I like a combat system that resembles an overflowing dressmaker's drawer, full of bouncy rubber thimbles and spools of pennants. While not as chaotic and tangled as Disgaea, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one such game. I'd call it “baroque,” but that wouldn't fit with developer Sandfall Interactive's stated influences: the new RPG is set in a melted and fragmented fantasy world based on the Belle Époque, or “belle époque,” of late 19th-century France. Your job as a player is to stop a Painter witch from painting everyone over a certain age into oblivion. But back to the plot, though. First, the overly ornate combat.
There are a few more generic, general elements: a turn order bar on the left, character portraits on the bottom right, and an action point gauge tucked neatly under your active character’s nose, with commands radiating from their torso, Persona-style. But each character plays their own version of the game, in a way. Hottie Gustave has a dashing mechanical arm that can be supercharged to unlock various mega moves, much like Nero’s gauntlets in Devil May Cry. Floating barefoot mage Lune can generate spots (see the paint principle), a custom resource that can be alchemically combined with her standard ice, fire, and lightning spells. Fencer Maelle changes stances when she performs abilities, alternating between sets of buffs and weaknesses. You’ll want to make sure she’s in the right position for the occasion, especially during pattern-based boss fights.
And then there are the quick-time events tied to these attacks and abilities, which reward punctual players in various ways: adding a bonus hit to a combo, boosting a heal, or mitigating incoming damage. Wash it all down with some unabashed ranged combat: Characters can shoot enemies in third-person to expose their weak points. It’s pretty dizzying, especially when you try to explain it using the game’s “Nevrons” and “Luminas” vocabulary. (PR included a glossary with our screenshots. Thanks, PR.)
Clair Obscur may seem quite experimental, and it is, but it’s also deeply nostalgic. The game counts some fairly specific mid-2000s RPGs among its influences—both conventional and ambitious works like Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, which came about thanks to Microsoft and Xbox’s quixotic assault on the Japanese market. I remember that period in game design as a time of expansionist tinkering with the fundamentals of turn-based combat. Projects like Valkyria Chronicles attempted to integrate real-time elements into Final Fantasy-style chess games, in an attempt to convince Johnny Actiongamer. While I love Valkyria Chronicles, I’m not sure anyone else has ever pulled it off.
Clair Obscur tries once again to combine these approaches, though as Sandfall Interactive co-founder and creative director Guillaume Broche was careful to point out during my demo, QTEs aren’t forced on you. You can customize your characters in certain ways to minimize the need to respond to prompts. Still, it feels like you’ll be missing out on something essential if you do. Among other things, if you combine certain gear and upgrade paths with QTE parries, it’s possible to deal no damage. The progression elements are heavy with jargon, but feel familiar: there are the usual stats to improve, as well as gaining skills from Picto items, allowing you to use them without having that Picto equipped.
Beyond the mechanics, Clair Obscur wants to recapture the visual aspect of games like Lost Odyssey. Broche suggests, without really convincing him, that there is a dearth of Japanese RPGs or Western “JRPGs” that attempt to achieve a photorealistic aesthetic. “We come from our own love of high-fidelity turn-based games, which hasn't been done since Lost Odyssey, like realistic turn-based, I feel like there's a big gap in the market,” he says.
Clair Obscur isn’t exactly “realistic,” beyond its preference for naturalistic human bodies and outfits. It’s set in a rotten, thriving, level-based universe that sometimes feels like it’s set deep under the sea, and sometimes feels like it’s set near Bloodborne’s astral hunting lodge. The setting is as gorgeous as it is putrid, a place of both sublime monstrosity and folkloric fantasy, where you’ll encounter cracked-lipped ghouls in unnerving mahogany palaces and trade blows with creaking puppet merchants to unlock more powerful wares.
The world is filled with an ever-present dampness, as if it had just been oiled and fixed by the aforementioned Painter—who, of course, serves as the game’s archenemy. Every year, she etches a new number onto her Monolith, causing the deaths of all those of that age and older. Gustave, Lune, and Maelle, all 32 or younger, are the latest in a series of increasingly older human expeditions attempting to put a stop to this. You’ll discover the remains of previous expeditions as you explore, resting in their abandoned camps, and learning a little about how they failed.
It’s a new narrative that can be tragic or ridiculous. Tragic, in that it could be a current story about increasing entropy in which children must comprehend the prospect of their own mortality, decades in advance. And ridiculous, in that it risks becoming a joke about Western thirtysomethings who spot their first gray hairs, realize they’re no longer the most elastic of chickens, and fall into a state of existential depression reflected in the messy construction of the world.
There’s a touch of memory in all this. “Why 33?” Broche says. “Because I’m 33 next year.” But there’s also a more calculating element of audience symmetry. Broche adds that “the generation of people who grew up with JRPGs are older now, so I really wanted to do something that wasn’t too adolescent, which I think has been done many times before – something more mature.”
As a brooding member of Expedition 39, I think we could do more “mature” than this. But Expedition 33’s cast is a welcome departure from the high school or runaway princess protagonists of games like Persona and Final Fantasy, while its captivating, over-the-top combat system reminds me fondly of my old Xbox 360, daydreaming under my bed. I can’t wait to get my hands on Clair Obscur. In the near term, who’s up for a bit of Lost Odyssey?
Check out Clair Obscur on Steam. There is no release date yet.