Like many folks who saw Clair Obscur: Expedition 33‘s reveal trailer last year, my first thoughts were along the lines of ‘Get that gorgeous-looking battle system into my veins, stat.’ And at long last, I’ve been able to sample an early chunk of Sandfall Interactive’s upcoming action RPG for myself, playing around the first three and a half hours of the game after its opening prologue.
At this stage in the game, the titular expedition team have left their hometown of Lumiere behind and set off on what everyone assumes will be a one-way trip to try and defeat the evil being known as The Paintress, who lives on a faraway island visible from the shores of Lumiere, and who keeps wiping out swathes of their friends by drawing eerie numbers on a large pillar. 33 is the latest number to get scrawled out on ‘The Continent’, and it’s since wiped out everyone who’s 33-years-old including expedition leader Gustave’s love interest, Sophie, and shrinking the remaining population of Lumiere even further.
But the team’s arrival on the shores of The Continent to try and break this tragic cycle of death and eventual extinction have gone awry. A mysterious, but intensely hostile old man – a sight unheard of for these young explorers – suddenly wipes out most of their squad right off the bat, leaving Gustave and a handful of other survivors to scrabble for a hasty retreat. I pick up with Gustave in an ethereal forest, where high rock walls and bioluminescent flowers guide me forward toward my first main goal: a place called The Indigo Tree, your team’s designated meet-up point if your arrival went south.
Along the way down these beautiful, albeit linear gullies, I was able to get to grips with Clair Obscur’s frankly stupendous combat system. But before I get to that, I want to talk a little bit about what happens between battles, as this is arguably what we’ve seen the least of during its various trailers so far, and which sadly left me a little cold after my playthrough. It’s not all bad news, I should say – there are hints of greatness here which I’ll get to shortly, but early on at least I could feel my enthusiasm for the game starting to wane every time I wasn’t in a fight.
The world itself looks stunning, no doubt about it. When I finally broke through the thick foliage of the trees, an enormous cliff view opened up, revealing huge, jagged rocks hanging curiously in the air, all pointed toward that ominous 33-etched pillar. The ghostly canopy of the Indigo Tree also draped itself across the sky like an otherworldly Erdtree from Elden Ring. Later, I explored a coral reef area where everything behaved like it’s underwater but it was actually just regular air – plumes of seaweed rippled upwards toward the sky, large fish bristled through the dense undersea thickets overhead, and bubbles lazily bobbed along in front of my face.
It’s the kind of visual splendour that really punches above its weight considering Sandfall’s comparatively small team size, and the temptation to coo over the sheer majesty of it all from a distance is strong in the extreme. But when it comes to traversing these rich, dense spaces, it’s essentially Dead-end Nooks and Crannies: The Game, but without the aid of a mini-map to guide you through its warren of branching avenues. I should say that noodling down these side paths is almost always worth it, as there was always some glowing trinket to pick up at the end of it – white orbs signifying more common items such as Chroma currency, while rarer, purple orbs sometimes doled out buff-boosting Picto armour, or Chroma Catalysts that can be used to upgrade your weapons, to name just a couple. These items were regularly guarded by fierce enemies, too – and even those that seemed free for the taking would often become ambush traps, forcing you to fight your way back to the main path.
All fine stuff on the face of it, but the act of trying to find a way forward – coupled together with some truly excessive motion blur that I couldn’t disable for the life of me in this particular build – made navigating these lush environments more of a chore than I was expecting. It’s exactly the kind of cocktail that puts my collectible-FOMO-obsession into overdrive, a feeling I don’t mind indulging as long as I know where the main path is at all times. But Clair Obscur infuriatingly forgoes any kind of map to help orient you in these large and imposing settings, and repeatedly running into brick walls and doubling back on myself began to grate as the preview build went on.
