4.5/5 ★ – FoofDeckman's review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Turned based RPGs aren't typically my thing. I tend to just skip this genre all together as besides maybe a few Nintendo games, I simply don't like that style of game. Most of the time they're extremely time consuming, repetitive and just flat out boring to me. With all that being said, Clair Obscur is one of the rare exceptions to this, as I quite honestly loved this game in a way that surprised me. One thing that shocked me the most was how invested I was in the characters and it's story. Every single party member has their own personality and distinct playstyle attached to them, which makes each moment with them unique even outside of combat. You genuinely grow attached to these characters over Clair Obscur's 20 hour story, and the more twists and turns thrown your way, the more invested I became in how the story was going to shape up by the end. I don't want to get into spoilers, but there's a lot of twists throughout this story that I honestly didn't see coming, which is pretty rare for video game writing standards. This game also has a stacked line of cast members, some of which are major stars like Andy Serkis and Charlie Cox who I don't think have performed in many video games before and who both really impressed me. Charlie Cox as Gustave in particular, who I've only really associated with Daredevil, kind of stole the show here in my opinion. The art direction and overall visual style is gorgeous in this game. Clair Obscur messes with so many different styles and the more you get into the game the more abstract it gets. There's a level pretty early on in the game that's supposed to look like it's underwater and it might be one of the most visually striking pieces of video game scenery in a while. There's several moments where this game pulls what I called in my head an "Alan Wake 2 moment" where it goes all art house cinema mode. It's hard to describe, but I personally loved those moments. The combat itself is a lot more difficult than I thought it was going to be. Maybe I'm just bad at video games, but I found myself struggling even on normal difficulty. Now keep in mind, this isn't a negative, in fact I loved learning almost every enemy's move set to learn when to parry them correctly. All of this combat is carried by some of the best video game music I've heard in a while, it's just so good. If turned based combat games are known for anything, it's for their music and Clair Obscur is no exception to that. If this somehow doesn't win every award during award season for it's music I will personally riot in the streets. While I did love Clair Obscur, there are a handful of things holding it back from being a 5/5 in my eyes. One of those being the lack of a map in the exploration areas. I know there's one in the overworld, but as soon as you get into an actual level, you're kind of just left to explore, which I guess might be a positive to some people, but I found myself getting lost quite frequently. It's one of those things that could have been easily fixed with a map of some kind, even if you have to fill it out as you go, just like the overworld. I know the game director mentioned this was done on purpose, but I find this to be a complete miscalculation on their part. There's also a lot more running and platforming sections in this game than I ever imagined there would be, these are easily the weakest parts of the game as the platforming isn't very good at all, it's all just very unresponsive in this aspect and clearly wasn't built for platforming, but besides a few minor aspects I don't have a ton to complain about, Clair Obscur is a VERY good game, and I highly recommend checking it out, even if you don't think you'd like it. The only reason I even gave it a chance was because of it's inclusion on gamepass and I ended up loving it as a result. Please do yourself a favor and check it out because as of right now this is my Game of the Year.