Spoiler warning for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 up un🌃til Act Two. is a very sad game. This is established from 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:its excellent opening, where we see Gustave and his ex Sophie reconnecting in Lumière on the day she dies. She’s killed in something called a Gommage, where an entity called the Paintress paints a number and everybody above that age dies. There is a celebration for the lives of everybody doomed to be erased from reality, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Gustave wa🤪tches as the woman he loves disappears. It’s a horribly tragic start ꧋to a horribly tragic story.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Is Incredibly Bleak
Right after, we see Gustave and a group of volunteers embark on an Expedition to the continent,൲ where they’ll attempt to kill the Paintress before she repeats the cycle next year. Most of them don’t make it very far. Most of the Expedition is killed almost immediately by an old, white-haired man leading an army of terrifying creatures.
After being knocked out in battle, Gustave wakes up separated from the group, and after a bit of exploring, encounters a massive pile of bodies, recognising the faces of his friends among them. It is gory, and terrifying, and hopeless. Realising tha🃏t he cannot complete the Expedition on his own, and believing that everybody he travelled with is dead, he sits against the mountain of corpses and puts his gun to his head. He is only stopped by Lune, another survivor, telling him that they have no choice but to go on.
These opening hours set the tone for the rest of the overarching story. There is a lot of death – the bodies of previous Expedition members are scattered all over the place. The scale of the horror can be so vast as to feel incomprehensible. You start to ignore the bodies you step over, because there’s so many of them that they stop feeling real. And Gustave himself dies in a shocki🔯ng twist at the end of t꧒he first act, i𒈔n such a horrifying and senseless way that it sets Maelle on her own journey to seek revenge.
It’s an incredibly bleak game✃, one full🧸 of heavy moments, violence, and death. So why does it make me chuckle so much?
Clair Obscur Means Chiaroscuro Means Balance
Expedition 33 is very sad, but it’s also very funny. I’ve gotten th🀅rough most of the second act, which means I’ve been treated to quite a lot of comedy. One of my favourite moments is when Gustave screams a password at a Gestral, only for the Gestral to balk at his aggression and Gustave to apologise profusely.
Monoco is one of the game’s funniest characters, from his deadpan humour to his sobbing hysterically in the ruins of a building when he hits it too hard and separates the group. Esquie is hilarious as well, from his absurdly floppy movements to his childlike sensibilities. Some of the journal entries are giggle-worthy as well, especially E𓆉xpedition 66’s about Esquie feeding them some poisonous mushrooms and crying ou🌼t of guilt.
You can also put every character in a swimsuit or stereotyp๊ical French fits complete with baguettes.
This strange confluence of incredibly dark themes and moments of levity might seem strange, considering the overall tone of the game. At first, I even found it a little strange – it didn’t seem to gel quite right, especially early on, when so much ofᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚ it had been so sad.
But the more I played, the more grateful I was for the humour. Without 𒁏it, Expedition 3♉3 would have been miserable throughout. That kind of game has its place, but a little absurdity and joking around made the minute-to-minute experience of playing it much more exciting. The bleakness even made it funnier, since you’re never really expecting it to make you laugh.
Clair Obscur is a French translation of the word chiaroscuro, an art style that focuses on the contrast between light and dark. Tonally, Expedition 33 pulls tℱhis concept off to a tee. There’s a lot of dark, but ther𝓀e’s also a lot of light, and they play against each other to create a game that’s thoroughly enjoyable, even as it punches you in the gut with its twists and turns.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
- 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 🐼
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
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