Great art invokes feeling from the audience. I enjoy most entertainment options between Television, Books, Movies and Video Games. It’s honestly rare at this stage in my life as a man of 43 years to feel much when enjoying any of those mediums. Expedition 33 drew sadness, laughter, warmth for the characters, excitement and reflective. After the finale of the game, not only did I want to return via new game plus, I sat thinking about the overall story for a solid 5 minutes before moving on with my day. This never happens to me, but absolutely did for this game.
I was really torn on what to rate this. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience, though there were so many little things that bothered me. Granted, they are little things, but there are a few of them. For example, I would have loved to have seen an HDR implementation. The graphics are stunning, and a full HDR implementation would have made the hard work the artists completed pop more than what they already do. The dialog does not auto-advance, you have to hit the A button every time someone speaks a sentence. This is very annoying and breaks immersion. The lack of this basic feature takes the amazing voice acting and makes it at best feel stilted. The picto and lumina system could have used a bit better tutorialization. The cutscenes seemed a bit blurry and were potentially captured at a lower resolution than what I was running the game at, I’m not certain of this, but it’s a guess based on what I was seeing. None of these items are dealbreakers, but these relatively minor things add up to give the final rating I landed on.
The Premise
The premise of the game is a bit hard to explain, but I’ll give it a go. The 67th team of expeditioners (known as Expedition 33) are trying to stop a Paintress from eliminating humanity as every year a number seen from the town of Lumiere counts down from 100. As the numbers tick down everyone aged higher than the number displayed is immediately evaporated. After 66 expeditions have failed to stop the Paintress, Expedition 33 is to set out and stop her.
Pros and Cons
- Graphics – Environment (Pro)
- The environments are surreal, gorgeous and oil painting-like. The environmental art design is truly great.
- Graphics – Characters (Pro)
- The character designs are amazing, from the human characters to the non-human. Esquie looks just so huggable like a pillow, there’s an odd black market of unlicensed plushies at the time of this writing.
- Gameplay Mechanics (Pro)
- The gameplay mechanics are simple at first but get very deep. The game onboards new mechanics all the way up through act 3, all of them welcome and add fun nostalgia to what I’m almost certain the inspirations to this game are (i.e. Final Fantasy, Sekiro, etc.)
- Combat (Pro)
- The combat is great, Sandfall took the generally “lean back” style of a traditional turn based JRPG and added a “lean forward” dodge and parry mechanic that’s such a great addition and refreshing to a 35+ year old genre. The combat never got stale, though frankly I struggled with the timing, it’s pretty tight timing – definitely a “me” issue rather than a game issue.
- Music (Pro)
- The music is amazing. Goblu from the underwater level battles can be heard from my car multiple times over the last couple of weeks. The music underlines scenes and elevates them in exactly the way you’d want. The beat dropping before a couple of major battles made me want to exclaim “YEAH!” aloud. Not something I would normally do.
- Voice Acting (Pro)
- The performances are amazing across the board. A few standouts are Charlie Cox as Gustave is endearing and wholesome. Ben Starr as Verso is deep and heartfelt. Andy Serkis as Renoir is confident and passionately caring. The top standout for me was Jennifer English as Maelle, who ranges from young, impatient and innocent to grieving, powerful and worn. I’ve enjoyed great voice acting and capture performances in my nearly 40 years of playing video games, this stands as one of, if not the best of all time.
- Writing – Story Arc and Worldbuilding (Pro)
- The story of the game raises so many questions in the first few minutes of gameplay, and I was hooked. Each act of the game answers questions and raises others magnificently. By the end of the game, I was satisfied, but wanted more. That’s a rare feat to accomplish!
- Writing – Characters and Dialog (Pro)
- The writing had so much heart and passion, the performances brought it alive and executed the well written dialog so well. The dialog both showcased the character’s personality and is a masterclass in how characters should communicate with each other.
- Technical Performance (Mid)
- The game at launch could have used some optimization, the game ran a fairly solid 60fps for me on a 4080 super – though I feel based on other contemporary games it could be better on that hardware.
- Wrap up
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an amazing experience. I sincerely hope Sandfall gets all the accolades they deserve for this fantastic piece of art. Little things that I complained about aside, I have a hard time imagining enjoying another game as much as I did for the remainder of the year. This is my game of the year to beat for 2025. I’m looking forward to jumping back in with new game plus and enjoying the story and combat again knowing what I know.
I played this game for 45 hours and would give it a 9 out of 10.
