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

Clair Obscur is a game that is at all times haunting. It is a game that is at times beautiful, sad, beguiling and even just weird - but it never stopped clawing at my soul for even a second. No matter what was happening, there was always this feeling that something was wrong. It's a very unique and impeccably told story that oozes Baroque style, and it's one worth experiencing even if you're not big on RPGs. Clair Obscur is one of the most gorgeous games I've played in a while. There's a wonderful variety in the environments, but nothing feels out of place. You aren't traveling from biome to biome - there's this weird consistency despite it being a truly imaginative fantasy world. It's just believable that all these places could exist at once together. The visuals during combat are stellar, the cutscenes are fantasic, and I feel like I never saw an asset reused. The world is tied together with an absolutely incredible sound track in a way that is both heavenly and disconcerting. It was a world that I wanted to see, but one that was letting me know I didn't quite belong. The combat at its core is a turn based RPG highlighted by the ability to parry, dodge, and counter the enemies' attacks by timing button presses. I'll be honest, this is the part of the game that fell short for me. The parry system is just about tapping the button with precise timing, which I'm admittedly not great at, but this leads to an overemphasis on learning every monster's attack patterns. If you're into that, you're gonna have a blast with it. However, a lot of the attacks are very stupid in this regard. Enemies often hold their attacks for weirdly long periods of times, even in the middle of combos, which felt very unfair. To its credit, I found that was mostly a problem on jobber enemies; most of the story bosses I did pretty well at sight-reading. Still, the parry system is very heavily rewarded. You get a ton of action points for parrying instead of dodging (which translates directly into more damage), and a successful full parry gets you a free counter attack which also does a ton of damage. Being good at parrying means you don't need any defense in your build, because literally everything can be avoided. In my opinion, this hurt what was otherwise a very good strategic experience by trivializing your build decisions. It's worth noting, though, that you don't have to participate in the parry fest. I didn't want to learn a bunch of patterns and wanted to use cool defensive features, and I got through the game just fine with the more lenient dodge feature and just getting hit sometimes and I had a wonderful time doing it. However, I think this strategy is much less viable on the hardest difficulty setting, where damage is very high. The other mechanical problem that bugged me is I was given too many options with leveling up. There's 5 characters, and every time one levels up you have to give out 3 attribute points spread across 5 attributes. This is a lot of button pressing, and I had absolutely no idea at any point in the game what attributes I should use. Each weapon scales with different attributes, and I didn't have enough respecs to change my attributes and skills every time I got a new weapon I wanted to use. I ended up just doing an even spread and hoping the difference was negligible, and given that I was frequently damage capping I think that's probably the case. However, the skill system itself was really, really awesome. I was really happy with my builds, even though I really only used 3 characters, and I kept finding incremental tools to make it more awesome throughout the game. There's definitely a very good system here. Being limited to six skills felt right, and you get more and more passive effects that eventually lead to you popping off. The real talking point of this game is the story. The story is incredibly unique and powerful. It's not like a Final Fantasy or D&D adventure: this game does not take its foot off the gas. This game is sombre almost non-stop - there's just not a lot of good things that could conceivably happen. The plot hook is interesting, and watching the mystery unravel was really incredible. The presentation is impeccable, too. The characters are incredibly believable. They find joy in different places, they grieve in different ways, and they all have different motives. The voice acting is top notch, and the motion capture sells the performance. Sometimes, they're so nervous that they quiver, sometimes they say something comforting but you can see the doubt in their eyes. When they argue, they make mistakes and they talk over each other. It's a very serious game overall, but but there's a few characters and moments that are really, genuinely funny. It all just felt very real - no one monologued, and no one dumped exposition on me. The whole thing comes together to tell the story it wanted to tell, and while it was maybe a little bit artsy, I'd say it did the "existential crisis" motif really well, which is hard to do these days without getting cringey. I do wish the main story had given a bit more detail on a few of the characters, but I also did almost no side content so that may still be waiting for me somewhere. Clair Obscur took me a little over 20 hours to beat, which is the perfect length for me. I don't like stories that dwell forever, and when you play this game doing just the main story it never wastes your time. There's definitely a lot, lot more out there for people who want to take their time and see the sights. There were several areas I just didn't even go to, although I'll probably check them out in NG+. This is a huge selling point for me - the side content was never forced on me. I never even felt compelled to go do it - the game wanted me to continue. I'd have to choose to ignore my very important quest to just go to some random zone for no reason. I love that the option is there and there's more world to explore, and I love that there wasn't a single stupid minigame forced on me the entire time. This is one for the ages. It's something anyone can play at least on story (easy mode), and while it isn't my absolute favorite story in an RPG, it is something special. Given how beautiful this game, its story and its soundtrack are and given how the game is just not a huge time investment, Clair Obscur is something I have to give my strongest possible recommendation.