Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is Sandfall Interactive’s debut, which tells me two things about the French studio. Firstly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs and, secondly, that they’re a bunch of utter show offs. You can’t do this, Sandfall. You can’t just come storming out the gate with a turn-based RPG possessed of all the flash and experimentation of Lost Odyssey or Legend Of Dragoon plus all the haunting playfulness and bizarre beauty of both Miyazakis having a thumb war while Yoko Taro rolls around on the floor beside them.
I don’t know how they do things in France, but where I’m from, pulling off such clarity of vision on your first attempt is illegal – as is this much earnest outpouring of feeling on any attempt. Indeed, I can see some of you finding Clair Obscur a little too cute, a little too eager to dazzle and move with its operatic spectacle and Lisa Simpson-ish virtuosity.
Me? I find it hard to even get lost in games I love these days. I’ll usually settle for anything that stops me checking my email for an hour. But if Clair Obscur’s brilliant combat had me hooked, the journey it offers had me enchanted. It would appear that they really do make ’em like this anymore.
“A bloodless guillotine,” is how leading man Gustave’s sister, Emma, describes the yearly expedition taken by the citizens of Lumiere: a voyage towards a distant horizon to defeat an entity known as the Paintress. Each year, she brushes a new number on her monolith, erasing everyone that age from existence in blooms of dust and petals. At the annual festival, those whose turn it is to die wear red and white garlands around their necks, saying goodbyes and piling their furniture in the street for those left behind.
No expedition has returned in 67 years, and the once-prestigious voyage has taken on an air of death and failure. For those who come after, they say, many morbidly resigned to carving out a slightly less treacherous path for next year’s gaggle of doomed bastards and bastresses. Not so Gustave, an inventor seemingly modeled at once after Robert Pattinson and Kieron Culkin, if the latter’s canny rat smirk was replaced by a touching if gormless determination. He’s convinced things are going to be different this time. As is Maelle, his adopted charge who’s opted to join the expedition of 32 year olds despite being half their age. The stakes are spelled out in the warped streets of Lumiere’s concrete carnival, and our wine-drunk expedition set forth in sombre good spirits.
They are immediately plunged into hell. The continent is Belle Époque Final Fantasy X by way of Henson’s Labyrinth in the throes of Annihilation; all shimmering oil spill chroma and constructs creaking through twilight forests; withered, coralised corpses and calamity-prone cloth mannequins stumbling through fairytale woods and islands where the stone itself takes the shape of titanous Melpo and Thalia masks. As a landscape, it evokes both verdant primordial promise and the closing act of time itself. As a world map, I’m 45 hours into a supposedly 30 hour game and I still haven’t unearthed all of its secrets.
‘Turn-based RPG but you can dodge and parry attacks’ sounds like a gimmick, and indeed could have been if Sandfall’s ambition had stopped at giving you something to do with your hands between turns. Instead, vivid animations lend each bestiary entry its own Soulsian timing peculiarities; lumbering, dancing, writhing personalities and presence you’ll want to learn intimately. Even at its most basic, combat here is animate and tactile enough to make even evident influence Atlus seem sleepy by comparison. Indeed, if you’re someone who likes the option to have a sandwich mid JRPG fight, you might find its constant demands for presence and reflexes a nag. Meet it where lives, though, and you’ll find an exhilarating challenge that’ll have you willingly seeking out every fight you can find.
Reflexes alone will only shore up your defence, though. To cut a path to the Paintress, you’ll need to seriously engage with layers of character ability, equipment and perk interfuckery to brew up the most busted combos you’ve laid eyes upon since the last busted combo you made. Indeed, there’s a healthy dose of deckbuilder tech lineage to experiment with, whether that’s building and cashing in stacks of status effects or penny pinching for action points and the rare repeat turn chance. I’m a decent bit into NG+ right now. I’m still regularly finding new ways to use old tricks in fresh, digusting combinations.
