Summary
- Clair Obscur offers rewarding secret locations with unique rewards and lore.
- Players can find potent weapons, valuable lore, and challenging bosses in hidden areas.
- Exploring the map thoroughly can enhance the player's experience beyond combat.
The fantastical world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is full of strange realms and mystical landscapes, touched by art and magic in bizarre, otherworldly ways. While the intense turn-based combat and deep, emotional storyline are some of the game's biggest hooks, fans can have just as much fun just wandering the map, looking for secret locations and deepening their relationship to the game's strange world.
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Clair Obscur has plenty of realms on offer to reward diligent explorers. The map is packed with secret areas, from sinister caves to beautiful forests. Each realm contains surprising new discoveries, from new music records and challenging secret bosses to secrets about the nature of the world itself. Here are ten locations fans might miss out on if they're not perceptive.
This list contains minor story spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
10 Crimson Forest
A Blood-Red Glade
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
The mysterious Crimson Forest can be found hovering in the air near the Endless Tower, lurking in its shadow. When players first visit this elusive floating realm, they'll find a tranquil and beautiful glade, colored with bright red leaves and dotted with picturesque ruins. As fans explore, however, they'll find distinctive statues wielding swords. Activating these will seem to damage the fabric of reality itself, creating increased distortion and filling the region with dangerous chevaliers, as well as deadly Clair and Obscur enemies.
Activating all three statues conjures a demanding Chromatic Gold Chevalier, who will yield a rather potent sword for Verso if players are able to take it down. The realm itself is a tangled knot of platforming and combat, making it rather tricky to navigate but ultimately very rewarding.
9 Painting Room and The Canvas
Family Portrait
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
On its own, the Canvas isn't a terribly difficult location to miss. While it's situated remotely on the map, up in the northwest corner near the Monolith itself, it's surrounded by whirling storms of Chroma that make it quite eye-catching. However, it represents the start of a much deeper puzzle that players might not immediately know how to work out.
Despite its tumultuous appearance, really the only object of interest in the Canvas is a large painting of the Dessendre family that players can claim for themselves when they visit. The game does not outline what to do with the family portrait, but players can bring it into the Manor and place it in an empty frame near the lobby. Doing so will unlock the Manor's Painting Room, a location that should be all too familiar to players by the time they reach Act 3.
8 White Sands
A New Home
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
While players can see the island containing this enigmatic locale as soon as they get Esquie's coral-breaking ability in Act 2, they'll need to fly to get into the location itself. This strange little zone contains no enemies - just a collectible music track and a glimpse of the exterior of the Manor itself.
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This small island's bleak atmosphere accentuates the grim past of the Manor very nicely, and the island's soundtrack incorporates a melancholy spoken-word poem that reflects nicely on the tragedy of the game's story. White Sands is a tiny little realm, and it won't hold much interest to players who just want to find the biggest and strongest bosses to fight, but those who want to experience more of the game's atmosphere and story will find a lot here.
7 Endless Night Sanctuary
Grim Gestral Past
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
The Endless Night Sanctuary is a secret vale, tucked away in a hidden little valley on the eastern side of the map. As the name suggests, it's cloaked in eternal darkness, lending a grim melancholy to its forested setting. The Endless Night Sanctuary is a location of particular significance in Gestral history, as players will likely be able to glean from the Sakapatates silently patrolling its pathways.
A lonely Grandis NPC calls the Sanctuary home. From this figure, players can learn of a dark chapter in Gestral history and an unfortunate consequence of these strange creatures' undying love of battle and violence. Players can also take on a particularly challenging Ultimate Sakapatate encounter and earn some potent weapons for Verso and Monoco.
6 The Chosen Path
Go It Alone
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
This strange little airborne realm presents itself as a mysterious, shadowy atelier, featuring five painted canvases awaiting entry. Each painting contains an encounter with a Nevron, but the catch is that only one party member can enter each one. Expeditioners also can't repeat canvases, meaning that each member of the party must be used once if players want to conquer the whole area.
