When I play a new video game, I am a dirty walkthrough follower. I never feel like having three monitors is more useful than when I can play the game on my main one and have a guide on a secondary screen. The reason I do this is simple: I like thoroughness in my gaming. I don't want to miss the secretly overpowered item in Act I because I didn't know where it was. I want to see it all, even if that means being guided by the hand.
Imagine my shock, then, over how I played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the ridiculously named role-playing game by French studio Sandfall Interactive that became one of the best reviewed games of all time shortly after its release on April 24. I had not heard of Clair Obscur before the reviews and hype started rolling in, and I immediately bought and downloaded it. A turn-based RPG that is both gorgeous and almost hilariously French? With timing-based parries and dodges, like some form of modernized, Francophile Super Mario RPG? Yes, please.
The knock-on effect of jumping on the Clair Obscur bandwagon soon after release was that the guides I come to know and love in every game just were not written yet. Sure, there were some tips here and there, but there wasn't a walkthrough that would ensure I would get every item in the game as I played through it. I could have waited; while I do get FOMO when friends are talking about a specific game—this is why my uncompleted games backlog is so hefty—I had other games to play that could have filled my time for a month or so before Clair Obscur got figured out.
And yet, here I am, some 35 hours later, having just rolled the end credits on this wonderful, bewildering video game, and I made it all the way through with as few guiding moments from an external source as any game in recent memory. Clair Obscur was a teacher for me as much as it was a video game experience, and it's to the game's immense credit that feeling lost and confused was a core feature.
Clair Obscur is almost antagonistic to the very idea of walkthroughs. There is no mini-map in the game, and there is only a limited fast-travel mechanic. The game encourages exploration by removing some of the key markers that can turn a game with so much to do into a checklist, and by simply letting myself get lost within its opacity, I came out of my experience with a newfound appreciation for discovering what I love about a game on my own. Whereas a game like Metaphor: ReFantazio, respects a player's time by streamlining so much of the experience of playing it, Clair Obscur asks you do a lot of seemingly aimless wandering while packing those experiences with a feeling of genuine discovery.
A quick aside to explain what Clair Obscur actually is. The plot is simple enough: Every year, people of a certain age die on the day of the Gommage (roughly translated to The Scrubbing), as the ginormous Paintress wipes away the prospect of aging and living a full life. Each year, she paints a number on a monolith, and everyone who is that age (or higher) gets turned into flowers and disappears. Then the cycle repeats the next year, counting down from 100 to, eventually, zero.
At the start of the game, it is time for the age-33s to die, and everything starts with as devastating an opening act as I can remember in a video game. After witnessing the 33-year-olds get Thanos'd, the titular Expedition 33, filled mostly (though, crucially not entirely) with 32-year-olds in their last year of life, sets off to the monolith in order to try to stop the Paintress, with the expectation that they will fail like the previous 67 expeditions did. Of course, because this is where the game drops us in, as part of that specific expedition, things do not go quite as they had for over half a century. Along the way, the main cast shines brightly, each with their own personalities and reasons for undertaking the expedition, reasons that the game slowly teases out before each individual story ends in a gut punch.
I won't say more because, again, this game deserves to be experienced as fresh as possible, with no one guiding you towards spoilers. I will speak to the gameplay, however, because it is one of the best turn-based systems I've ever experienced, even if it is remarkably easy to break in the player's favor. The battle party consists of three fighters (out of a choice of five total), and they take turns fighting monsters. Simple enough. In defense, however, the game turns into quasi-Elden Ring, where the player must time dodges, jumps, and parries in order to not take ridiculous amounts of damage in return. A successful parry sequence can also trigger a powerful counterattack, so it's in the player's interest to learn the minuscule timing windows. I am awful at it and spent most of the game just dodging, which has more generous timing, though there were a handful of bosses where parrying was not just more powerful but actually necessary to win.
There are also "Pictos" and "Lumina," essentially buffing items that give each fighter specific power boosts. One might let you attack twice in a row, while another turns your basic attacks into fireballs that leave a damage-over-time effect on the enemies. There are seemingly hundreds of these buffs, and while people online slowly but surely figured out the best combinations to steamroll the game even on the hardest difficulty, figuring out which combos on which characters would lead to the strongest party was more than half the fun in Clair Obscur for me.
Though the plot sort of loses itself in the final act, the twists and turns in the first two chunks of the game were stunning to experience with no prior knowledge nor inkling of what was to come, and Clair Obscur has no reservations about turning the player's accumulated knowledge and emotions against them. While I surely wasted plenty of time just backtracking and getting lost in the many labyrinthine areas in the game—the Ancient Sanctuary early in the game took about three hours to get through, as an example—each time I found a new Pictos buff that would elevate my power ten-fold, I felt like I was re-learning what I love about video games.
I'm itching to get back into the world of Clair Obscur even as I just finished its main story. There are side bosses and challenges still to conquer, and the game also has a New Game+ feature that will eventually allow me to experience the game once more with the knowledge both of its plot machinations and its gameplay rhythms, only at a harder difficulty. I might use guides for that playthrough, admittedly; I don't see much value in withholding information for myself after doing it almost entirely for my first go-around. However, no amount of guide usage can ruin what was the purest experience I've had with a video game in, at least, a decade, and for that, and for the ways that it rewarded my restraint, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will always have a special place in my cold, dead video gaming heart.
