and sea creatures flying overhead, or a forest made of wooden human figures, but every place shocks in a new way.
All of these disparate places are linked together by Lumiere and the Expeditions’ black-and-gold colour scheme, consistent across both your party and the remains of every past Expedition you come across. Spotting these colours in the world will often lead you to vehicles or gear used by those past Expeditoners, and often provide some environmental storytelling about how they met their fate. You can also find journals for almost every past expedition scattered across the world, slowly expanding what you know about the world and the thinking behind these past explorers. Some of these journal entries are truly surprising, and show that not every Expedition set out with the same end-goal or philosophy in mind. It’s a great worldbuilding device for those curious, and reinforces that this is a game that will ALWAYS hide a treat if you go looking in every corner of the map.
Having spent about 36 hours with this by the time I reached the end of its story, I was truly shocked by the number of twists and turns I’d been through over that time. The story takes some turns I truly did not see coming, and I’m excited for other players to see just how much fun it is when not EVERY cool moment of the game is in the trailers.
The ending moments of this story truly impacted me in a way I wasn’t expecting, and left me rethinking and re-examining my choices in the lead-up to the end – and adding new twists all the while. Even having completed the endgame, there are still areas on the world map that are too high-level for me to handle just yet. Sandfall has advised there’s about 30 hours of side content on top of the game’s main story, and I’m excited to explore more of it.
This is a kind of story that hasn’t been seen in modern RPGs, with a level and distinctiveness in visual presentation that leaves many franchises right now in the dust. All this plus a star-studded voice cast makes Clair Obscur Expedition 33 an amazing first outing from the studio, and a powerful statement that the RPG genre is still growing and evolving to this day. JRPGs have had their time in the sun, sure – but I say, bring on the FRPGs!
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 was reviewed using a promotional code on PS5, as provided by the publisher. Click here to learn more about Stevivor’s scoring scale.
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