One thing I wasn’t expecting, though, was a kind of central, overworld hub connecting all these disparate environments together. After defeating the boss monster of the forest, for example, I stepped through a portal that brought me to an area that felt like I was stepping out onto Hyrule Field in Ocarina of Time again, or the plains outside Midgar from the original Final Fantasy 7. With the camera pulled back and Gustave looming large over a cartoonishly small rendition of the world at large, it conjured the best kind of nostalgia I could hope for in a modern game like – that feeling of playing a PS1 Final Fantasy game, just with the sumptuous detail and lighting of an Octopath Traveler diorama.
I also spied shortcuts and obstacles here that needed to be unlocked before I’d be able to push further into other areas of the island. Other, higher-level areas also had big red warning signs flagged up as I approached them, though that didn’t stop me from having a go at them anyway, just to try my luck. This overworld hub is a place I suspect we’ll be returning to often throughout Clair Obscur, dipping into its numerous, discrete locations to further the story, and then returning to explore another area with the knowledge gained from our previous stops. Indeed, a teaser montage at the end of the preview also hinted at being able to travel by air and sea in this area once you’d unlocked the requisite skills and characters, and I can see how this meshing of Metroidvania tropes with the bones of its core RPG could be very appealing indeed. I found myself thinking, I want to play that version of Clair Obscur, as what I played just now felt very limited and narrow in scope.
Granted, my preview was just an early segment of the very first act. Blinkers are to be expected. I just wish Sandfall Interactive would deign to give us a map to help us see it in all its glory, rather than eschewing any kind of HUD or UI completely when outside of battle.
And my word, those battles. What a triumph. I couldn’t wait to get back into the thick of it a lot of the time, as its turn-based combat just felt so light on its feet. Each party member, for example, has a pool of action points to spend each turn, which deplete when you perform special attacks or use your free-aim ability to shoot glowing, enemy weakpoints from afar, but accrue with regular ones. But the way each character’s individual skillsets twist and build on this basic premise brings heaps of tactical thinking to the forefront of your battle plan.
Gustave, for instance, has a special power called Overdrive, which lets him unleash a devastating Lightning attack with his mechanical left arm – provided you’ve accrued enough charge by performing other special attacks first, that is. Lune, meanwhile, is more of a magic user, and her elemental attacks will leave elemental ‘stains’ that can then be consumed by other attacks for additional damage. The more abilities you unlock, the more you start to think how well they might synergise with each other, and even at this early stage there were plenty of potential combo opportunities to really wrack up the damage.
But it was Maelle who really ratcheted up the tension here, as her épée attacks are all centred around one stance flowing into the next, accruing more and more bonuses and effects provided you keep the chain unbroken. This creates a constant dance between different flow states – her offensive stance will boost her attacks, but leave her open to more damage, for example, while swapping into a defensive stance will bolster her defence at the cost of attack power. If a foe is burning, however (which you might have achieved by using her fiery Spark attack during her defensive stance), you can switch to her 200% damage-dealing Virtuose stance – the pinnacle of Maelle’s attack triangle in the preview, and a real piece-de-resistance that feels intensely gratifying to unleash after building up to it across several turns.
It’s even more delicious if you manage to perfectly counter an enemy while in Virtuose stance, too, as players are given the chance to either dodge or parry every single attack that comes their way via time-based button presses. The timing is pretty hard to nail on its default difficulty, but there’s nothing more satisfying than parrying an attack three times in a row and then watching your squad – either individually or altogether if it’s a group assault – pull off the biggest middle-finger counterattack I’ve seen in a game in a very long time. It’s truly tremendous stuff, and it’s all executed with a real eye for neat visual flourishes that make you go ‘Heck yeah’ at the TV. Even the Persona games can’t measure up to the level of showmanship on display here, and I simply couldn’t get enough of it.
It’s this combat that still makes me excited for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, but please for the love of all that’s holy, I’m going to need a goddamn map if I’m ever going to be as thrilled by the exploration side of the game. Just like the ever-present 33-painted pillar on the horizon, I can clearly see the brilliance lying at the heart of this game. I just hope that its final release on April 24th won’t get too bogged down in the tedium of navigation to let us appreciate it in all its glory.
