When I previewed CLair Obscur: Expedition 33 earlier this year I had a feeling it was going to be something special. The timing-based RPG combat was reminiscent of Super Mario RPG and felt extremely satisfying and flashy. What kernels of a story were available had a strong sense of world-building. And the visuals were incredibly distinct and immediately caught my eye. Based on just a few hours with an early portion of the game, I felt that if the rest of the game could match or surpass the preview content, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had a great chance to be my Game of the Year. And I was right.
Sandfall Interactive has already gone broke as the awards season has just begun. Clair Obscur cleaned up at the Golden Joystick Awards, and next week I'd be shocked if it doesn't get away with some hardware from The Game Awards. While games like Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silk Songand Death Stranding 2 are many deserving of accolades and will certainly gain attention, it feels like Clair Obscur has some momentum.
I love Clair Obscur, but it almost lost me in Act 3
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a brilliant game, but a certain development in Act 3 doesn't quite land like the rest of the experience.
For me, the timing-based combat, the story, the performances, the music, and the visuals add up to a memorable experience. Its gameplay is satisfying and addictive, the world is enticing and the characters will stick with me for a long time. I have a few games on my backlog that I need to get to, but right now, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the game of the year. I'm not surprised that it ended up taking the top spot on my personal top 10 list, but what is surprising is that the game got a nod despite including two of my biggest video game pet peeves.
The first pet peeve it Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is guilty of is unique to RPGs, and it means forcing you to use certain characters as part of your team or replacing characters without your control. I know this is pretty common for RPGs, but I'm the type of player that likes to invest in a specific team composition and go all-in on it. I like to have my healer/mage, my damage dealer, and my utility character, and then focus on leveling and optimizing them as much as possible.
Not knowing how much friction I might encounter during an RPG, I'll usually do a lot of grinding to level/upgrade my core team members. I might survive, I might not, but I tend to like unlocking new abilities, leveling up my weapons, and making sure I have money to spend on useful items. But then, when the game decides I can't access a character, for story reasons or otherwise, I get frustrated because a weaker character then has to rotate in. I have now lost a core member of my team comp and have to try and get this new member to work.
As I mentioned, Clair Obscur is not unique in this approach. Final Fantasy IV trades this with Cecil very earlyChrono Cross makes a very significant change to your core characters after the first act, and Final Fantasy 12 causes you to change teams often. It's a pet peeve of mine and one that I almost expect by now. But what makes the difference Clair Obscur and other games is how they tackle it.
I think so Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 approaches this idea by allowing all of your party members to gain XP (albeit less than the main ones) from battles. So, if you choose not to use Maelle, or Lune, or Gustave, or whoever, they will still be close to the level of your core team. For the sake of spoilers, I won't go much further than that, but I appreciated that Sandfall made it easy to get over the potential switches.
Also, the mechanical differences between each character made me want to swap characters in and out. I had fun learning the value of each character's mechanic in relation to the enemy in front of me and experimenting with different roles. Also, I love how Sandfall tackled the fall condition by allowing you to switch to a new expedition team if you start three members were all eliminated. For every part of the “forced switch” that I could have been frustrated with, Clair Obscur had a reasonable answer.
The other pet nags at it Clair Obscur include is platforming when the game doesn't have the mechanics to support it. You can look up tons of rage-filled forum threads about the Gestral Beaches in Expedition 33and I also share that frustration. Final Fantasy 15 had an optional platform section that did a similar thing, seemingly in an attempt to mix things up. Without the precision of platform-focused mechanics, jumping and sticking to the landing can lead to many frustrating moments, and on those shores it feels like you're playing Only Up, not an RPG.
Like the Pitioss ruins in Final Fantasy XVthe vast majority of the platform game i Clair Obscur is optional. I still felt compelled to finish those episodes because I'm a masochist and a completionist, but for others they can just go from there. Still, That is perhaps my biggest gripe with the game. If the fairing was more consistent or if the roll after a sprint jump wasn't hard to control I might have felt differently. I know I'm not alone in this.
Even with the two elements that would usually take a game down a notch or two on my personal review scale, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is my favorite game of 2025. For the character swap, I think Sandfall Interactive has a handful of elegant solutions that made it a non-issue in my playthrough. The platforming, on the other hand, is a pain point, but it's mostly optional. It's hard to hold it against the game overall.
Really, it's a credit to the game that I still enjoy it so much despite including these two pets. And if those elements affected your enjoyment of the game, I think that's fair. For me though, everything else around the game is so great that something “bad” never affected my enjoyment.
- Released
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April 24, 2025
- ESRB
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Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer
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Sandfall Interactive
- Publisher
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Kepler Interactive
