Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (No Spoilers)
This is an Italian term which literally means ‘light-dark’. In paintings the description refers to clear tonal contrasts which are often used to suggest the volume and modelling of the subjects depicted.
Expedition 33 Cover
I have never felt a game so strongly before. So strongly in fact, that I decided to write down my thoughts.
Despite being (probably) autistic and don’t have a huge emotional range, I for some reason developed a bit of an obsession for emotionally-intense RPGs when I was a kid, and it has kind of stayed with me ever since. These days I don’t have a lot of time to play games, but I still play about one game per year, and this year’s choice of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of those games that I know will stay with me for the rest of my life, and I would say it’s the best game I have ever played, and I have played a lot of mind-blowing games!
If you want a point of reference, Final Fantasy has been my favourite series, and my previous favourite game was probably FF7 (the original), followed by 8, and 10. I also really liked Baldur’s Gate 1-3, but that’s a very different vibe. This game is much closer to the FF series, which is perhaps unsurprising, as the director Guillaume Broche is also a big fan of the FF series, and you can definitely see its influence on E33.
The game starts in a visually stunning world in the island city of Lumière, a re-imagined version of 19th century Paris, where a curse instills a sense of urgency and sometimes nihilism in the inhabitants. Every year, a long haired figure (the Paintress) paints a giant number on a big rock in the distance. The number goes down by one every year, and everyone above that age dies. The game takes place in year 67 (34 painted on the rock), on the day of the annual “festival”.
Every year, the day after the festival, they send an expedition to “the continent” to try to stop the Paintress, and none has succeeded or returned. As you may have guessed, the game follows Expedition 33, consisting mostly of people aged 32 who decided to spend the last year of their lives on an epic adventure.
The Writing
The best part of the game is no doubt the writing. The writing is courageous. It’s not the kind of writing you would expect from a big publisher trying to make a game palatable to a large audience. Be warned, it’s not a feel-good story. It’s evocative, many layered, and morally complex. Many games have played with moral ambiguity and giving the player choices, but I have not seen a game that goes as far as E33. It’s not good vs evil. Not even good vs evil with caveats, as many games have done. There is no good or evil, and the big decision in the game give you only reasonable choices. Reasonable choices that are all morally defensible, right and justifiable… and with tragic consequences, that, because of how well the story and the characters have been written, feel just like making decisions about people and a world you have known all your life.
The story touches on themes of agency, humanism, grief, guilt, consciousness, imagination, nihilism, disability, and mortality. There is a lot going on all the time, yet somehow the story doesn’t feel contrived and ridiculous as you would expect, Everything Everywhere All at Once style. Somehow, despite major plot events happening back to back, it doesn’t feel forced or arbitrary.
The story has a few similar elements to Final Fantasy 7, so if you are familiar with that story, maybe it will give you some idea whether you’ll like this one. I don’t know which one I would rank higher, but E33 gives you more agency, which I think makes the story even more impactful as the secrets of the world unravel.
The extent of sex scenes in my play-through. This is not Baldur’s Gate 3.
The Music
The soundtrack of the game is 8 hours long, and all orchestral. So many beautiful and interesting melodies in all sorts of different styles, from baroque, operatic, to heavy metal, and somehow they made it work. The main vocalist is Alice Duport-Percier, a classically-trained soprano with a very beautiful voice that added a whole other dimension to the story. If you can’t get enough of her like me, she was also the singer in the Grissini Project for many years, singing video game covers under the pseudonym Lilou.
Initially, most of the songs are in a synthetic language mixing French with Latin (I think?!) in order to not spoil the game, with standard French versions in the end. That I thought was very cool. There is also a single piece in English.
In one part of the game, you have to defeat a Sirene that lures people to their death with enchanting music. The game tells you that people go crazy listening to the music for too long, and that you should go through the area quickly. And then they put such beautiful music (no spoiler in the video, but don’t read comments) in the section that you can’t help but stop and listen…
I have been listening to these songs non-stop for weeks at this point. Send help.
The Passion
Video games are one of the newest art forms that is still a bit contentious, but I don’t think anyone can disagree after seeing this game. The writing, the music, the environment design, the motion capture and voice acting… in a way it’s an art form that combines so many other art forms, and everything is done so well in this game. As an example, watch this video of the mocap session for the scene at the end of the Prologue when you get to that point.
Video games will always have a special place in my heart, and not just from playing them. My first job was at Capcom Vancouver, a small game studio in Vancouver at the time, and it’s what introduced me to the world of video games. I didn’t end up staying in the industry because of the toxicity (not my employer - they were lovely - but the industry in general), and I’m really glad that there are people out there still making masterpieces like this one, with so much passion (by necessity to some degree… you don’t go into the video game industry to get rich). I’m hoping that with recent super successful RPGs like E33 and Baldur’s Gate 3, we’ll get a resurgence of interesting and epic RPGs. Hopefully will convince large publishers that bland MMORPGs with a million in-game purchases aren’t the only way to make money in games. I’ll die very happy if I get to play a game like E33 every year.
Expedition 33 Post-credit.