This game is phenomenal. It turns out that when you let talented developers escape the Ubisoft corporate prison and you just let them cook, you get an actual masterpiece. The art style is breath-taking with incredibly smooth animations, and the story keeps you hooked from the very first minute. The soundtrack is an absolute god-tier masterpiece—it literally gives you chills and fits the whole atmosphere perfectly. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an absolute banger and Sandfall Interactive completely nailed it.

What is left to say…
Just play the damn game !

This is a neat game, and you can find a lot of praise and compliments. I also had fun with it, but in this review, I would like to focus on criticism because I hope somebody in the studio reads the feedback, and I’m looking forward to what comes next.

The mix between TB and RT in combat mostly works, but there are certain hiccups like not-so-well telegraphed attacks here and there, or infuriating mechanics like Vanish
The map doesn’t have player-made markers, and I had to keep notes in a notebook
The same with quests, there is no journal
With so many build options, it would be nice to have presets of weapons / luminas - manually selecting each thing when you want to experiment is tedious
At the end of Act 2, the story takes a turn for the worse and leads to an anticlimactic ending, and the amazing setup from the beginning of the game is ruined
Steam Deck “verified” is only on paper; the game looks and runs poorly on the device

Highly subjective and unpopular opinion, but the OST with constant operatic singing is tiresome.

Still, I will definitely get back for a New Game+ sometime later.

Look, I play every game in a way that makes most normal people rage-quit after the first hour. If I'm not pushing a game's mechanics to the absolute breaking point, I'm not having fun. So when I booted up Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for the very first time, I immediately cranked it to the highest difficulty setting, stripped my party down to a single character, and committed to a parry-only run. No dodges, no safety nets.

What I didn't expect was for the game to actually hold up to that level of punishment—and completely destroy me emotionally at the same time.

The Story Actually Hooks You
I don't care how hardcore you think you are, the beginning of this game will make you tear up. Every single time I watch that opening cinematic, it hits me like a truck. Watching the Paintress wake up to paint that number on the monolith and just erase an entire generation of people into smoke is brutal.

From minute one, I was obsessed with figuring out what was going on. My head was spinning with the same three questions the whole time: Who the hell is the Paintress? Why is she doing this? What even is this place? The writing is so incredibly tight that it forces you to care. You aren't just grinding for stats; you genuinely need to know the truth behind the Gommage.

Taking the World Record
Because the combat in this game is so flawlessly tuned, you can pull off some absolutely unhinged stuff if you have the patience and the execution. And I have the patience.

Someone out there was sitting on the actual World Record for most perfect parries in a single boss fight with 10,000. I decided that wasn't going to fly. I sat at my desk for almost 8 straight hours against a single boss, completely locked in.

Here is the final breakdown of that fight:

Damage Taken: 0

Dodges: 0

Perfect Parries: 12,315

Taking the official World Record by perfectly deflecting over twelve thousand hits in a row without a single mistake is the wildest gaming experience of my life. My hands were completely dead by the end of those eight hours, but executing that flawless 1-character, parry-only run was worth it. Every single attack thrown at me, I just stood my ground and perfectly deflected it.

The Verdict
Expedition 33 isn't just a good RPG; it is the absolute peak of the genre. Whether you're here for an incredibly well-written story that will actually make you cry, or you're a complete masochist like me who wants to spend 8 hours perfectly timing blocks to steal a world record, buy this game right now.

10/10.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game about being stuck but unaware of it. It is a hollow spectacle, mechanically satisfying and with striking music and visuals, but it's let down by weak writing, by a disconnected mess of a third act, and by its strong points' repetitiveness. But what's worst is how frustratingly close it keeps coming to being coherent and meaningful, to having interesting things to say.

The game's themes are creativity and grief and trauma, and losing oneself in any of these, and that kind of fits with its art, where you can see stunning vistas while standing upon literal mountains of corpses, or hear beautiful music that conveys the same mood of tragedy and lament that all the music before it conveyed as well. These could be made to work if the story addressed these themes, but it refuses to.

A secondary theme is different forms of art or expression and the tension between them, but it feels like the game keeps forgetting about this right after it comes up, every time.

