The industry hype machine is a heavy burden for any game to carry. When Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept the conversation as one of the most critically lauded titles of 2025, it set an impossibly high bar. Stepping into the boots of Gustave and his crew for the first time, I felt a distinct pressure to instantly fall in love. Yet, for the first three-quarters of my play through, I found myself in a deeply frustrating position: recognising that every single component part of the game was independently brilliant, but struggling to connect with the experience on anything deeper than a skin-deep level.
It took just over 40 hours, a gruelling journey across the Canvas, and a final boss confrontation to realise how wrong I was. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a slow-burn masterpiece that requires patience, but the ultimate pay-off leaves an unforgettable, melancholy impression that lingers long after the credits roll.
Note that this is my original review from the old site. I’ve consolidated the three-parter into something more digestible but it maintains the sentiment and I feel like it’s a decent effort to get it re-done here.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was one of our last proper reviews, and it feels like it needs to live on, here.
A World Painted in Suffocating Dread
The foundation of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 rests on one of the most hauntingly original concepts in modern RPG history. This is a world defined not by a generic demon king or a sci-fi alien invasion, but by a single, terrifying number.
Once a year, an enigmatic entity known as the Paintress awakens to paint a number upon a massive, distant Monolith looming over the horizon. The moment the pigment dries, every human being of that exact age instantly turns to smoke and vanishes from existence via the Gommage. It is a slow-motion, mathematical apocalypse. With the numbers ticking downward annually, there are no elders left to guide society; memory and history are dying alongside the population.
When the game begins, the Paintress has just painted “33.” Tomorrow, everyone of that age will fade away.
Sidebar: “Clair Obscur” is a French term meaning “light-dark,” translating directly to the Italian art term chiaroscuro—the dramatic use of strong contrast between light and shadow to create depth. It is a philosophy that bleeds into every frame of the game.
The remnants of humanity have retreated to Lumière, a stunningly re-imagined fortress city of Belle Époque France, defined by cobblestone streets, gaslamps, and high fashion. Yet, this beauty is overlaid with a thick, suffocating dread. It is a gilded cage where citizens party as if there is no tomorrow. Because for many, there isn’t.
To fight back, Lumière sends an elite military unit (an Expedition) across the surreal landscape of the Canvas to hunt down and kill the Paintress before the next number is cast.
Thirty-two expeditions have marched out. None have returned. You control Expedition 33, a group of volunteers led by the fiercely determined Gustave. They are uniquely on the clock; every member has exactly one year left to live.
This surrealist nightmare of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 looks less like a planet and more like a painting in constant flux, saturated with Chroma, a volatile artistic energy that powers both your party’s gear and the magic of your enemies.
The threats you encounter are beautifully twisted manifestations of art and folklore, from the porcelain mask-wearing Nevrons acting as the Paintress’s cosmic antibodies, to the Gestrals, an indigenous, honourable race obsessed with combat as a form of meditation.
Best-in-Class Combat
If the narrative takes its time to sink its hooks into you, the turn-based combat grabs you immediately. It is, without a doubt, some of the finest RPG combat in modern gaming.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 elevates traditional turn-based systems by making them completely active. Mashing the R1 trigger to master parries, timing dodges, and executing perfectly placed jumps turns what could have been passive menu-selecting into a tense, mechanical dance. When you get into the rhythm of a fight—timing your deflections flawlessly while managing defensive Gloss barriers—it feels incredible.
Beneath that mechanical execution lies a deep, rewarding layer of strategy. Building up character abilities, levelling-up weapons, and finding intricate team synergies makes mechanical progression a joy.
The component pieces of the gameplay loop, backed by stunning character animations, an outstanding soundtrack, and stellar voice acting—are bulletproof from hour one.
The 30-Hour Disconnect
Yet, despite all these excellent ingredients, I spent a massive portion of my play through feeling hollow. Around the 25-hour mark, with the final area in sight, I found myself frustrated playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The story and characters were moving along at a lovely pace, and camping with the party grew my attachment to them, but the stakes felt shallow.
A major narrative event at the end of Act 1 felt forced, and Act 2 did little to move the emotional needle.
I was desperately trying to love a game that was, on every technical level, excellent. I worried the entire review would end up hollow, left wondering why a critically lauded masterpiece felt so sterile to me. I simply couldn’t engage with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on a level where it didn’t feel like a beautiful drag.
Then, I hit Act 3….
The Canvas Dries
Act 3 is where the cracks in the paint disappear, and the true picture becomes breathtakingly clear. The narrative of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 pivots sharply from a generic “save the world” military march into something profoundly intimate. It becomes a harrowing, beautiful study of grief, and what it means to reconcile with loss as both an individual and a family.
The story takes an immense amount of time to establish its emotional baseline, but the payoff is entirely earned. It builds to a crescendo that leaves you with a world-shattering choice at the very end—a decision that completely recontextualises the hours of travel that preceded it.
Had I not been committed to seeing the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 through to the end, I am not entirely convinced I wouldn’t have walked away during the mid-game slump. But I am incredibly grateful I stayed.
The Verdict
Ultimately, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 justifies every bit of praise it received. It takes too long to get you fully invested, but once it does, it refuses to let go. I left the game in that specific, melancholy state that only the absolute finest stories can induce: genuinely sad that it was over, and deeply missing the characters I had spent 40 hours with.
With peerless combat, a magnificent setting, and a narrative punch that lands with devastating force, it easily earns our highest recommendation. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an exceptional achievement, and one that deserves a spot in any serious gaming conversation.
To think this was crafted by a small, independent team is amazing. DAM, that’s excellent.
