‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’ Is What Happens When Ambition Pays Off

Sandfall Interactive, a French independent studio founded just five years ago in 2020, is swinging for the fences with its debut title, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Published by Kepler Interactive, Expedition 33 is a bold undertaking for the small team.

The game offers a 3D realistic art style that is imbued with just enough whimsy and fantasy (both dark and inspiring) to always feel unique and unburdened by a push for true photorealism. Sandfall knocks it out of the park regarding beauty.

This beauty is also central to bringing the game’s narrative to life. In Expedition 33, you travel and scale wonderous landscapes as a part of the titular Expedition 33, a group of people on a journey to take down the Paintress and ensure that they can stop living in fear and instead thrive. The mysterious Paintress appears in the world and paints a new number every year, and everyone who is that age fades away. Expedition 33 aims to stop the Paintress in her tracks once and for all.

The game features traversal mechanics that help scale impossible terrain and leap across huge chasms quickly, the world bluring around you. Sandfall wonderfully uses its world’s verticality to send players quickly across it and allows them to explore a richly detailed world filled with treasures, weapons, and imposing enemies.

Sandfall Interactive never gets lost in the photorealism technical weeds.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers fantastic character designs with thoughtful customization. The character models have just as much impact when they’re in their default costumes as when you switch them. But what really stands out is how each character wears their damage effects over time as their health drops. Sandfall also smartly balances its approach to 3D animation by balancing realism and fantasy. It embodies the whimsy and beauty of Belle Époque art but still feels unique.

At times, our characters and environments look photorealistic, with the fantasy coming through slightly. That balance allows the game to avoid the pitfalls of other hyperrealistic visual styles. Sandfall is also unafraid to use expected RPG visual tricks in the best way possible.

Instead of needing to animate all three party members at one time, you switch between each of them, with the one selected as the focus of your camera. You control them, and once you stop sprinting around (or flying in Lune’s case), you can settle and look back on your party.

I point this out because compared to other games of a similar visual style, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the most technically sound. There is no jarring rubberbanding, uncanny facial movements, or clipping that keeps the game’s vision intact. Visually, Expedition 33 is absolutely gorgeous, and so much of that is the depth of the world around you. The landscape begs to be explored. You can feel the world beyond your view, and capturing that sense of wonder and grandeur of the horizon made me want to play even when combat proved too challenging for me.

Because of how immersive and fantastical the world was, I never wanted to stop playing. It also kept me deadset on not switching my difficulty level to Story. While there is nothing wrong with setting up your game in a way that makes you happy, there was something about Expedition 33’s depth that made me feel like I just needed to keep going. It made the challenge worth it.

On that note, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 also does my favorite thing in a turn-based game – it gives you something to do between turns. Learning to appreciate turn-based combat has been difficult for me. I’m an impatient player, and there are very few RPGs with turn-based-strategy components that I’m captured by. Expedition 33 is added to that list today.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s combat throws players into a reactive turn-based battle system, requiring timed inputs to perfectly execute powerful attacks or dodge, block, and parry enemy attacks. With quick time events baked into nailing the quality of using your skills and a dodge system that requires timing above all else, the dynamic traversal mechanics are something to be excited about.

But don’t worry if you’re not good with timing or limited in another way. There are three difficulty settings that are changeable at any time while playing the game. The easiest of them is granting the player generous input windows and reduced damage from enemies. But the hardest setting also lets players challenge themselves by pushing them into a combat style that requires true mastery of real-time mechanics, particularly where parrying is concerned.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers synergistic and dynamic combat to celebrate.

With an intelligent blend of real-time commands like jump, parry, and dodge, and turn-based battles, it’s hard to break your attention away from Expedition 33. Instead, each combat turn feels creative and responsive. You can get the upper hand if you hit an enemy first to start a random encounter. With some enemy types (of which there are many), you can damage a glowing core that makes the rest of your battle slightly more manageable.

This makes surprise key but highlights the importance of using Free Aim, which fires a single shot that can be aimed and fired at any time, both in combat and out of it. You can use that shot for 1 point when in combat, and with certain Pictos (equipable passive skills), firing before any large skill can increase the damage of that subsequent skill attack.

While you take skills at their base damage, taking the time to read how they work with skills from other party members is an essential way to not hit your head against a wall with certain bosses. And there is no shortage of synergy.

Across Gustave, Lune, and Maelle, every attack has a ripple effect for the next if you pay attention. That said, the types of damage they wield and how much it takes to build up to them is important to monitor, making the Picto that rewards you one skill point for a “perfect” dodge, parry or counter almost essential to every single character. While each skill is balanced perfectly against the next (at least for the three characters the preview featured), Gustave, Lune, and Maelle all have particular personalities and fighting styles that force you to weave them together for the best outcome.

