3.5/5 ★ – Lord_Hazenberg's review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

For a team mostly comprised of people working on their first completed game, Expedition is an impressive feat. A JRPG inspired game with hints of Dark Souls, it clearly wears its inspirations on its sleeve. I played this on the Series X performance mode via Game Pass. If you just focus the main story then the game is only about 20-25 hours long. There are a ton of cutscenes with some long enough that my screen dimmed & controller turned off. I do wish there was an option to play the entire game in black & white, because those cutscenes with the film grain filter look fantastic. I did as much side content as I wanted to, and clocked out around 33 hours. I played on the “normal” difficulty throughout. The combat can barely be called turn based, since you have to do more on enemies turns than your own. You get one action per turn, but enemies can throw combos, buffs, & debuffs all in one turn. Towards the end you’ll be dodging or parrying up to 20 hit combos, and you will be dying a lot if you mess up any timing. An enemy glossary or index would’ve been helpful since weaknesses, resistances, immunities, & absorptions from Persona are present, but the game doesn’t keep track of that information. You have to remember every single enemy & pray you have a party setup with the right skills/weapons at the right time to fully take advantage of the combat. Enemy staggers also break at the worst possible times too since they recover instantly from a stunned state & miss only 1 turn. Some boss fights can be extremely frustrating with how limited your tools are. You can’t swap party members mid combat, there are no elemental throwables if you’re lacking skills to exploit weaknesses, & there’s no guarding option if you suck at dodging/parrying which I was very guilty of at times. Then bosses can instantly delete your party members from existence if you mistime one of the 4 different defensive QTEs. Optional content was a little disappointing as most of it is reserved for the endgame. A lot of areas were either one room or a still picture with a music record collectible on the ground. Some areas were actual levels so I did what I could of those. I didn’t do some of the endgame content as I was not a huge fan of the combat’s flaws, and I heard some optional bosses were ridiculous even to people who really like the game. *STORY SPOILERS BELOW* The initial story hook was way cooler than what the story ended up being. Painting away all of the townsfolk was a bait & switch for a family’s drama while they feuded as deities in the world which is a living painting. In contrast, the actual human characters are far more interesting than the painted ones. If only there was a way the writers could have combined the two positives of this world. Most of the characters can barely even be called that. You recruit most of them by just randomly bumping into them after your entire team gets killed in the opening cutscene. A team full of people you barely knew, so it didn’t hit nearly as hard as the writers wanted it to. The survivors who make up your party barely have any personality between them. The last party member you get 2/3rds of the way through the story is the most interesting one by far. Then there was a completely forced “romance” system introduced that felt very out of place so I ignored it. There’s also quite a bit of meta commentary on the artistic process throughout the game. Writers & painters fighting against each other causing harm to their creations. One could attribute this to the team being mostly former Ubisoft employees as that company is hilariously mismanaged. *END OF STORY SPOILERS* I experienced quite a few hard crashes especially near the end. Most of them right after boss fights too, so the crappy auto save would make me fight the boss again. A manual save system would’ve been wonderful. This was one of the better optimized Unreal Engine 5 games, but it was still pretty rough at times. TLDR; this is a good game but I don’t think it’s a 10/10 instant GOTY like a lot of others felt. Not saying they’re wrong, but I feel like I played a different game compared to everyone else. Game Pass definitely helped bring more attention to it. It’s well made but bland characters, a disappointing plot twist, & mediocre combat do bring it down a notch. It’s a good first game, but this team still has a lot they can improve on for their next project.