Summary
- Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers a unique and impressive soundtrack that heightens emotional impact in every scene.
- The game's setting and world design, with surreal landscapes brought beautifully to life, set it apart from other RPGs.
- The combat system in Clair Obscur is engaging and reflex-based, allowing players to parry and dodge attacks for a satisfying experience.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been hailed as a new paragon of the turn-based RPG genre. This icon combines influences from French history with surreal, dreamlike fantasy and a tense, action-packed combat system full of parries and dodges. The result is a truly impressive adventure that stands above many of its competitors.
While Expedition 33 is an impressive turn-based RPG, it's also a unique one. There are a lot of mechanics and factors setting it apart from the rest of the genre and establishing that, despite its status as a debut title from developer Sandfall Interactive, it's an undeniable success. Here are some of the things that the game does best.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33: Best Characters To Use For Solo Fights, Ranked
Every so often, the party faces a solo fight in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and must send forth a single member to defeat the enemy.
7 The Soundtrack
Slaying Nevrons In Style
One of the most impressive qualities of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is its soundtrack. Composed by Lorien Testard, the music is powerful and varied, and heightens the emotional impact of every scene. Like any good video game soundtrack, Clair Obscur's is richly varied, including intense, pulse-pounding battle themes and quiet, emotional tunes to haunt the party as they reflect on their grim circumstances.
Strong soundtracks are a hallmark of the turn-based RPG genre. Beloved tracks from games like Persona 5 and the Final Fantasy series are remembered with love by the players who encountered them in-game. The soundtrack of Clair Obscur is sure to be remembered with similar fondness years down the line.
6 Setting & World Design
Pretty As A Picture
One of the most striking things about Clair Obscur is its setting. The warped streets of Lumiere, where the game begins, serve as a perfect introduction to the rest of the game, with their twisted architecture and shattered, floating rubble. The Continent, where most of the adventure takes place, is full of no less surreal locales. Players will visit an ocean on land, endless towers that stretch to the heavens, and villages bristling with brush-headed statues.
These strange and eerie locations are brought to beautiful life by Clair Obscur's advanced graphics. Each mystical and dreamlike realm is rendered so faithfully and gorgeously that players can feel like they're actually walking through it. There have been many RPGs with creative and striking environments, but Clair Obscur's surreal landscape stands alone.
5 Build Variety
Constructing The Ideal Expedition
A major selling point of most RPGs is the chance to build up characters throughout the game, unlocking and mastering powerful skills to make each character a true powerhouse in combat. Clair Obscur is great at this, offering players several ways to upgrade and enhance their party. In true RPG tradition, fans can unlock new skills and upgrade stats each time a character levels up. These new skills offer unbelievable combo potential, letting fans turn their party into a well-oiled machine that churns out unbelievably high damage every turn.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Best Attributes For Each Character
For those looking to optimize their party setup in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, here are the best attributes for each character.
This is aided by the game's in-depth Pictos system. Players can equip Pictos to each party member to give them potent new abilities that can supplement and enhance their skills. Each character also has access to a roster of weapons that can completely overhaul how they play and interact with their own mechanics, giving players virtually limitless options for each member of their team.
4 Overworld Navigation
See The World
Of the many inspirations Clair Obscur took from classic JRPGs, one of the most prominent is its overworld map. Players will find themselves wandering between missions in a scaled-down sandbox-style version of the Continent, often on the back of their bizarre but lovable sidekick, Esquie. Sandfall Interactive took many of the best parts of overworld navigation from classic RPGs, incorporating countless secrets and bonus areas for inquisitive players to find.
Esquie also unlocks new traversal abilities over the course of the game, letting him swim and bust through physical obstacles in the protagonist's path. By the time players unlock the ability to fly in the late game, they'll have become extremely familiar with the map. However, Clair Obscur will surprise them all over again with the wealth of new locations to explore and discover from the air.
3 The Reserve Team
Those Who Come After
Like many other turn-based RPGs, Clair Obscur makes players build an active team from their roster of characters, sidelining whoever's left. This RPG tradition makes sense for balance reasons, and most games tend to have a mechanic for involving benched characters, often by swapping them in mid-fight. Clair Obscur has a much more distinct take on keeping the whole party involved, though.
When the entire active party falls in battle, players have the option to send whoever's left in to fight in their stead. This gives players a last, desperate chance to take down a dangerous foe. It also keeps the stakes high, since players will almost always have fewer characters on the bench than they do in their active group. It's always been strange for reserve JRPG adventurers to watch their active counterparts fall in battle without interfering, and this mechanic makes the division a little more believable.
2 Character & Story
A Tale of Woe
The storytelling in Clair Obscur is one of its strongest elements. The game's heart-wrenching prologue sets the stage for a deeply bittersweet tale of sacrifice and grief, and the lovable protagonists carry it throughout. Each member of the team is a fully-fleshed-out character, with their own motivations, personalities, and trauma, and the game explores these thoughtfully throughout the story.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - 7 Ways It Stands Out As An RPG
Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 has provided a much-needed breath of fresh air for RPG fans, and it achieves this in a few unique ways.
Dialogue between characters feels naturalistic and real, and their relationships make things all the more gripping for the player when things get serious. Players can enjoy charming, engaging, and meaningful scenes, without getting caught in needless lore dumps and exposition, even as the story gets complicated and shocking truths about the characters are revealed.
1 Exciting, Unique Combat
It's All In The Timing
One of the most prominent selling points for Clair Obscur is its deep and engaging combat system. Unlike most JRPGs, which focus solely on the tactics of choosing the best moves and reacting appropriately to enemy attacks, Clair Obscur gives players a chance to engage in combat on a much more active level.
Almost every enemy attack can be dodged or parried, potentially negating damage entirely if the player's reflexes are good enough. The complex and intricate attack strings that foes can unleash turn combat into less of a turn-based tactical affair and more of a reflex-based action game, as engaging as anything from FromSoftware. With the intense damage output each character is capable of producing, there's nothing more satisfying than parrying a string of tricky attacks and pulling off a combo that causes the opponent's health bar to evaporate.
-
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
- Genre(s)
- Turn-Based RPG, JRPG, Fantasy
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
