Phew! It’s been a while since I did buy a game at release, and I made an exception for this one (several months back) as I kept hearing good things around the game in my circle. And I was not disappointed. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from Sandfall interactive is a masterpiece, and it came out of nowhere.

How things start

I will avoid spoilers in this review, as the story is one of the main reasons to play the game. But I can at least tell you the beginning, since it’s also shown in every trailer out there.

You start by playing the role of Gustave, a 32 years old man, living in Lumiere, a sort of old Paris (it’s clearly Paris, it has all its landmarks) from the Belle Epoque era, that has been badly damaged by an event called the Fracture 67 years ago. The whole continent has been ravaged intro broken lands, floating parts, and the Eiffel Tower is now a twisted as if attracted by an invisible vortex.

After this major disruption 67 years ago, the people of Lumiere started to notice far away from their land, on the horizon, a count-down from 100 to zero, on a monolith in the sea. A huge paintress figure, usually sitting and hunched over, would stand up once every year, and paint a new number, counting down one by one. And at that stroke of a brush, the people from Lumiere of that age would disappear, reduced into floating petals, dispersed by the wind.

The people from Lumiere refer to this phenomenon as the gommage (yes, the French word that means erasing, even in the English version). But they did not give up. In the face of this terrible threat, they have organized, and since then they are launching a new expedition of younger folks every year to go and find the paintress, and destroy her so that she can never steal anyone’s future ever again. Expeditions start on boat since the city is now isolated by a large sea from the rest of the continent.

Expeditions have been going on for many years, yet nobody has ever returned and no one has been able to stop the paintress so far. Not all knowledge is lost and every expedition manages to save some information about what they learned into some crystal shards that they leave behind, for future adventurers. Still, the countdown continues. Most expeditioners know this is almost like a suicide mission, yet they keep fighting, to give a chance to their loved ones.

But not everyone is ready to fight. There are others, resigned to their fate, knowing that there is not much that they can do. They await the final day and try to enjoy the years they have left. This is the case of Sophie, who is 33 years old as you start the game. She is an ex-love interest of Gustave - they haven’t seen each other for years. As the countdown from 34 to 33 approaches, Gustave and Sophie get together to spend a final time together before the fateful moment occurs. The paintress stands up, draws 33, and a few moments later, Sophie disppears in today’s gommage. Gustave, being one year younger, is heartbroken, and gets ready to join the 33rd Expedition along with several of his friends, including the orphan Maelle, much younger (in her twenties), who is almost like a little sister to him.

This is where you really start the game, as you depart for the continent in the hope of finding the paintress and defeating her.

Super powers

Right from the beginning that also acts as a quick tutorial and a guide to the world of Lumiere, you realize that your characters are not normal run-of-the-mill humans. They can jump dozens of meters by using some kind of magical hooks. Gustave’s left arm is some kind of steampunk prosthesis, too. The tutorial also introduces the key concepts behind the combat system.

The combat system is a mixture of turn-based combat, precision shooting, and QTE to parry or dodge the attacks. So unlike your regular turned based games, you have to stay alert and engaged even when the enemy attacks. Dodging is almost mandatory to avoid getting killed, and parrying is recommended if you can do it, while the timing to parry is much more difficult to get right.

Parrying will let you execute a counter-attack which can help you to kill enemies much faster in the end. Note that parrying needs to be done with a precise timing on every enemy hit, not just the first one. Some enemy attacks have 5 hits for example, and you need to parry every single one of the 5 hits to trigger a counter-attack. Yes, it’s tough.

To be honest, none of this makes any sense if you think about it more than 30 seconds: why would a turn-based game have time-based events? Why are you even able to shoot enemies in real time while they wait patiently for their turn?

Yet… once you stop asking questions and you accept things as they are, you realize it works wonders to keep you hooked and active during the whole fight. And it removes the usual RNG related to enemies hitting or missing you. You are now in control 100% of the time, which makes a huge difference in how you approach the fights. Xcom2 makes me curse to no end because I hate when dice rolls make me fail. Expedition 33 makes me curse as well, but I am the only one to blame for not being good enough when it happens. As long as you get better at catching the enemies’ attacks at the right time, YOU will prevail and no amount of luck will change that. And everyone litterally gets better as they pour more hours in the game.

