Early thoughts on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

[Dracos]

Mmm.  So I'm a decent ways into Clair Obscur Expedition 33.  And what I can say with confidence is it is art.  I can understand how it draws such people.  Exploring themes of war, grief, and departure.  Moving on and staying put.  Living in dreams vs the world.  Flawed people vs perfection.  Abandonment by society.  Horrific genocide.   Free will.  Serenity.  It uses rather realistic art while evoking French impressionism all over the place, which is sort of an odd mental contrast.  It's the type of thing that gets attention and emotion, whether that is thoughtfulness, love or disgust.  The story they want to explore is evident, and in exploring it, some adjacent evokative tales are told that they probably really didn't intend.

It's combat setup is certainly the star of it.  Beautiful, generally short encounters with colorful flurries of attacks.  It's extraordinarily flexible and you can have almost every character fill several different roles depending on how you want to play. with pretty decent opportunities to just reset and reapply skills and attributes.  I'd make this cheaper myself, given just how flexible things are.  It's got a rather evolved dodge, parry, jump, special parry defensive setup which rewards you incredibly for being able to do it (not just in dodged damage, but also in high powered counters and extra action points for next turn).

This can exist alongside minigames that are bottled lameness meant largely to annoy than to wonder and exploration where 'keep your hand on the left wall to navigate the maze' might as well be good advice.

Folks saying it needs a minimap are very correct as the game has the most mechanically rewarding exploration I think I have ever seen and many pick ups can sometimes be almost unseeable even when right on top of them.  By mid game the difference between someone that scours every map (including the world map) and someone who goes where they can see may be dozens of possible skills to equip, 25-50% skill points controlling how many of those you can equip, how powerful items are to help you and how many you have.

I'm pretty sure one of the characters I am playing is the most stone cold bastard I've ever encountered in a video game story by just an incredible margin, while being friendly and kind on face.  Wandering through and will see how it goes in truth.  May spoil talk about it later.

I certainly wouldn't recommend it for everyone.  The exploration mechanics can be frustrating and the story can very much evoke disgust rather than thoughtfulness or love.  But it definitely leans in to aiming to evoke  thinking about it versus playing it.

[Dracos]

Come walk through the nightmarish hellscape of corpses reaching for you as your friends are murdered.  Convince a young teenager not to be shellshocked and traumatized after walking through a world war 1 battlefield where none of the bodies were picked up and they were all explicitly countrymen on the same journey while being attacked by the otherworldly monstered that killed them.