Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 PS5 Review You know those games that you fall in love with at first sight? There’s that initial trailer and you know you will love that game? That’s how I felt when the announcement trailer dropped in June 2024 for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Absolutely everything about it screamed “This checks all the boxes and more.”
After my time with Clair Obscur, I see just how correct I was back in June 2024. That’s not to say that there aren’t shortcomings, because there are. However, this tragic story more than deserves your attention, and the gameplay loop provides just enough challenge to keep you tweaking your builds. Clair Obscur is nothing short of special.
For spoiler reasons, I am staying intentionally vague. While I don’t always think that seeing spoilers ruins an experience, several aspects of this game rely heavily on what you discern on your own. Please bear this in mind while looking at anything regarding Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, here or otherwise.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review (PS5) – A Generation-Defining RPG
Pitch-Perfect, Organic Storytelling
Imagine a world where life as a whole revolved around an expedition cycle, where certain people are chosen to defend your race while others simply get gommaged (purged or erased). This is the world under the influence of The Paintress, who determines whether you survive or are gommaged. In an effort to stop this endless loop, expeditions go out into the world in hopes of reaching The Paintress and taking her down for good.
The situation in which these people find themselves in this world has a fairly simple premise. This is to the game’s benefit simply because the writing doesn’t take you, the viewer, for granted. Clair Obscur delivers the story organically. You only learn things as they come up, including how the world works. These are things that your party may already know just because they live in the world, but you only find out when it comes up. At other points, you learn something that the party doesn’t entirely know yet. Regardless, Clair Obscur doesn’t cut to scenes with enemies who give away their plot, and the game doesn’t expel massive chunks of exposition to make sure you understand something.
The quality of writing in Clair Obscur absolutely took me from start to finish. Character interactions steal the show, and that comes down to how natural they sound. No one speaks in stilted terminology, and it all sounds like the team actually recorded these scenes together instead of piecemealing lines together. There are a couple of goofy characters who sometimes interject at tense times, but they always seem to accentuate the situation instead of hinder it; in this, I feel similar vibes as I do from the Nier franchise.
Expanding the Narrative
To top it off, the game hints at certain things to keep you even more engaged. You get expectations and see some reveals before they happen, but the members of your party don’t always see it. On all fronts, the story here is intricately crafted and beautifully told. Much of the success of Clair Obscur comes from how the game balances these aspects of the story, which it does beautifully.
The plot itself is self-contained. So, if you so choose, you can cruise straight through the story and skip the vast amount of extra content, seeing you to the end of the game in 20 hours or so, skill-dependent. However, the extras you can do add so much to the characters and how they interact that you would be doing yourself a disservice. When at camp, you get the option to hang out with each party member, allowing you to get to know them and even see how they see you. You also learn about the world through these interactions, so it’s not just character building.
Clair Obscur features hands-down the best soundtrack in years-full stop. You listen to these songs as you go along, and they convey an energy on their own. As you progress through the story, the energy starts to shift, relating more and more to the context of the game. By the time the credits roll, those songs feel different, more impactful and emotional. The energy put into creating synchronicity between the game and the music outdo efforts found in big-budget projects in any medium.
Globetrotting
After leaving your home, you set out into the world. This world consists of a world map sprinkled with different zones that you explore. The overworld plays a key role in Clair Obscur simply because this is the only map you get in the game. There is no mini-map when exploring the zones. This makes sense narratively, since no one knows these areas and no one has reported back home with that information.
In theory, not including a minimap sounds like a bad idea. However, the zones end up mostly linear. This gives an illusion of both blind exploration as well as a mostly constant feeling of progression. Until you get used to the formula, you can easily get turned around. Thankfully, the zones feature unique markers, and each zone looks distinctly different from the others. If you do get turned around, it’s quite easy to get back on track.