Landing on the Continent

A last bit on the story. Once you and your comrades land on the continent where you think the paintress will be found, you are approached by an old man walking with a cane. Not responding to an attempt at communication, the old man brutally executes several of your companions in one move. At the same time, huge monsters appear out of nowhere and surround your party. In no time, most of the Expedition 33 is wiped out. Gustave is struck down, losing consciousness on the battlefield… only to wake up a few hours later, surprised to still be alive. Now you are alone, and you are to find survivors. Maybe there are a few more lucky ones. And indeed, you will find that you are not the last one still standing.

You run into large environments with mobs roaming around. Whether you fight them or not is up to you (most fights are not mandatory), but the game will require you to level up progressively. So not fighting at all is not an option. And after all, the fights are quite fun… Apart from the mobs, there are some treasures to discover in every stage, but not much else. Sometimes there are some NPCs, but that’s fairly rare overall.

Sooner or later, you will be facing much stronger enemies (yeah, bosses) which have way more hit points and much more complex attacks to parry or dodge. Such fights are really fun - bosses will typically kill you the first time you encounter them, and will force you to get better (find their weaknesses, and also FIX your own weaknesses by getting used to parry their attacks).

Building on the mechanics already seen in Elden Ring or other games, bosses with switch to a difference stance as you weaken them, splitting the fight in different phases. The genius of the game is that you will get better upon every try, and ultimately no boss is too hard to beat as long as you put in the efforts. It makes it very hard to give up on the game.

A Slightly Confusing Upgrade System

Sandfall went overboard with the fighting system and related upgrades by making things way more complicated that it should be. Every single character has their own set of unique properties, which kinda makes sense, but it is very hard to grasp in details as you are overwhelmed by new information at first, and information that lacks clarity. For example, one the main characters, Maelle, works with stances related to how she uses her sword, and depending on which stance she is currently in, the attack you use next will be more or less effective.

Now, imagine that you have to keep this in mind for every character (you have 3 at once in a fight, and each of them has very different rules that apply) and memorize this to be able to exploit everything to maximize the effect of your attacks. And that’s on top of, you know, memorizing the timing for parrying all attacks. It’s… a bit too much. For the most part, you can kind of ignore these optimizations and grind a little to level up instead. Upgrade your weapons, buy new ones, that works too. Until a certain point.

But it does not stop here. Every character has their own upgrade tree. The tree unlocks new powers, modifiers or attacks as they level up. So far, so good.

Your characters also have slots for Pictos, additional powers or bonuses you can attach after finding them around in the world. You attach them in slots available for each character, in limited number. Think of it as materia in Final Fantasy for example. However, the thing that is not clear at all - and the UI for this is extremely confusing - is that you can learn Pictos after using them on the same character for a while. This makes this Pictos available without the thing, and you can then use Lumina Points (that you collect when leveling up and also finding them laying down on the floor when you move around) to equip as many powers as you can afford, without having to worry about slots.

The advantage of Lumina points is that you can progressively add dozens of powers or bonuses to your characters and still add on top of that Pictos to make them even stronger. It took me probably about 10 to 15 hours to really understand what the heck these Lumina Points were about and how to actually use them. It’s clearly a tutorial issue (only explained once, and way too early) and a UI issue (completely hidden from the regular interface). As much as I praise other aspects of Expedition 33, this part is a major fuck-up that can’t go untold. Were testers asleep so that nobody gave anyone that feedback before release?

Game of the year?

I have never really cared about the game of the year kind of thing. Why should it matter if a game came out during an arbitrary period of the Earth’s rotation? At the end of the day, what I care about the most is whether this game is a landmark or not. In many ways, Expedition 33 is a resounding success because it’s a breeze of fresh air in a landscape of very boring, stereotyped games and a massive number of sequels after sequels. If you go to a trade show like the TGS, what you see from major publishers is just sequels, remasters, reboots, remakes. The whole industry is dying, becoming adverse to risk as it is being managed by boring, clueless MBAs out of business school.

Almost every other major game these days follows a very well-defined recipe and does not stray out of the norm. Expedition 33 comes with a very original story, a world design that is not just comprised of some kind of cheap asset reuse from other games, great characters that feel alive with an actual backstory. Is that so hard to do these days?