There is no character development happening either, at any point, despite ample opportunity for it. Nobody learns anything or grows in any way. Instead, there are interactions that check off the trope checkboxes and that make numbers go up.

Apart from the themes the characters' viewpoints are implicitly militaristic and colonialist, but even given that the game is surprisingly tone-deaf at times. Imagine if your Blue Mage's ability required them committing war crimes, and the game played that fact for laughs.

Mechanically Clair Obscur is a competent JRPG-with-lots-of-Quick-Time-Events with minor implementation problems, and if you enjoy those you will probably like this one as well, but it assumes familiarity with a lot of genre tropes and does a terrible job of explaining its own mechanics or even menus.

A Life To Love…𓍯𓂃𓏧♡

When Expedition 33 first came out in 2025, i knew nothing about the game AT ALL and i bought it on my ps5 and it sat untouched in my library for almost a year. i bought the game on my PC sometime in early May during a difficult week. i needed an escape from reality, and for most of my life i had found that escape in games, especially story line ones. i had missed the feeling of truly experiencing a game again, having played over and over the same games and completed so many over the years. The story touched me in ways i hadn’t felt in a long time. It brought back the same emotions i used to feel while playing the games that shaped me, wrapping me in a comforting sense of nostalgia. It was a feeling i had almost forgotten, and one i was grateful to experience again.

i began my journey choosing hard mode, not knowing what i was getting myself into. The intro to the game was such a beautiful way to begin a story, with its beautifully composed French soundtrack, which struck me with how effortlessly the music was made and how perfectly it blended with the environment. It begins with a man named Gustave and a young woman named Maelle, speaking about a special rose that was to be given to a mysterious woman named Sophie. After that, i was slowly getting used to the controls, already sensing that the action in this game was about to leave me stunned. After meeting everyone and truly seeing what Lumière held within it, i found myself unexpectedly attached, almost moved to tears by characters i had only known for 40 minutes. The use of the narrative is woven in such a beautiful way too, often making it feel less like a game and more like i was watching a movie. Over the course of the story, you begin to understand how different people in this world deal with grief. Some manage to slowly move forward, finding ways to continue living with what theyve lost, while others remain stuck in it forever, unable to escape the weight of it. You don’t truly understand it until youve experienced it yourself, and that idea deeply shapes the way you perceive the story.

The colour palettes throughout the game were mesmerising, especially the beginning when everything transitioned into what was the beginning of the true story. There was something so haunting about it, an atmosphere that carried both beauty and sorrow at the same time. It was intensely sad, yet strangely satisfying, to watch loved ones slowly fade away, and to be confronted with the reality of what you had truly signed up for without fully realising it at first.

The music is breathtakingly beautiful. each soundtrack has a whole personality it captures the characters and environments emotions. it made me even add so many songs to my playlist. The Womans vocals stand out, they were DEEP emotions put into the music, its like shes carrying the feeling of the entire story in her voice. and the instruments behind her are just as impressive. You can really feel the talent and the passion of everyone who worked on it.

The characters development is one of the strongest suits of this game. you see every single emotion inside of them. you see how they love, how they hate, how they change, how they bond and learn, how they grow stronger until they are almost unrecognisable from who they once were. The writing behind each character is impossible to ignore theres a depth to them that makes them feel less like fictional constructs but as people each carrying a history, a soul of their own.

Every single enemy every single boss fight IS PURE ART. They all have so many unique names, unique lore. Every detail is just beauty no words could describe it well enough, you just need to experience it yourself.
My favourite boss fights were Dualiste, Mask Keeper, Siréne, THE PAINTRESS, and of course Renoir.
My favourite characters are GUSTAVE, Maelle and Verso.
My Favourite Characters to play as were Sciel, Maelle, Monoco and Gusave.

