Video game writers have become much more adept at using death as something more worthwhile than a dramatic plot device over the last decade or so. The starting point in Tetsuya Takahashi’s “Xenoblade Chronicles 3” is a frank admission that no one knows how to handle grief, honor the dead, or live what amounts to a good life, ThunderLotus honed in on the specific moment of farewell and the pain of dealing with the physical and emotional space the dead leave behind. When new studio Sandfall Interactive first announced “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” and promised a “dark and mature” story set against trailers filled with blood-stained faces, grim expressions, and people wailing over fallen comrades, it all seemed a bit gauche and shallow.
It isn’t. “Expedition 33” is one of the most sensitive handlings of grief and artfully crafted stories in the medium, though it does little to prove that in its early hours.
An apocalyptic event called The Fracture tore the world of “Expedition 33” apart a century before the story begins and dropped part of Lumiere—the game’s version of Paris—into the ocean. Every year since then, an enigmatic entity named the Paintress awakens, paints a new number on a monolith, and everyone older than that number dies in a cloud of smoke and flower petals. “Expedition 33” opens on the eve of the Paintress’ annual awakening, as Lumiere’s citizens gather to watch their 34-year-old parents, friends, and siblings die when the sun sinks behind the monolith. This is also how Lumiere sends off its annual expeditions, where dozens of people travel back to the shattered continent in the hopes of stopping the Paintress and saving their loved ones.
It’s a lot to take in, and the 33rd expedition that sets off the next day starts with another, more violent tragedy as well, so when the main cast completely ignores it for the next several hours, it’s more than a little jarring. They crack jokes about taking down big enemies, explore a village of sentient, giant paintbrushes who love fighting, and banter with each other at camp, while only occasionally remarking on the gravity of their task or what they lost.
This refusal to engage is a mask that “Expedition 33” wears. Still, its role as an intentional pretense—not just poorly conceived emotional pacing—becomes apparent once the mask is forcibly removed and destroyed. Everything changes after this point. The score drops its quirky insistence on skipping between moody piano themes and light rock and settles for melancholy instead. The colorscape takes on a darker, more somber hue, and even the enemies become more disturbing in appearance. With the coping mechanism gone, the cast is forced to reckon with reality and their own internal darknesses, dredging up buried memories, addressing repressed emotions, and, tentatively at first, reaching past banal banter to understand each other and themselves on a deeper level.
This is the real “Expedition 33”: an exploration of pain, a slow unraveling of the defenses its characters built to help them cope with, or ignore, a series of terrible personal disasters. Sandfall made the first act a metaphor for one of the story’s overarching themes, but an even more remarkable feature is its honest recognition of human emotion and complex psychology. There’s a tendency in most media and even in real life to treat grief as a straightforward process to deal with, or if the messiness of it gets acknowledged, it’s in a way that remains clean and socially acceptable – extended periods of sadness, withdrawn behavior, things people still perceive as “normal” that the sufferer will eventually get through or learn to live with. It’s fine to say something like “grief becomes part of you,” but rarely does media bother to ask or show how.
The number of ways “Expedition 33” examines these ideas is too large and too spoilery to list, but one that occurs roughly just past the game’s halfway point is worth illustrating in more detail. The team receives a new task: travel to two islands, defeat two giant enemies, and utilize their hearts to craft a powerful weapon. It seems like the worst kind of video game storytelling device—a MacGuffin hunt designed to waste time and devoid of anything meaningful—but it’s where some of the game’s most important ideas start coming into view.
One island is based around the conflict between masking oneself and acknowledging one’s emotions and true self. It’s a common theme, but “Expedition 33” flips it by recognizing that these masks and the motivations for wearing them are just as much a part of one’s true self as whatever it is they’re hiding. A ballerina based on the sirens of Homer’s “Odyssey” is the second island’s adversary, but in place of a song that draws the hearer to their doom, her allure is in showing people what and who they’ve lost. An optional opponent in this area is The Tisseur, a weaver and maker of props for the siren’s act. The cast remarks upon defeating him that it felt wrong, somehow, to destroy this creature and the dreams he wove, as if they were somehow less sinister and more innocent than the player is led to believe.
It’s a problem if someone takes these things to their extremes, of course. Hiding behind false selves and living in a fantasy world is part of what broke Gustave’s world from the start. You have to let them go eventually and move on, but what “Expedition 33” is saying is that you can’t do that unless you accept them and work through why you need them in the first place. It’s messy and personal, and maybe even weird and unhealthy at times, but it’s the only way to find closure and move on.