Fans can get valuable rewards from each fight and a particularly potent Pictos if they clear the whole gauntlet. Furthermore, by studying the Chosen Path closely, players can get hints as to which creature waits behind each canvas, letting them strategize which expeditioner should commit to which painting. The Chosen Path presents an engaging, if enigmatic, challenge for players.
5 Dark Shores
Back To Where It All Began
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 2
It's technically impossible to miss Dark Shores, since every player visits it in a cutscene at the start of Act 1. By the time players actually get control at the start of Act 1, though, the Dark Shores are well behind them. Many fans might play the whole game without realizing that the Dark Shores exist as a location on the map and that players can visit as soon as they have access to Esquie's swimming ability.
That said, they should still hold off. The Dark Shores are crawling with deadly Noir nevrons, imposing monsters who absorb dark damage and dish out serious punishment. Once players are strong enough to turn the tides on these deadly creatures, they can return to the scene of one of the game's most shocking story moments and honor the sacrifice of those who came before.
4 Sunless Cliffs
Master of Mimes
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
The world of Clair Obscur is infested with mimes. These bizarre and punishing enemies are notorious for their unforgiving damage output and hefty defensive walls, but players frequently hunt them nonetheless for the cosmetics they bear. Players who want the ultimate Mime challenge should make their way to the Sunless Cliffs, where the strongest mime in the game awaits.
This massive mime dishes out unbelievable damage and also locks players into solo fights. Fans will have to bring the mime down five times, once with each character, in order to unlock its ultimate prize. The Pictos this mime guards is a particularly bizarre one, which epitomizes the high-risk, high-reward playstyle that many fans favor.
3 Flying Manor
Strange Reunions
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
The Manor is a recurring and extremely significant location throughout Clair Obscur, and once players get the ability to fly with Esquie in Act 3, they can find a particularly striking variation on the theme. The Flying Manor hovers over a mountain near the middle of the map. Players who are looking to visit all the game's regions might still miss it, as its map icon blends in quite aggressively with the mountain underneath it.
As optional areas go, the Flying Manor is particularly robust. This expansive dungeon contains some extremely high-level foes, and in order to unlock the heart of the manor, players will have to take on several of the bosses they've already encountered throughout the campaign, often in newer and more powerful forms. This culminates in a truly surprising confrontation with one of the most difficult and lore-significant bosses in the game.
2 The Fountain
Consequences of Your Actions
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 3
Tucked away in an isolated glade, at the southwest end of the map, players can find the Fountain. This tiny little zone has only one inhabitant: a white Nevron by the name of Blanche. This character serves as a caretaker for the strange white Nevrons that players encounter throughout the game and imparts some extremely valuable lore about the nature of these odd figures.
The encounter with Blanche can play out in one of two very different ways, depending on how players have been treating the white Nevrons during their playthrough. Either way, a visit to the Fountain can prove to be extremely rewarding, both in terms of material benefits and story content alike.
1 Monoco's Room
A Good Boy
- Earliest Possible Visit: Act 1
The mysterious Manor holds many secrets and many rewards. While players won't be able to unlock all of its secrets until near the end of the game, there's one particularly striking discovery that can be made quite early if one knows where to look. Behind a specific painting in the Manor hides a secret room full of paintings dedicated to the dog Monoco, a real-life canine listed as the Happiness Manager on Snadfall Interactive's development team.
The existence of these paintings inside the world of Clair Obscur carries remarkable implications for the party member who shares this dog's name. Strong theories about the connection between Monoco and Monoco have already been made. Players who are interested in seeing this remarkable Easter egg for themselves should hunt out the secret Monoco room and the valuable revive tint upgrade hidden within.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 92 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- April 24, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Sandfall Interactive
- Publisher(s)
- Kepler Interactive
WHERE TO PLAY
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Genre(s)
- Turn-Based RPG, JRPG, Fantasy