My favourite part of the game, without question, is the camp. It feels like a place that exists outside of everything else outside of battle, and outside of fate, where everyone is allowed to simply be. At camp, you don’t just travel alongside your companions, you begin to understand them. You share moments that feel unguarded, almost sacred, as they reveal stories theyve never spoken to anyone before. You start to see sides of them that don’t exist in combat or conflict, softness where there was steel, vulnerability where there was pride. And in those moments, they stop feeling like expeditioners or characters. They feel like people who have lived before you arrived. What i loved most is Sitting with the gramophone as music fills the camp, letting the soundtrack breathe life into the silence. Each record feels like a memory pressed into sound ( especially Gustave’s song ) something fragile and permanent at the same time. And then there’s Gustave’s journal writing in it that felt like home. i write all the time and seeing an expeditioner and a man like him go out of his way every night to write in his journal for his apprentices, was beautiful. In those moments, the camp becomes more than a resting point. It becomes a memory you are actively building one quiet note of music, one meaningful and unforgettable conversation, one written line at a time. A place where the world softens just enough for you to notice how much it means to you before it moves on again.

The story is so beautifully written that it left me SOBBING FOR HOURS and probably will be for weeks…especially at the end of Act 1 an ending that feels like it settles into your memory and refuses to leave, i nearly quit the game after THAT scene happened ( its going to haunt me forever…beware. ) i love when games carry that kind of weight, when they have the power to move you so deeply that you forget you’re even holding a controller. How every intense battle can make your pulse spike and your voice rise without thinking. How every quiet moment of bonding can soften you. How every devastating scene doesn’t just make you cry, but leaves you sitting in silence afterward, unable to find the words to match what you just felt. How a single line of dialogue can feel heavier than entire conversations in real life. How characters begin to feel less like writing on a screen and more like memories of people you once knew. How music swells at just the right moment, as if it already understands what your heart is about to lose. It’s rare for something to reach so deeply that it reshapes how you remember it. And yet this game does exactly that. The big twist to the game is just phenomenal. i actually cannot process anything ive just witnessed into that. i did have some theories that actually surprisingly matched exactly what happened, but you would least expect it. the choice of ending is what really shows the type of person YOU as a player are. i was there sitting for over 15 minutes deciding WHAT TO CHOOSE. but i knew exactly what was morally right and i would have agreed throughout the whole story. What makes the game so unique as well is that i have over 40 hours on the game and quarter of the achievements and you have SOOO MUCH MOREE to explore and more bossfights, more lore to struck speechless. the journey doesnt just end yet. and i cannot wait to experience more.

i recommend this game to EVERYONE, if youre in for a challenge and to get your heart broken...this is the game for you. Genuinely one of the few games i have played that made me realize how beautiful life can be sometimes. What i do recommend is to play it on hard mode! i also do recommend is to not read or watch too much if you havent already about this game, so you can get the best experience and get the real emotions throughout the game.
thank you Sandfall interactive for creating Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and choosing such an amazing cast.
and the final thing i have to say is….

For Those Who Come After ꫂ❁

Highly recommended!

One of the best games I've played so far. The story is incredible; I can't tell you anything, but trust me, you'll love it!

The gameplay is turn-based with QTEs (quick-time events). You also have dodge, parry, counter and many other mechanics that you will discover soon...

I love that you can customize your characters to your liking. For example, don't like parry? No problem, you can customize them to dodge or even gain buffs when taking damage and a lot of other possibilities. It's up to you.
You love parry? you can make them to parry everything and gain great benefits at high risk.
The battles are super addictive and boss battles are cinematic.

The scenery is very beautiful, there is a lot of places to explore.
The music is superb!!

You can finish the game in about 30ish/40 hours, but there's tons of side content to discover.

If you like games with fantasy worlds like me, then what are you waiting for?


FOR THOSE WHO COME AFTER

very good game but very sad

At first I only played this game because my friend bought it for me and I figured "why not". I was nominally interested up until the end of Act 1, after which my interest began to deepen beyond simply finishing what I started. By the time the expedition culminated in the conclusion of Act 2 I was fully convinced that this is one of the greatest pieces of fictional media of the last 5-10 years. Certainly it has one of the greatest video game stories of the last decade.

The aspect that makes the mythological narrative of Clair Obscur so brilliant is the masterful use of ludonarrative, which is what gives video games their artistic merit as a medium. Meaning, it's not just a game WITH a good story but it's a story that fully utilizes the interactive nature of video games in the narrative structure and theme development. Everything about this game just works and it's a "must-play" game for casual and hardcore gamers alike. Totally deserving of its "GOTY" award.

"Merci" to mes amis at Kepler for adding more beauty in our world with Clair Obscur : Expedition 33.

peak gaming experience