Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, developed by Sandfall Interactive (Review)

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a riveting, achingly beautiful tale of loss, hope, and difficult choices.

Release date: April 24, 2025
Platforms: PC, Playstation 5, Xbox Series X/S
Developed by Sandfall Interactive
Published by Kepler Interactive
Rated M (17+) for violence, depictions of suicide, and occasional disturbing imagery
Approximate length: 30–60 hours

People come and people go, but the one who will always be there for you is you. Little one, there’s more to life—if you can just see how big the sky truly is. Reach out your hand, and it’s yours. —Renoir, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Sandfall Interactive’s debut game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, is an unparalleled masterwork of interactive storytelling. Borrowing from and combining several tried-and-true genres, it deftly integrates nearly every aspect of video game design into a seamless, emotionally powerful, and stunningly original experience.

Set in an alternate version of Belle Époque France (ca. 1871–1914), Clair Obscur immediately establishes a unique aesthetic with a visually striking opening sequence. A man in his early thirties and a teenage girl stand together on the balcony of a café, gazing out at the ocean, but the camera faces them, so we can’t yet see what, specifically, they are looking at. The tables, chairs, and lampposts around them are draped with red-and-white garlands, and flower petals cover nearly every flat surface. Much of the balcony is damaged, as though by a severe storm; it seems odd that someone would have decorated it for a party afterward.

The man and the girl address one another by name; he is Gustave, and she is Maelle, his more-or-less adopted sister. Seemingly unfazed by the destruction around them, they speak wistfully of a citywide celebration that is to take place within the next few hours: the “Gommage.” As they discuss a woman named Sophie, who clearly is important to both of them, the camera slowly rotates around them. Finally, we see what they are looking at: a colossal monolith in the distance, far across the sea, with the number “34” painted on it.

As Gustave and Maelle traverse the city toward the harbor, where the Gommage will take place, they speak more of Sophie; it becomes clear that she is Gustave’s ex-girlfriend—and might have been his wife had things gone differently. Thousands of people mill about the ruined city, anxiously preparing for something obviously important. Some of them wear garlands around their necks, and astute players will notice that all those people appear to be roughly the same age as Gustave.

When we finally meet Sophie near the harbor, she, too, is wearing a garland. Several people wait in line to wish her well; apparently, she is going somewhere. Gustave finally finds a chance to speak with her, and they share a tearful reunion. Sophie isn’t going on a trip—she’s about to die. Throughout the remainder of the prologue, additional scraps of information are slowly revealed until we can piece together the nature of the Gommage: It is not a celebration but a mass execution.

Every year on the same day, a woman known only as the Paintress awakes across the sea, near the monolith, and paints a new number on it. The new number is always one lower than the one previous. When this happens, everyone in the world who is currently older than that age dies. The deaths are not violent; the victims simply turn into flower petals and float away on the breeze. The Paintress, whoever she is, seemingly has decreed that humanity is to be wiped out slowly, over the course of a century (the countdown began sixty-seven years ago). Eventually, the only people left will be children too young to reproduce, until they, too, disappear, leaving behind a silent, empty planet.

Within the game’s first thirty minutes, the stage is set for a heart-wrenching tale about love, loss, and determination in the face of seeming futility. As the sun sets and the Paintress paints “33” on the monolith, Gustave and Sophie share a last embrace before she dissolves into flower petals. This scene contains almost no dialogue, but the masterful animation and voice acting convey decades of complex thoughts and emotions between them. Gustave sheds only a single tear as his love fades away, but the set of his jaw, the tightness in his shoulders, and the distant look in his eyes show that he has known for a long time that this day was coming and has steeled himself for it. Without a word of dialogue, his face and body language suggest that he has a job to do, despite his monumental suffering, and that Sophie would want him to stay focused as best he can.

Every year, a new expedition of several hundred people crosses the sea in an attempt to find the Paintress and stop her from painting human life out of existence. None has ever returned, and all are presumed dead. Gustave and Maelle are members of Expedition 33, scheduled to sail the next morning. The game follows their Odyssean struggle to succeed where thousands of others have failed—but what begins as a seemingly straightforward story about avoiding death gradually blossoms into a much deeper, richer tale that explores what it means to truly live.

Clair Obscur’s most laudable of its many achievements is the depth and nuance of its plot. Not once but twice the story suddenly veers in an unexpected direction. These are not cheap twists, nor are they shoehorned in; they are masterfully planned, precisely timed revelations that completely recontextualize both past and future events. After the first of these twists, it becomes clear that several characters’ actions are underpinned by complex, hidden motives. Some of these secret agendas are morally unjustifiable, but all are understandable and deeply relatable. It’s hard to say more without spoiling the plot, which depends heavily on mystery and on carefully controlled doses of information, but suffice it to say that the major choices that both the protagonists and the antagonists make are driven by differing perspectives on the best way to deal with intense grief. No character in the game is motivated by a desire to harm others or to destroy life-serving values. Indeed, all the major characters are flawed but admirable and sympathetic, doing their best to protect their loved ones from a threat that none of them fully understands. As one protagonist says several times, “Life keeps forcing difficult choices. All we can do is what we think is right.”

