Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (2025)

Finally defeated Clea even with the Stendhal nerf.

The point of the fight is to parry all her attacks so she can't heal, but somehow I was able to do it by failing almost every parry. I made a Corpeso/Burn build for Verso that inflicted so many burn charges that it damaged her for almost 500.000 HP every time she healed.

Then I get Maelle to Virtuous Stance to attack with Stendhal and her level 3 Gradient move for the "real" damage.

It was intense.

I'm not trying to gush here, but I'm around 10 hours in and this game hits all the right notes for me.

Everything about this game just feels right, if that makes sense.

The boss fights, especially the optional bosses, are challenging, and when I beat one, I get a big dose of dopamine like I'm playing a turn-based Dark Souls.

The art aesthetic and music direction are just amazing. I haven't felt such a joy in exploring a landscape since wandering the streets of Columbia in Bioshock Infinite.

Even the character customization is satisfying, with loads of options for building your team how you want, like an RPG should have.

The only real struggle is my own desire to rush through the game and get to all the content as quickly as possible, and trying not to do that so I can enjoy the story in smaller, more satisfying bites. Either way, I'm enjoying every minute I spend with this title.

I'm nearing the end of Act 2, and I will definitely be writing a review when I finish the game, but I have a handful of sporadic thoughts I feel a compulsion to write down.

1. The difficulty balancing is... Weird. The game starts off brutally hard, and then it eases up as you get more tools to work with. In theory, this fits the setting, but in practice, it means I had to set the difficulty to "Story" for the first half; and Story wasn't a cakewalk either, I absolutely had deaths in there.
2. While the music is consistently great in isolation, I think there's far too heavy a reliance on the soprano vocals. Partly because it seems to be the same vocalist singing in the same range, but also because it doesn't have the same impact when it's constant. The Overworld theme has actually become rather annoying at this point.
3. There is an event roughly half-way through the game (Gustave) that still feels really narratively unsatisfying, and I don't really understand where they're going with this. Maybe it gets resolved eventually, but I dunno man. I also don't really like Verso as a character, nor the way he's just dumped into the party out of nowhere.
4. I am very confused - Sandfall social media shows people doing insane damage in a single hit, but I've been capped out at 9,999? Very confusing, because I can hit this very easily and it feels like my DPS isn't keeping up as a result. It's a really low damage cap.

Those are all critiques, but I overall still love the game. These are exactly the kind of of bugbears you would expect on a studio's first game, and I am confident they will learn and grow for their next game. I'm presently hovering between 4 and 5 stars, I think the final act is going to do a lot of heavy lifting to sway me in one direction or another.

I knew this is not my kind of game but my friend convinced me to keep going. I am currently on my fourth attempt on the Lamplighter boss fight. And my main thought is I would be enjoying this more if there were no fights.

I do not like the pace and length of these turn-based battles. Wasting 30 minutes just to die and have to start over again?! No thank you!

I know this is just very basic video game stuff, but that is why I say, even though I play a lot of them, I am NOT really a fan of videogames anymore. Not like in my youth.