On your travels, you find traits that you equip to your party members. You find these sprinkled around each zone, and you also earn them from certain fights. These allow you to mix and match different benefits to maximize each party member’s strengths. For instance, Maelle plays like a musketeer, and she does devastating damage with parries. You can use a trait that increases her damage at lower health as well as a trait that increases parry damage to make her parry counters even stronger.
Counter Measures
In general, fights tend to take a long time. This holds doubly true for boss fights, with the majority of them lasting between 15 and 30 minutes. Much of this is thanks to the inherent turn-based nature of the game. Alongside that are two other elements: attack animations and your level of skill. All enemy attacks consist of the enemy moving into position and then executing attacks. These alone run the clock.
Then there’s your level of skill that comes into play. All attacks can be dodged or countered in some way. Particularly, parrying acts as your greatest line of defense as well as your strongest offense. Enemies throw at you patterns of anywhere between two to ten attacks, with each enemy using choreographed move sets. Generally speaking, unless you somehow parry everything naturally, you use a couple of turns to learn the attacks before parrying everything successfully later on in the fight.
Parrying each pattern results in a powerful counter that costs no resources. In many ways, this damage contributes more to defeating enemies than using attacks and skills. Not only do counters do damage, but they also contribute greatly to staggering, or breaking, your enemy. When that occurs, the enemy is dazed for a turn, which leaves you free to do extra damage.
Plenty of Room For Struggle
While I appreciate the break system in Clair Obscur, bosses as well as enemies in the latter half of the game tend to attack multiple times in rapid succession. So, unless you coordinate a break to line up with your party attacking, the break ends up wasted most of the time.
The one major downside to parrying is that if you don’t parry every strike in an enemy’s attack pattern, then you don’t do counter damage. There are some situations where an enemy attacks several party members and you can get counter damage, but that’s the exception and not the rule.
This goes back to my statement earlier about how long fights take. If you get the hang of parrying and do it well, then fights end up routine and go by rather quickly. If you don’t, then fights can turn into slogs. While you can change the difficulty setting, this only slightly increases the parry window; though lower difficulties do reduce enemy damage and health.
With that said, you can use traits to empower your party to do more damage with skills and normal attacks. There’s a balance you can make with any level of skill. However, the fastest way to progress and succeed is to master parrying. There are no two ways around that. This could likely be something that keeps you from enjoying the game. At the same time, the reward more than pays for the risk if you get it right, and it feels great to successfully parry every single time you do it.
A Stroke of Genius
I do not say this spontaneously or hyperbolically: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a generational RPG. To boot, this is Sandfall Interactive’s first title! The quality of writing is pitch-perfect at every step, vividly depicting the somber world and its tragic circumstances with glorious technique. Combat always feels rewarding when successful, but it can feel like a slog if you don’t get the hang of the parry and trait systems. The linear nature of the game helps to balance out the lack of mini-map, so try and not let those factors keep you away from at least trying this brilliant game.
My biggest fear with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is that it will end up as one of those classic games that people only talk about years after release. All developers who put their heart and soul into something deserve both praise and compensation for creating something so personal. With that said, Sandfall Interactive has done something that, in my mind, hasn’t happened in several generations: Created a new, unique RPG that successfully channels the essence of the great RPGs that came before it.
Review copy kindly provided by publisher
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is due out on PS5, PC, and Xbox Series X/S on April 25, 2025.
On A Personal Note
I write this now, my view glazed with tears, in the moments just after finishing the game and seeing both endings. If I threw all objectivity out the window, I would score Clair Obscur Expedition 33 a perfect 10. I don’t give a damn about the few problems I came across or the occasional frustration with combat and parry timing. I don’t believe I will ever score a game with a perfect 10, because perfection is wholly subjective; but damn it if I don’t want to throw out all my convictions just for this. I can’t help but wonder how fantastic it must feel to create something like this and know that some random person on the other side of the globe is emotionally connected with your creation. Thank you, Sandfall Interactive, for painting something so beautiful.