The game’s writers do not rationalize or otherwise attempt to defend harmful or irrational behavior. On the contrary, they acknowledge that it’s possible (and often appropriate) to empathize with others who make destructive choices out of grief—even to grieve deeply alongside them—while also holding them accountable for those choices. Throughout history many works of fiction have attempted to portray sympathetic antagonists, but very few have done it with the level of finesse, skill, and philosophic precision on display in Clair Obscur.

Grief that cuts to the bone can have lifelong impacts on the griever and on those closest to him, and the game invites players to consider these consequences by showing some events from multiple perspectives. Throughout the main story (which unfolds over about thirty hours of play time), players are granted increasingly intimate glimpses into the value premises and emotional states of both the protagonists and the antagonists, all of whom have lost nearly everyone they love, either to the Gommage, to the mysterious and hostile land across the sea, or—worst of all—to the well-intentioned but ultimately catastrophic choices of other loved ones. The soul-rending agony of unresolved grief saturates the game’s third act in particular, but it is never piled on so heavily that it becomes emotionally unbearable. Clair Obscur is not a story about people who have given up—it’s about people who desperately want to live the rest of their lives but don’t know how.

In short, the story contains multiple antagonists but no villains. It is possible but extraordinarily difficult to write a villainless story in which good people fight against one another for entirely understandable reasons on both sides, but Clair Obscur succeeds where virtually all other such attempts have failed—and it succeeds magnificently, painting a bittersweet but ultimately life-affirming and dramatically satisfying epilogue that will stay with me for years. (It has two possible endings, and this is the better one in terms of its conclusion about the roles of grief and hope in human life, although both are excellent dramatically.) One of the game’s main ideas is not that morality is relative but that it sometimes can be tremendously difficult and painful to act morally; therefore, we shouldn’t necessarily condemn those who lack the iron will required to choose the right path in such cases.

Clair Obscur is not only a phenomenally well-written, well-told story—it shines in every other aspect of video game design as well. The art direction, character design, and overall aesthetic are simply superb. The Paintress paints beautiful and wondrous things into life as she seemingly paints people out of it, a motif that visually integrates every corner of the game world. Different areas feature distinctly different color palettes and artistic styles, from the vibrant scarlet-and-ivory café boards of early 20th-century Paris to eerily moonlit flower fields overlooking a sparkling emerald sea. Certain areas are grayscale or sepia-toned, hinting at especially traumatic events that have unfolded in those places. Real-life locations are seamlessly blended with fantastical creatures and customs straight out of a child’s imagination; this unconventional design choice has roots in the plot and makes perfect sense by the end of the story. The mash-up of visual styles from so many different time periods and artistic philosophies easily could have been a disjointed mess, but counterintuitively, the result is an impressively well-integrated, highly intentional, and deliberate whole. (Again, I can’t explain why without spoiling the plot.)

The combat gameplay is challenging but almost always fair, which makes it fun and rewarding. Each of the six playable characters has distinctly different battle abilities that complement the others, offering players a wide variety of tactical options. Just as the player unravels the story in layers, so, too, he gradually learns that the combat system is more complex and nuanced than it first seems. Early-game fights are simple and straightforward, but by the third and final act, players must think several steps ahead, ruthlessly exploit enemy weaknesses, ensure that each party member synergizes with the others, and make consistently efficient use of action points (limited resources needed to use each character’s strongest abilities). Playing the game on Standard or Expert difficulty requires high degrees of hand-eye coordination, swift reflexes, and strategic creativity, but Storyteller (easy) mode is far more forgiving in these respects.

The seven-hour soundtrack is stunning, primarily featuring classical piano, haunting strings, and crystal-clear French soprano vocals reminiscent of Véronique Gens. Here, too, the game masterfully blends wildly different genres and elements to great effect, including lively Spanish guitar numbers and ghostly choral arrangements. Whereas most modern video games heavily utilize software-generated music, all of Clair Obscur’s 154 tracks were recorded with real instruments and human vocalists, yet again emphasizing the development team’s dedication to true craftsmanship. Every major member of the voice acting cast—which includes Andy Serkis as the stern but compassionate Renois—delivers a stellar performance, bringing their respective characters to life across the entire spectrum of human emotion.

No video game is so good that it can’t be improved, but Clair Obscur’s flaws are trivial compared to the magnitude of its overall achievement. These include slight functionality quibbles with certain aspects of the user interface, minor performance issues (at least on PC), and a handful of optional battles that are so difficult that most players will likely find them frustrating. None of these shortcomings significantly detracts from the game’s enjoyability or emotional impact.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the greatest video games ever made, and it richly deserves its myriad awards, record-breaking sales, and status as the highest-rated video game of all time on Metacritic.¹ Its story of life, death, love, loss—and ultimately, inner peace as a necessary condition for happiness—is one that should be told around campfires to rapt listeners for generations to come.

1. Paul Tassi, “Players Just Ensured Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Record Score Can’t Be Touched,” Forbes, April 28, 2025, https://www.forbes.com/sites/paultassi/2025/04/28/players-just-ensured-clair-obscur-expedition-33s-record-score-cant-be-touched/. ↑