Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the debut role-playing game from French studio Sandfall Interactive, which instantly won the recognition of critics and players. Since its release on April 24, 2025, the game has received high ratings on Metacritic and OpenCritic, and has also sold over a million copies in its first three days. Despite the game being available on Game Pass on the day of release, including on PC, the peak concurrent player count on Steam reached almost 130 thousand. The game has undoubtedly become a phenomenon and one of the contenders for the title of the main game of 2025. Let's figure out what exactly makes it special.
| Game | Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 |
| Genre | role-playing game, JRPG |
| Platforms | Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S |
| Languages | English |
| Developer | Sandfall Interactive |
| Publisher | Kepler Interactive |
| Link | expedition33.com |
Atmosphere and visual style
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 takes us into the world of Lumière, a dark fantasy inspired by the Belle Époque in France at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. A city of twisted architectural forms, a monolith inscribed with the word "33" and characters disappearing into a swirl of petals create a unique mood. This is a place where every building facade, sculpture or character costume looks like a work of art. And the fantasy details add an almost grotesque motif to the surroundings and saturate the atmosphere with mystery and doom even before the game's plot begins.
The use of Unreal Engine 5 delivers stunning graphics with support for Nanite and Lumen technologies, making every frame almost a painting of the Belle Époque itself. Each scene looks vibrant and complex in its hues, colors, and nuances.
The visuals perfectly complement the mood of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: a world where beauty and death walk side by side. This game is not just beautiful – it is aesthetically rich and has its own artistic language.
Plot and characters
The story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 unfolds in a world where an absurd and cruel pattern reigns: every year, a mysterious Artist draws a new number on a huge monolith somewhere on the horizon, and everyone who has reached that age disappears without a trace in the petals of flowers blown by the wind. This story is imbued with melancholy and the tragedy of inevitable loss. This time, the Artist has written "33", so the heroes of the game, who are not yet 33, but who know that time is inexorably running out, are going on another expedition to a mysterious continent. Their goal is to stop the cycle and understand the nature of this "painting of death".
The focus of the plot is Gustav, who has just turned 31 and wants to stop the annual "Gommage" (the day when the Artist writes a new number on the monolith) and thereby give his students a future, and in a year it will be his turn. His half-sister, who has 9 more years left before her disappearance, but she does not have the strength to wait idly and wants to find out the truth, see the world and stop the fatal cycle, goes with him. And Lune is Gustav's age, who is engaged in researching everything related to this world and previous expeditions, one of which was her parents. All of them have a strong motivation to reach the goal. The player will be introduced to the rest of the expedition members and other interesting characters as the story progresses.
The presentation of the story in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is built on atmosphere and attention to detail: memories, dialogues, reactions of the environment. The characters are deep, each with their own past and play style. The interaction between them affects the battle, and improving relationships can even unlock new skills. The game has grotesque humor, but it does not destroy the drama, but on the contrary - emphasizes the absurdity of a cruel world where beauty, fatalism and death are intertwined into a single whole. For example, one of the characters reacts with humor to the absurdity of situations, as if he himself recognizes the strangeness of the world around him. This adds depth and humanity. There are also unexpected plot twists in the game. This is not just a "fun journey", but a dark story about loss, struggle and hope, which constantly change the mood of Expedition 33, like day changes night.
Combat system: a hybrid of tactics and reaction
At the heart of the gameplay of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an innovative combat system that combines classic turn-based combat with active real-time actions. The player chooses actions, as in traditional JRPGs, but during enemy attacks they must react: dodge, parry and even counterattack in time. In addition, there is a shooting mechanic that is successfully combined with the main skills of the characters.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 somewhat borrows the structural depth of Persona 5, where every action is the result of a well-thought-out strategy. The player has a wide arsenal of skills at their disposal that can be customized to suit their playstyle: some skills deal damage, others impose statuses or affect the order of turns.
This system is complemented by passive effects, conditional "strokes on the canvas" of the character, which form a unique combat rhythm. The combination of these elements determines not only the effectiveness in battle, but also the overall pace of the game. It can be either aggressive with the risk and chance of missing heavy enemy attacks, or sustained and defensive, which turns the battle into a balanced but long chess game.
The Pictos system allows you to customize passive bonuses and active skills, creating a variety of strategic combinations. These perks can be in active cells, of which there are three for each character, or as passive ones. Those selected as active give additional bonuses in the form of improving one or more of the character's indicators: health, speed, defense, etc.
Active skills in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are unlocked in the leveling tree. It is unique for each character both in terms of content and form. From this it is clear that each member of the expedition specializes in a certain fighting style: parrying and counterattacks in Mael, accumulating charge and dealing powerful damage in Gustav, or elemental attacks and healing the team in Luna. Elemental and other attacks can "hang" statuses on enemies, and some skills give buffs to expedition members. Each of them can use up to six skills at the same time in battle. These skills work in synergy with the characters' weapons. After all, each of them specializes in a specific type of weapon: from swords to double-edged scythes.
In addition to skill points, experience gained after battles with enemies is converted into improvements in the basic characteristics of health, strength, speed, defense, and luck, which affect the amount of damage received, dealt, turn order, and the probability of inflicting a critical hit.
What gives such a rapid dynamics to turn-based battles is also the source of one of the main problems of the game. We are talking about the timing of dodges and parries. They are often unbalanced in duration and vary from enemy to enemy. Some enemy animations that are difficult to read add obstacles to using timely dodges. Another minus of the game is the balance of bosses.