Deciding when to heal, buff, and let loose is what makes Expedition 33’s combat a good time and one that rewards you once you’ve climbed over the hurdle of the increasingly difficult bosses. While you can get away with brute forcing your way through the trash mobs in encounters, boss battles are a different beast. There is an obvious learning curve for each boss as you figure out what deals weakness the most, what stuns them, what lowers their shields, and whether or not the adds at their side should be handled quickly or ignored.

Because dodging, parrying, and jumping are all controlled by the player, the combat here doesn’t really leave things up to complete chance in an encounter. This means that if you’re confident in your ability to do any of the dodge or block mechanics against specific enemies, then it’s easy to let some damage ride. But if you just can’t get the timing right, well, you better map your healing and item usage skillfully.

For me, at around the mid-point of the preview build, a trombone-playing boss appears. With a stunning creature design that Guillermo del Toro would request a miniature of to paint, its hits are brutal. But with enough practice and death, you can easily learn how to time it, which hits hurt more than others, and what its elemental weaknesses are.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 asks you to be heavily involved in its combat and to learn about the characters and enemies in a deep way. The baked-in tutorials help you understand how to stay alive, but at the same time, the execution is all up to you.

Characters matter in Expedition 33, both for combat and for narrative.

The first character the preview gets you used to is the handsome Gustave (Charlie Cox, Daredevil). A resourceful and dedicated engineer, his specialty is electricity-based attacks. Each character is outfitted with a battle mechanic unique to them. For Gustave, his is Overcharge. Also, the name of one of his primary skills that deal the most damage, Overcharge, charges up a little more with each attack until it unleashes a fury of electricity.

However, for me, Gutsave rarely built enough skill points to use Overcharge outside the game’s opening. Instead, I utilized Gustave’s support skills, like marking a target to increase damage when hit by another party member or his buff, which increases the party’s damage. If Gustave provides buffs (and some self-heals), Lune (Kirsty Rider, The Sandman) is your key support pillar.

A passionate scholar whose hope stands taller than the circumstances around her while Gustave edges closer to giving up, Lune is my favorite. While I appreciate the role in the narrative as the resilient woman pushing her party to keep going even if they won’t survive, her battle mechanic takes close attention to maximize its potential. Her elemental-based attacks are fantastic on their own, particularly the ability to leave enemies with a burn that deals an extra round of damage. Elemental Stains is what makes her effective in combat.

Lune’s skills each require points like the other characters. However, she carries a weapon that houses Elemental Stains. These stains are color-coded and caused by the previous attacks and the damage they deal. As you fill up her weapon, using skill points and the subsequent Stains allows you to deal more damage more effectively. It also means that you have to look at how to weave your rotation of skills with the others in the party and for yourself.

Then there is Maelle, the youngest of the trio and Gustave’s foster sister; she’s more trusting of the dangerous and beautiful world that Expedition 33 has wound up in. She’s kind, and her youth makes her approach the world with curiosity and empathy, whereas her brother’s first reaction is to shoot at something new.

It’s also fitting that because of this, Maelle is either the perfect glass cannon or a tank that can take more hits than the others in the party. This is all thanks to her battle mechanics, which are Fencing Stances. In defense, Maelle takes half the damage she would if she wasn’t in the stance. This also means her skills are nerfed. Each skill you choose to use has the potential to change your stance. It can leave you without one, put you into defense, or throw you into an offensive stance.

When in an offensive stance, you deal more damage but take 50% more damage than you would when not in a stance. This is the perfect stance to switch to after marking a target with Gustave, but it also brings risk if you’re not as good at dodging incoming attacks.

It’s Maelle’s final stance that really makes her add a perfect synchronicity to the party. When Maelle is in her third stance, she deals 200% damage. Maelle is an essential party member, and watching the combat become more complex as we add each character keeps Expedition 33 memorable.

If Clair Obsur can nail its lore, this will have the potential for awards.

If there is only one critique I have at this stage in the game, it’s that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s lore can sometimes feel like too much. This is apparent when trying to figure out what Chroma and Pictos are, how to use them, and ultimately, what they’re connected to in the larger story.

That said, this could just be the nature of playing a truncated section of a game without walking through the game’s initial onboarding sequences and chapters, which would surely let you discover the world. I may have only understood the larger story at the very end of my playthrough, but I was still desperate to learn more.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is more than just a modernization of classic RPG styles. It’s an embrace of the past and charting a unique future. This game hits heights and refinement when it comes to even its technical characteristics that showcase what a small studio can do and what independent studios are capable of.

When all is said and done, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of those rare games that wears its influences on its sleeves while never losing its specificity. There are hints of classic Japanese-produced RPGs in every bit of Clair Obscur, from the menus to the combat visualizations. Still, the world is entirely unique and engrossing, never abandoning its French identity. This is what happens when ambition pays off, and it’s beautiful to see.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on April 24th on Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and PC.