The world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is fragmented and broken -- a surreal collection of islands cracked apart by a calamity known as "the fracture." Every year, a giant elderly woman at the end of the earth stands up, filling the horizon and paints a number on an obelisk. Soon after, every person older than that number is erased from the world, vanishing into a dust cloud in front of their loved ones.
The number decreases every year.
In an act of desperation, humanity sends out an expedition of the doomed, who sacrifice the final year of their lives on a mission outside the relative safety of the last remaining human city -- a mission to kill the woman, known as the Paintress.
It's a world of soft brush strokes, surrounded by a sky alive with dancing auroras, backed by shattered cliffsides with impossible waterfalls cascading off the world's edge. Light shifts and caustics shimmer across the ground as if you're exploring the inside of a giant fish bowl or an alien landscape terraformed by some godlike entity. It's like stepping into a dream.
Exploring this world, mostly devoid of humans, fills you with hopelessness, a sense reinforced by beautiful piano melodies that make your heart ache and soaring, operatic music that leaves you longing. It's a strange, specific collection of emotions no game has captured since Nier: Automata, combined with the unease and otherworldly dread of a New Weird novel like Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation.
Coming from a relatively small French team, you can see where the game's budget didn't stretch -- conversations fade to black whenever a character would otherwise be animated, and some locations were clearly intended to be more than they are -- but there's real vision and ambition behind Expedition 33. Production is pitch perfect, making sure the budget was spent in the areas that matter most, which means the big, emotional gut punches come with lavishly animated cutscenes, and the moment-to-moment combat (which you'll spend most of your time doing) is tight, deep, and puts some of the series that inspired it to shame.
Those inspirations are clear from the outset. A mission to kill a god, turn-based combat built around a party of unique -- and sometimes oddball -- characters, and an overworld map to explore; first on foot, then by sea, then by air. But despite being inspired by Final Fantasy, Expedition 33 isn't a copy.
Where Final Fantasy evolved to focus on real-time combat, Expedition 33 imagines a world where turn-based JRPG combat evolved to suit modern sensibilities, instead of being transformed by them. The result is a turn-based system that keeps you constantly engaged, asking you to time button presses to deal more damage, dodge, parry and hop over incoming attacks. Enemy tells give it an almost rhythm-action game feel, and you eventually build a musical bestiary in your head of attack strings for each enemy.
Going into it, there was some concern that being able to negate all damage with player skill would make combat too easy, but those worries were unfounded -- there are plenty of sneaky ways the game catches you out, and the best way to turn the tide to your favor is character customization.
It'd be easy to bore you with the nitty-gritty, but to speak plainly, it's one of the deepest systems ever made. You essentially combine a mix of statistical buffs and perks, which range from the simple (get extra action points at the start of a fight) to game-breakingly brilliant (always play twice in a row). You can have many of these equipped at once, and they often interact with each other or your weapon perks. Then there are the nuances of each character, who all play entirely differently. By the end of the game, one character could, after two turns of setup, deal 4.5 million damage in a single hit. And the optional superboss still destroyed us mercilessly.
Mind you, so did the game's ending ...
Expedition 33 has such a strong setup that it would have been easy to fumble the ending, but it all culminates in one of the biggest emotional gut punches in memory. From the heart-wrenching performances of the cast to the twists and turns of the story, there's very little wasted as it wrestles with difficult topics. It's a story about coping mechanisms for grief, how our sadness can leak into the world, and how our only real legacy is in what we leave behind, whether that's the art we create or if it's even morally right to bring children into a doomed world.
Small issues like poor signposting and the worst platforming sections since Max Payne tiptoed over a bloodstain barely even come to mind when thinking about the last 50 hours with Expedition 33 -- they're just black spots in an otherwise lucid dream. It's the kind of game that causes you to just stare at your reflection when the credits scroll, between the names and into the darkness of the screen. It leaves a hole behind and makes you consider your mortality. It's dark, beautiful and bold -- a real treat at a time when game stories are often sanitized with the sharp edges filed down.