Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 PC review — Pure inspiration

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is very clearly making some fairly large waves. Some AAA publishers have been arguing that turn-based combat just doesn’t have broad enough appeal anymore, but this game selling incredibly well and becoming a critical darling has certainly quashed that excuse. This is a rare game that simultaneously wears its inspirations on its sleeve, while still being boldly innovative. This is done through a strong story, likable characters, terrific visuals, and some truly captivating turn-based gameplay. All of that combines to make for a must-play game that stands on its own.

From a cursory glance, the game seems like it’s in the mould of a very standard Japanese role-playing game. You can put three characters in your party and attack enemies with a combination of basic attacks and skills. Skills can be elemental attacks, heals, buffs, and more, plus you can use items to give yourself an edge. Your party gets an advantage over an enemy that you strike first on the field. There’s a large overworld map that you traverse to move to the game’s different areas, and your party levels up as it accrues experience. Standard stuff, right?

One of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s greatest strengths is the way it takes those decade old characteristics and freshens them up with new additions. Skills and ranged attacks use up action points that you’ll gain mostly by landing hits on foes. Ranged attacks, however, are freely aimed and can be used to hit enemy weakpoints for extra damage. What’s more, you can dodge, parry, or jump over enemy attacks in real-time, plus skills will do more damage if you successfully time the game’s quick-time events correctly. It makes the gameplay feel very hands-on in a way that’s reminiscent of something like Paper Mario.

Naturally, it doesn’t stop there. Enemy attacks are often fierce and highly damaging, so failing to dodge or parry will find you in hot water. But this is easier said than done, as enemy attacks are reminiscent of modern Souls-likes and require you to learn their timing and know how many times they’re going to hit. Many enemy attacks also have delays built into them, so memorising enemy move-sets and capabilities can be necessary for victory. Parries are the preferred manner of dealing with enemy attacks as characters will respond with powerful counterattacks, but the parry window has strict timing, so using dodge before you’ve got everything down is a much safer bet.

Due to all of this, combat in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels unique instead of coming across as a copy of other games. Characters often have distinctive mechanics, as well. Lune’s elemental attacks create remnants called stains that can be used to strengthen other elemental skills. Maelle has multiple stances she can switch between that increase her damage or defence capabilities. Sciel’s skills create stacks of something called foretell that can boost her damage too. There’s truly a lot to consider, plus you’ll need to change your party up based on the enemy composition of an area.

The locations you’ll explore also take some Dark Souls influence, albeit more in-line with, say, Dark Souls III than anything else. Areas are linear but loop back into each other with various shortcuts. You’ll also find pickups while exploring that will aid you, including weapons and points that will let your characters have more pictos abilities equipped. Pictos are one of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s most interesting innovations. A character can have three of these equipped, but finishing four battles while using one will let you equip it to a separate pictos list on top of the normal three slots, provided you have enough points.

There’s simply a ton of room for strategy and builds here to a degree that I simply wasn’t expecting. Then you’ve got an overworld mount who gets additional abilities that lets your party reach new areas, as well as some surprising side activities. This is an incredibly full-featured game and it’s all highly polished of an impressive quality. For a team of just 33 people to have made a game with such breadth is beyond impressive. The only real issue I take with the game is that it’s quite demanding from a performance perspective. With a 3090 and 5700x, I was typically getting under 50 fps at max visuals and 1440p.

Granted, the various upscaling options are all present here, but the optimisation could certainly be better, especially since the dodges and parries absolutely benefit from the snappier inputs of higher framerates. And if I have to nitpick, players might be concerned by the fact that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s lip-syncing is only synced to the original French, so the English dub typically doesn’t match the character’s lip movements. Obviously this has an incredibly simple solution, which is to just turn on French audio, but the English dub is of stellar quality all the same.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an incredible game that hits pretty much everything out of the park. It’s one of the few turn-based games to offer all the joy and satisfaction of a JRPG without having any sort of anime art style or archetypes, which is celebratory in and of itself. Anyone who enjoys turn-based RPGs needs to play this game. AAA publishers should once again pay attention to the obvious fact that a game can still sell extremely well, without compromising itself in an attempt to sell more copies.