When we all fall asleep, where do we go? It’s the existential question pondered by singer Billie Eilish in her 2019 album – and one that I can’t help but recall as I take my first steps in role-playing game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. As I sprint across a shimmering ocean floor, launch icicles at hordes of ethereal terrors, gawp at a slew of faceless corpses, and dodge floating mines beside half-submerged apartment buildings, I sincerely hope this isn’t where my unwaking subconscious goes. Welcome to the world of Lumiere, the eyebrow-raising setting of Sandfall Interactive’s ambitious new turn-based role-playing game (RPG), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
If there’s any genre that needs a bit of a shot in the arm, it’s the Japanese RPG genre. Where shooters from the ‘90s have morphed into something almost unrecognizable today, genre revivals like Sea Of Stars feel steadfastly reverent to their 16-bit inspirations, diligently building upon the same foundation Square Soft laid at the dawn of the medium. Thankfully, developer Sandfall Interactive is aiming to inject some welcome innovation into an overly iterative genre.
Leaning away from traditional fantasy norms, Clair Obscur takes its visual cues from France’s beloved 19th-century Belle Époque painters, employing their impressionist painterly art style to suck you into this intriguing world. Part Lost-Odyssey-inspired epic, part hallucinogenic nightmare, Clair Obscur offers a refreshingly grown-up and – uniquely French – twist on the often conservative genre. In Clair Obscur’s existential land of Lumiere, age is no longer just a number – it’s a death sentence. Each year a mysterious painter marks the sky with a deadly number – instantly evaporating anyone of the corresponding age. As more humans vanish off the face of the Earth, a crew of increasingly desperate expeditions is sent to the “Continent” in an attempt to track down and vanquish the mysterious Painter.
Combining French art with Final Fantasy
Time is very literally the enemy here, and the mood isn’t exactly cheerful when I join the unlucky members of Expedition 33, Gustave and Lune. With half the expedition inexplicably missing at this point in the game, I find my fractured party beaten down and miserable. It’s an endearingly somber tone for a usually chirpy genre, and the stellar cast delivers a refreshingly relatable performance throughout my three-hour demo. With Gustave played by Mr Daredevil himself – Charlie Cox – and Andy Serkis and Ben Starr also amongst the star-studded cast, the highfalutin script is brought to life with only minimal amounts of melodrama.
Outside of its brilliant battles – don’t worry, we’ll get to those later – Gustave and Lune feel surprisingly nimble. Sprinting across environments at full pelt as Gustave and floating across grassy plains as Lune, I’m able to clamber up a rock face with the grace of Nathan Drake. It’s a jarringly Western approach to traversal, an Uncharted-esque trojan horse concealing a stat-crunching, spellcasting RPG.
Clair Obscur does its best to deliver what players would expect from a conventional AAA real-time adventure – taking a ‘best of both’ approach to Eastern and Western game design philosophies. There’s no better example of this than in Sandfall Interactive’s delightfully reactive, timing-focused combat. Taking its cues from Paper Mario’s quick time event-esque (QTE) clashes, Clair Obscur adds in reflex-testing dodges and sphincter-clenching parry windows to the drop menu navigation of old.
Combat, blended
Unlike many of its peers, battles in Clair Obscur always demand your undivided attention. There’s no pause button to save you here. No leisurely turn-based breather for you to check your phone. Attacks come thick and fast, and you’ll need to perfectly read bosses’ movements and skill patterns in order to survive. Dodges are the safer bet, giving characters a generous window to dash out of an attack’s reach. Pulling off parries requires a sweat-inducing level of precision, but rewards success with a hefty damage-dealing counterattack. Do you opt for the more forgiving dodge, or risk it all for a parry?
As swearing protagonist Gustave battles his way across this waking dreamworld, I become completely engrossed in the melancholic melee. The meld of real-time and tactical play adds a welcome layer of reactivity and dynamism to the classic turn-based shenanigans of old, further sweetened by a manually aim-able projectile that snipes enemy weak points.
Still, it wouldn’t be a current-gen game, if Sandfall Interactive didn’t take a healthy dose of influence from Miyazaki’s Souls series. Meshing the classic Final Fantasy save point with the Dark Souls bonfire, expedition flags littered across the map allow players to funnel points into one of five different attributes – vitality, might, agility, defense, or luck, alongside unlocking a veritable array of new combat skills. It’s a clearly FromSoftware-inspired bit of character-build optimization, rewarding your grinding with upgrades while respawning the local mobs and healing your party in classic save-point fashion.
Much like in Golden Sun or Chrono Trigger, taking the path less trodden greatly rewards player curiosity here, with my detours culminating in everything from discovering juicy equippable trinkets to stumbling upon utterly terrifying hidden bosses. One in particular had me hiding under my beret. As the environment begins to open up, I dare to veer off the beaten track and find myself standing atop a crumbling cliff face, facing a nightmarish sunglasses-donning mime. Hunched over clad in a red and white striped top, the gangly monstrosity smiles eerily before it swings his hulking dangling limbs at me – eating the party’s pathetic attacks before gleefully murdering my hapless heroes. Well, it’s not every day that you get pulverized by a third-rate Pinnochio.
Modern twists on the classics
There are a litany of nice touches that help to immerse you in this often baffling world. After battle, your chosen party leader roams the environment with horrific injuries befitting their health bar, from a minor splatter of blood on their clothes to sickening gashes and lesions across their arms and face. A modern twist on the JRPG world map sees your characters sprinting across a diorama-esque playground full-pelt, dodging enemies as you hightail it to the next town.
If there’s another ‘first’ that Clair Obscur can claim, it’s being the only JRPG adventure to feature multi-language profanity. While playing in English, Charlie Cox’s impassioned f-words are occasionally punctuated by additional swears in French, with a melancholic ‘merde!’ and passionately uttered ’Putain!’ ensuring that each character’s cursing feels almost as dynamic as the battling.
Much like its dreamlike impressionist art style, Clair Obscur feels equal parts familiar and foreign, like old friends and forgotten classmates stumbling their way into ill-fitting dreams.
Clair Obscur doesn’t completely defy genre conventions – there are still a groan-inducing amount of proper nouns being uttered, and a ragtag crew of misfits embarking on a quest to kill god. Yet for every earnest uttering of words like ‘chroma’ and ‘nevron’, so far, there’s a relatable vocal performance to match.
My biggest source of frustration throughout my journey was its complete lack of objective markers, waypoints, or a mini-map, causing me to keep retreading the same ground. This, however, should be a fairly easy fix, and hopefully one that Sandfull will implement ahead of the game’s April release.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 then, is shaping up to be the JRPG for people who grew tired of JRPGs. While recent years have seen no shortage of nostalgia-soaked JRPG homages, Sandfall Interactive seems determined not to just rehash the past, but to ensure the genre’s future.
Whether Clair Obscur’s combat and exploration can sustain this level of dynamism through its inevitably hefty run time remains to be seen, but in demo form at least, Clair Obscur’s slick combat, ethereal art, and somber storytelling live up to its genre-disrupting promise.
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