But what deserves the most praise, by far, is maybe not related to the game. Thanks to Expedition 33, we have been able to discover Lorien Testard, who composed all the original sountrack for the game. It transcends everything. Put some generic tunes in Expedition 33 and it falls apart like a castle of cards. Lorien Testard composed 8 hours of soundtrack for the game. And the most impressive feat is that there’s nothing to throw away. If I write 8 pages of text, you can be sure that there’s going to be some poorly written paragraphs in the lot. Lorien just writes great music like he breathes air. The kind of music that you keep humming long after you finish the game. This puts Expedition 33 at the very top of the best music ever made for any game. The marketing around the game at launch made it a point to showcase the music, and they were so right. It sells the game by itself! And it convinced me to buy the OST too.

And then, there’s the French thing. In a (gaming) world dominated by American and Japanese games, it’s refreshing to see something culturally different (maybe I’m biased here, as a French citizen), and this is clear that this could not have emerged from the minds of people from these countries. It’s not your typical good vs evil story, and the multiple endings you get are all bittersweet.

It also comes at a point where there has not been a big French game for a very, very long time, so it’s even more noticeable. The story is very carefully crafted, and leads you masterfully from the beginning till the end, with a few (major) surprises along the way.

But will it be remembered 5, 10 years down the road? Maybe. It’s hard to say.

There are still ways in which Expedition 33 could be improved. Graphics are good to great, but the floating hair effect coming from Unreal Engine 5 always looks really off and fake, even if you have the hardware to run the game at full details. Talking about hardware, the game is extremely demanding, but it does reward you with extraordinary visuals again and again.

It can run on the Steam Deck after you do a few incantations, but barely - it’s stretching the poor little guy to the max. Even on more powerful desktop GPUs, getting to 60 FPS at max details and high resolution will be a challenge. Blame Unreal Engine 5? Blame poor optimization? I’d guess it’s a little bit of both. It does not feel that this game should run so poorly, visually speaking. At least it’s got ultrawide support, which is a blessing since the environments are splendid and having a larger view is a great way to enjoy them.

Enemies are very cool: they benefit from a very original design - shapes, textures, movements, almost like nothing you have seen before. Not so much asset re-use here (Japanese games recently feel a lot like that, outsourcing your work to developing countries is very noticeable, right Final Fantasy VII?), and some genuinely fantastic monsters and bosses. I have a sweet spot for Sirene, a huge boss in the middle of an enclave, who dances at the music before you approach her for an epic fight.

Some of the level maps are huge, and you might get lost. The game has no GPS and no indicator to tell you where you are, and it’s probably a good thing. It does not do too much hand-holding, and lets you explore and learn the hard way - it does give you some visual cue when a monster is WAY more powerful than you are, to avoid certain death. So you will probably do some back and forth to find the right path. Honestly, it’s OK. This is anyway encouraged as each level has secret zones where you can find treasures, chests, and other goodies.

There are numerous cutscenes in the game, and most are great and well-made. The actors are very convincing (I’d recommend to play in French and read subtitles, but the English version is good enough as well), and they usually serve a purpose: to get you to know more of each character, to understand where they come from, and how they feel. Beyond cutscenes, the game encourages you to go take some rest in the camps (anywhere you want on the world map, basically). When you camp, you can trigger a lot more conversations between your characters, which leads to better connections between them (a la Persona), but simply, good bits of background and lore about the world. By the way, no matter where you are in the world, the camp and its surroundings always has the same look, which is a little weird. Just a detail that felt a little strange.

The worst thing about the game is that the levels can feel a little empty. Apart from the mobs and shadow-NPCs, there is not much to do. Luckily things always look quite unique as you progress, so I was not caught by boredom anywhere - still, I would have liked to see some more life (butterflies? rats? animals?).

Glorious, Still

For a first game, it gets so many things right, that it’s hard to blame it for its small issues. I have no problem recommending Expedition 33 to just about anyone. It hits a sweet spot in the genre, with way less grinding than in Persona, and a very good story and likable characters. It’s not too long (about 30~40 hours if you stick to the main story). And as I said before, the music will work its magic for the rest. The music already has its own following, as there were already multiple live concerts in France in the past few months.

While I mentioned the game is borderline playable on the Steam Deck, I played something like 15 hours on it and managed to beat several bosses with it, so even if you only have the Steam Deck, you won’t regret it. It works.

After finishing the game, you have access to the whole world to further explore and unlock more secrets (it’s mostly about beating more bosses). So the challenge can easily continue for another 70 hours or so if you want to beat it to completion.

Well done, Sandfall interactive, and now, looking forward with what they will be cooking for their next game. I am praying that it won’t be a sequel or a prequel. We have enough of these.

As of november 2025, if you have not played it yet, there is something missing in your life that you don’t know about.