“Expedition 33” occasionally seems to move on quickly from its big ideas – the allure of wallowing in a dream of what’s lost never actually gets brought up in conversation, only in a pre-battle cutscene – though that impression stems from how loath it is to state its meanings and intentions openly. This is a game that expects you to pay attention, to think about what it is and isn’t saying and why, and to make connections on your own, and it even goes so far as to hide important information in out-of-the-way places or just to assume you’ll figure it out on your own.
There’s a reason why one of the primary characters has a fighting style based on perfection, where mistakes deplete his morale and lead to worse performance. That reason is hidden in a memory, behind a door, in a cave you might never see. Sandfall also has a strong rationale for why, despite battle abilities having four different elemental alignments, only fire has an associated status effect – burning. It never explicitly states what that rationale is, but if you think for a bit, you’ll likely arrive at it.
Sandfall undoubtedly knows the people who play this kind of game will search for every story clue. However, even if one gets missed or you don’t connect all the narrative dots, “Expedition 33” expertly maintains its cadence in other ways. Tragically broken landscapes, the melancholy beauty of its score, and even the excessive bloom effect from the lighting all play important roles in engaging the emotions and quietly telling other parts of the story during what’s normally dead time in RPGs—periods where players just want to get from one point to the next. The most important auxiliary storytelling tool in “Expedition 33,” though, is combat.
The animations and cinematography transform even basic encounters into miniature spectacles, channeling the emotional intensity from every other part of “Expedition 33” into something actionable. Most skills require button presses to deal the most damage possible, and every enemy has several attack patterns that demand carefully timed responses—dodging, parrying, jumping, or a combination of all those and more. On top of specific character playstyles and the option to build them around certain skills or swap roles between battles, “Expedition 33” has dozens upon dozens of equippable skills and modifiers that grant the party bonus effects.
One character, Maelle, is a fencer archetype who switches between offensive, defensive, and an additional, extra-powerful style when she uses specific attacks. It’s possible to build her around skills that burn enemies and keep her in the third style, then equip passive effects that make her deal more damage to burning enemies to the point where Maelle can handle entire groups of enemies alone. Another option ignores skills in favor of ranged attacks to target enemy weak points and basic attacks, outfitted with passive skills that let those basic attacks reduce an enemy’s stats and buff Maelle’s. There are so many other ways to approach every character, though, and while “Expedition 33” isn’t overly generous with handing out items that reset a character’s skill board, there’s enough room to experiment with a few builds before settling.
It’s one of the most inventive uses of conflict and battles in RPGs, and that’s barely even getting into just how deep this all goes. It’s just a shame there are no assist options to help those with slower reflexes adapt to the unforgiving input timings, though “Expedition 33” is gracious about defeat. The party loses nothing, and the game just reloads to a point a few minutes before the fatal encounter.
The last decade saw dozens of variations on the topic of turn-based battles being outdated and lacking the power to resonate with modern audiences. It pushed the likes of “Final Fantasy” into action-RPG territory and stuck others that wanted to innovate in the “retro” box as homages to the past. “Expedition 33” proves that turn-based battles have just as much power to stir the senses as ever. They just needed to be in the right hands.
Finally, it’d be remiss not to touch on just how essential the cast of “Expedition 33” is for making it what it is. Charlie Cox (“Daredevil: Born Again“), Kirsty Rider (“The Sandman“), and Shala Nyx (“My American Family”) are, unsurprisingly, exceptional as the thoughtful inventor Gustave, driven researcher Lune, and reflective fortune teller Sciel, respectively. However, comparatively new talent Jennifer English (“Baldur’s Gate 3”) and Ben Starr (“Final Fantasy XVI“) are equally impressive and carry the game’s most intense and significant moments.
The timing of all this couldn’t be more important, either, as actors continue to strike for protections against studios who want to train generative AI with their talent without guaranteeing proper permissions and compensation. The artistry and sensitivity in “Expedition 33” wouldn’t be half as powerful without the passion and depth of emotion literally every performer in this game puts into their role. Sure, you might get a recognizable recreation with an AI tool. Still, even aside from the serious ethical issues, you’re excising the project’s soul and making it impossible to connect with the audience and fulfill its purpose in the process. As “Expedition 33” itself attests to throughout its tale, without that connection and honest human emotion, the only thing that remains is a hollow, worthless shell.
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