It seems that because dodging can cause zero damage to the characters' health, and parrying can cause massive damage to the enemy instead, the developers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 made the timings very difficult for balance, and the bosses deal simply incredible damage even on medium difficulty. This makes most of the bosses impossible to beat the first time, because you have to at least learn all the moves and timings.
This is complemented by an ill-conceived save system and the lack of an option to restart the battle at any time (as was the case in Metaphor: ReFantazio), you have to load the save and run to the scene of the fight. This effect can be partially reduced by choosing a low difficulty level, but parrying does not become easier, it simply reduces the damage that the characters receive. I have allocated several paragraphs to describe this problem, because in contrast to the entire game, this is almost the only thing that can spoil the overall impression. And this thing can be fixed with patches, because in the first days after the game's release, fans made a mod that allows you to adjust the time window for dodging and parrying.
In general, mastering the timings for defense and remembering the bindings of skills to the buttons of the gamepad or keyboard allows you to perform almost seamless and rapid combinations of attacks, using the full depth of this system. Which makes the battles spectacular and interesting. And even after several failures, even if it is death from one blow of the boss, you want to sort through the set of equipment and skills and rush into battle with new enthusiasm.
I would like to pay special attention to the design of the enemies. They are very diverse and grotesquely bizarre. Most of them have a unique behavior pattern and type of attacks. Even if you find a pair with similar behavior, there will still be differences in animations and timings, and a couple or three unique attacks will be added. And this gives just a bunch of unique situations and tactics. What works with one may be completely useless in a battle with another.
You can try making universal builds, because you can have six active skills at once, or reassemble a set of skills for each situation. This affects the dynamics a bit, and here it would be nice to be able to save skill sets for more convenient switching.
Exploration and game world
The world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is full of secrets and mysteries. It has no map of specific locations, only a very conditional world map or pointers, and this is a deliberate decision that forces you to explore the levels manually, noticing small details in the architecture, signs or sounds. The player moves from one flag of previous expeditions to another (this is an analogue of the bonfires in Dark Souls), discovering shortcuts, puzzles, secret rooms and NPCs that are not displayed on any map. For example, in the estate you can find an old painting that, if used correctly, will open access to a secret room with plot clues and improvements.
The game rewards those who are attentive: a broken lantern can point to a hidden tunnel, and a random monologue from one of the companions can point to a hidden threat. This can be a drawback for some players, because sometimes it is really difficult to understand where to go next, especially in new locations. But if you accept this as part of the plan, the exploration becomes very exciting.
And it's no wonder that you can get lost in new locations, because each of them has a unique style and is simply mesmerizing with details and atmosphere. You can find journals from previous expeditions everywhere, which give more context about the surrounding location and the conditions in which a particular expedition was. Interactions with NPCs also add details, and sometimes, on the contrary, raise new mysteries and questions for reflection.
Soundtrack and voice acting
Immersion in the surroundings of the locations is facilitated by wonderful music that is memorable and will play in your head for some time. Composer Lorien Testard previously, before working on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, published his music on Soundcloud, and then the developers from Sandfall noticed him. He created an emotionally rich soundtrack that changes depending on the events: from a gentle and melancholic piano accompaniment at the moment of memories to growing orchestral themes at the climax of battles. The soundtrack works both for emotional immersion and gameplay: some compositions suggest a change in the pace of the battle or the approach of an important event. The vocal themes are especially impressive - they are infrequent, but used very effectively. You can already find playlists with the game's soundtrack on Spotify and YouTube Music.
The voice acting is bilingual: English and French. Both versions are high-quality, but the French dubbing better matches the style of the world and the lip sync. Intonations, accents and rhythms of the language significantly better convey the mood and cultural subtext of the game. Although the English voices of the characters were given by such famous actors as Charlie Cox, Andy Serkis, Ben Starr and Jennifer English, who voiced Tineserda in Baldur's Gate III. It is worth mentioning separately that some scenes received full-fledged direction: chamber transitions, mise-en-scène, facial expressions of the characters are synchronized with the music. This is a rarity in mid-budget games.
Conclusion
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a bold and emotionally charged turn-based RPG that combines elements of classic Japanese role-playing games with innovative rhythm mechanics and a striking visual style. It is not just a game, but an artistic expression. It combines Belle Époque aesthetics with deep philosophical themes: death, fate, resistance to the inevitable, even raising the eternal themes of parents and children.
The player finds himself in an uncompromising, but visually beautiful world, where even the most absurd has an internal logic. Thanks to the combat system, which requires both strategic thinking and motoric reaction, each battle becomes a tense dance between life and loss. The game has many small details that bring the world to life: hidden rooms, translucent hints in dialogues, humorous digressions that do not destroy, but on the contrary - emphasize the tragedy. The characters are alive, contradictory, and allow you to build relationships with them, which have both gameplay and emotional significance.
This game is not for everyone - it does not hold your hand, does not forgive mistakes and requires attention and perseverance in mastering the complex timing of parries. But for those who are ready to perceive the plot and gameplay as equal components of a work of art, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be an event. This is a rare example of a game that wants not only to entertain, but also to leave a mark - like a brushstroke on a canvas that will not be erased from memory. After the credits, the game leaves the player alone with their own thoughts, to comprehend what happened, and for what other details it is possible to return to the world of Lumière.
