Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the debut title from brand-new French developer Sandfall Interactive. A turn-based RPG featuring spectacular combat, a star-studded cast, and set in a grim world, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has the potential to be the next sleeper hit of 2025. So does this French take on Final Fantasy hit the mark?
In the world of Clair Obscur, an entity known as the Paintress writes a number on her monolith once a year. Soon afterwards, everyone that age turns to smoke and vanishes forever in what the people call the “Gommage”. Each year the denizens of the last remaining human city, Lumiere, send an expedition to the realm of the Paintress in an attempt to put an end to her carnage. With only one year left to live, this is where Expedition 33 comes in.
Your party initially consists of Gustave, who has just watched his lover vanish into thin air, his adopted sister Maelle and their companion Lune. Naturally, their expedition quickly falls apart as they arrive on the continent, and so Gustave and Co must set out on their own to complete the mission.
The Paintress’ realm is surreal, and the rules of physics don’t seem to apply. Chunks of rock float in the sky, oceans appear on land, and impossible ruins dot the landscape. You traverse largely linear environments, some feeling more like traditional dungeons than others. There is also a world map akin to those found in classic JRPGs, with hidden areas to find and challenging enemies to fight.
While initially overwhelming, the openness of the world isn’t as deep as it first appears. A lot of the enterable locations on the world map are only one “room”, and feature a single item and a nice view. Others are for mini-games like a bizarre game of volleyball, or a platforming challenge that the movement system is absolutely not designed for.
Indeed, Clair Obscur is often refreshingly digestible. The vast majority of levels or dungeons can be knocked over in around thirty minutes. Some exploration, a few fights, maybe a story beat, and then you tackle a boss, and you’re done. It helps keep things moving and stop any particular zone or enemy becoming an annoyance.
Combat is certainly a highlight. By and large, Clair Obscur sticks to a traditional JRPG style of turn-based combat. Each character has unique moves and mechanics for you to master, there are a variety of status effects to be aware of, and of course limited-use items.
Clair Obscur’s combat does differ significantly in a few key ways. First, every attack has some kind of quick-time button input to engage with. When attacking, this will simply be pressing ‘A’ at the right time. When defending against your enemies’ attacks, however, you have a variety of options. You can dodge, parry, and jump to avoid or deflect attacks, and there are even more mechanics you unlock later on.
This makes each battle engaging. Parrying in particular is key, as timing it right allows the party member, and sometimes the whole gang, to counter-attack, dealing massive damage. You can also spend your AP on ranged attacks, which allow you to aim with a crosshair to hit an enemy’s weak point.
Another difference is how Clair Obscur handles items. This is not an RPG where you will be stockpiling 50 potions and antidotes. Instead, healing and reviving items are restored upon resting at a checkpoint. By exploring the world and defeating tough enemies, you can unlock further charges of these items, or make them more effective. It’s a novel way of streamlining item-use in RPGs like this, and I think it works quite well.
The combat is absurdly flashy. Each attack and spell for each character has its own animation, and the sound design does a fantastic job of providing feedback for when to parry or dodge, as well as just adding to the spectacle.
The original score is fantastic, and features a surprising amount of variety in instruments and tone. There’s epic orchestral tracks with an operatic choir for battle, goofy, accordion-filled tunes for some of the sillier encounters, as well as some more electronic, heart pounding stuff.
The story starts strong, with the horrors of embarking on the expedition keeping the tension high. The main characters are all performed wonderfully, and them clashing over what they should do next provides for some surprisingly good drama. As the game goes on, however, things get more complex and the mysteries multiply, but I just couldn’t stay interested. There is simply not enough to chew on here, and I struggled to care about the answers to questions the game clearly wanted me to be asking.
There are a number of other things that bring the overall experience down. First, there are some odd quality of life omissions. Outside the overworld, there are no maps whatsoever. The developers have been quoted saying this was to enhance the feeling of exploration, but having played the game, I can confidently say it just made exploration arbitrarily frustrating.
Second, there is no quest log or anything akin to one. Clair Obscur features a number of side activities and characters who ask you to do or find specific things, and the game gives you no way of keeping track of this. When you combine this with a lack of maps, it makes engaging with any content other than the main story an exercise in tedium.
Now for the less tangible flaws. The pacing of the main story is a little all over the place. While individual dungeons may not overstay their welcome, there often isn’t all that much to do between them. You may wrap up one story thread after a boss fight, have a series of cutscenes play out at camp, only to dive straight back into another dungeon. Clair Obscur does not feature the variety of a lot of other great RPGs.
Because the realm of the Paintress is, by design, an ethereal dreamscape, it lacks the tangibility of a more grounded world. I admit this may be more of a personal preference, but I struggled to feel like I was exploring an actual place, with people and a history that matters. Because of this, I found that Clair Obscur lacked that essential quality of all great RPGs, the sense of going on an adventure with your party.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an impressive debut game from a new studio. It offers a bizarre world to explore, a banging soundtrack, solid performances and a fresh take on turn-based combat. That said, the world and the story Sandfall Interactive tells within it lacks cohesion. The game buckles under the weight of its own mysteries, and the party’s struggles fail to remain interesting the further in you get. Couple this with the absence of common features like a map and quest log, and Clair Obscur leaves a lot of room for improvement.
Rating: 7.5/10
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was reviewed on PC with a code provided by the publisher.