Each of the five playable characters feel distinct, whether that’s furry puppet Monoco’s severed leg Pokémon transformations or science witch Lune’s elemental bank ‘n’ cash rotation. It’s maybe a bit too easy to become attached to the fruits of your latest fifteen minute menu sweat and refuse to dive back in to experiment until you’re booted out of smug complacency by a difficulty spike, but there’s always an easier mode if you’re in a hurry to see the next story beat.
Off the critical track – nestled at the end of tucked-away side paths in dungeons that can run intimidatingly labyrinthine – are the small details that elevate journey to adventure. Pale, oddly serene monsters with requests. A plaintive manor, unmoored from time and space, that you’ll return to a dozen times through a dozen secret doors. Goofy beach minigames where you play air hockey with exploding puppets or attempt infuriating parkour challenges with controls designed for anything but. An entire food chain of optional mega bosses both secret and brazen enough to loom over the map, daring you to come have a pop. It’s a world that feels wide enough to make must-come-back later notes so often I’m left perplexed by no in-game ability to do so.
Clair Obscur’s most profound moments often exist outside of a main plot I’m taking pains to be vague about, instead arising from the writers taking their central conceit – a dwindling, gradually younger city born with a timer on their lives – and asking questions. How much do you really owe to a society that won’t hesitate to sacrifice you when the time comes? How would it feel to come to terms with soon losing someone to the Gommage, only to lose them to some other tragedy? How early should parents begin to prepare their children for the inevitable, and how low does that number have to be before the entirety of Lumiere decide to stop bringing children into a doomed world altogether? Clair Obscur offers neither judgement nor easy answers, just a perpetually dying light and a group of deeply likeable humans you’ll want to witness rage against its throes.
Strong performances throughout, Jennifer English’s especially, more than make up for noticeable budget sacrifices in facial animations, I can see the game’s particular brand of whimsical goof being more divisive, even if I loved it. When Ben Starr’s reserved-if-not-gruff Verso is asked, following a tragic scene, if he’d like a hug by giant balloon idiot Esquie – and it’s Esquie’s third quickfire question, the first two met with terse single-word responses – Verso says that yes, he would like a hug. God. You get so used to pop culture’s tired rhythms of quippy standoffishness that it all it takes is a simple reversal to hit like a sack of billiard balls. No “you’ll be hugging the next person with one arm!”, no “No, I would not like a hug“. Verso just wants a hug from his old mate. Lovely.
The music sits somewhere between FFX and Nier: Automata – rousing, playful, sweet, sad, sometimes jazzy or electric or carnivalesque – and it compliments a palette and tone that, to slightly caveat my praise, I’m a complete mark for. Storybook without being twee. Thoughtful and rich without posturing importance, if perhaps a little profundity. Playful without falling into our era’s seemingly inescapable three-kids-in-a-suit urbane irony poisoning. Dark without ever being ugly. And, yes, it’s often enraptured by its own spectacle, but there’s a reason why we use the word ’empty’ to modify ‘spectacle’ when it deserves it. This is heart-full-to-bursting spectacle. Uninhibited and unembarrassed. Big kids playing make believe. Most of all, it feels personal. Full of the sort of odd brush strokes a more established studio might have scrubbed out.
Very occasionally, I’ll play an RPG that makes me feel ten again. Rebirth. Cris Tales. Revisiting Suikoden. Years come, the big number ticks down, and comfortable appreciation replaces the spellbound enchantment of being told a story, of being swept off to a new world. Of playing Final Fantasy 8 in that special edition shirt that Ben Starr likes to wear that I wish I’d kept because I bet it’s worth a bloody fortune now. You wait for a game to bring you back there, mostly certain you’ve moved passed the capacity to feel that way because you now have the sort of adult concerns that cause you ask how much a shirt might be worth on Ebay. I can’t say if Clair Obscur will work its magic on everyone the same way, but it certainly did for me. I’m still not ready to leave, honestly. What a special and rare thing this is: a story that feels like someone wanted to tell it so badly it hurt.