Spoiler-free, but talk about inciting incidents 2025 was certainly quite the year for gaming. It seemed there was something for everyone, regardless of genre and scope, and many developers worked extra hard. One of the titles that’s a frontrunner for this year’s Game of the Year award is Clair Obsur: Expedition 33, a turn-based RPG from a new French studio, Sandfall Interactive. The hype and …
Spoiler-free, but talk about inciting incidents
2025 was certainly quite the year for gaming. It seemed there was something for everyone, regardless of genre and scope, and many developers worked extra hard. One of the titles that’s a frontrunner for this year’s Game of the Year award is Clair Obsur: Expedition 33, a turn-based RPG from a new French studio, Sandfall Interactive. The hype and reaction for this game has been extremely positive. Now that I’ve concluded the game, I wanted to share some thoughts on the game and the experience in a spoiler-free article!
Inspired by France’s Belle Époque era visually, Expedition 33 is set in a world where every year for the past 67 years, the citizens of the island nation of Lumière watch a mysterious being known only as “The Paintress” draw a number on a massive monolith on the horizon. Once the new number is drawn, always counting down by one from the previous number, all those who are that age disappear in a cloud of flower petals. It’s a highly emotional time for the people of Lumière, as they say goodbye to loved ones without any explanation each and every year. The game opens with the “Gommage”, as it’s called, of those who are 33 years of age, thus triggering the number 33 to be written on the monolith. After this event happens, each and every year, the city sends an Expedition to the Monolith to try and stop the Paintress. The expeditioners are always comprised of those of the same age as the Monolith, as they are the most senior and have the least amount of time to lose should they fail. But every Expedition has failed thus far. Will Expedition 33 be any different?
You start the game as Gustave (voiced by Daredevil’s Charlie Cox), one such member of Expedition 33. After the Gommange, where he bid farewell to his former girlfriend Sophie, he ventures to the Monolith with the other members, only to be ambushed upon arrival by a horrifically powerful older man. Everyone on the team is killed except for him, Lune and his foster sister Maelle, who, despite not being the right age, has joined the Expedition regardless of the time granted to her relative to her fellow Expeditioners. As they explore the land, they stumble across other members, some being other survivors of the beach like Sciele, others being locals to the land like Monoko, and others should remain a mystery for now.
Without getting too far into the weeds, one of the best parts about Clair Obsur: Expedition 33 is the story. It’s a passionate and layered story about loss, death, grief, and acceptance. The story is brought to life by a stellar voice cast, including the aforementioned Cox, but also Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings), Jennifer English (Baldur’s Gate III), Kirsty Rider, Shala Nyx, Ben Starr, Rich Keeble, and Maxence Cazorla. The game’s dialogue in particular deserves huge praise for feeling organic and genuine, with lots of banter and naturalistic-sounding dialogue that you don’t often hear in games. It creates scenes where characters talk or yell over one another and actors improvise dialogue, creating more human interactions. The narrative is also insanely impressive and goes places you will not see coming, of that I can promise. Just when I thought I had the game figured out, it would pull the rug and put me into an emotional state, or make me question the very nature of the game itself.
But if the story is a highlight, then the crown jewel of the game has to be the soundtrack. Composer Lorien Testard didn’t have to go that hard, but he did, and he created one of the best soundtracks I’ve heard in years, regardless of medium. It’s a blend of traditional French music, choral, electronic, jazz, and other genres into this unique and unexpected blend that hits surprisingly hard at the right spots.
Gameplay-wise, Expedition 33 wears its influences on its sleeves, but adapts and modifies to create a style of its own. It pulls heavily from turn-based RPGs from Japan (JRPGs) such as Persona or Final Fantasy, where you control a party of characters and take turns in combat, choosing between either attacking or healing/buffing your characters. The choice you make and/or which attack you choose also depends on how many Action Points (AP) you have this turn. But there are also real-time elements, where the characters can dodge or parry incoming attacks, which adds another element of strategy to the gameplay loop. To top that all up, each character can equip special skills called “Pictos”, which offer certain skills or buffs to the player, such as gaining an additional AP when performing the first successful dodge per turn. Upon performing a given action four times, the passive skill is learned, and any character can use said Picto as a “Lumina”, at the expense of “Lumina Points”, which can be found in the world. Players can also upgrade their weapons, find new outfits, level up their stats, and boost their relationship with their party members as part of the gameplay loop. The Expeditioners traverse an overworld, which is a scaled-down version of a continent to explore, and from there, they can enter specific zones, which is where most of the story beats and dungeons happen. Upon resting at the flags of previous expeditions, the players’ health and potions will be restored, but much like a From Software game’s bonfire system, enemies (save for bosses), will respawn.
So, it seems that I’ve been gushing quite a bit about Expedition 33. So why is this article titled “Almost Perfect“? Well, Clair Obsur may get a lot of things right, but one thing it doesn’t is platforming. This is the type of game where platforming wasn’t in mind when being designed, but the devs seemingly added it to the game as bonus challenges throughout the game. And they are infuriating. They comprise rather lengthy platforming sequences where you ascend a tower or traverse an obstacle course, but the jump animation is very stiff, which results more often than not in mistiming the jump and falling off the trial, only to respawn back at the front, which can be five minutes or more of progress lost. Likewise, depending on how far the drop is, characters may perform a safety roll, which in turn will throw you off the course as well, making it hard to judge the distance needed to complete the run (a roll can be stopped with a button press, R1 in my case on PS5, but this is not clear at all). A lot of the optional content is tucked away in these sequences, so it can feel unnecessarily punishing. There’s also the fact that the character Lune tends to float everywhere she goes, but is seemingly incapable of making small jumps, despite her power of levitation. Was this done intentionally to troll players, or just an oversight by the devs? Hard to say, but it did create a blemish on an otherwise exceptional experience.
But that’s ultimately a wrinkle on an otherwise exceptional game with a story that will long be remembered for its nuance, poignancy and unexpected developments. The developer had such confidence in their story that a live-action movie was announced months before the game even released. Will a movie be able to capture the nuances found in the game? I hope so and look forward to seeing who they’ll cast and how they’ll bring this world to life. For now, it’s time to enjoy New Game+ and look for all the foreshadowing.
