The end credit scene from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with big illustrative texts that says "A game by Sandfall Interactive" next to illustration of Lumiere that's in ruin.

I finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 recently, and completed around 95% of optional content in the Expeditioner mode (aka normal mode). I won't be 100% it because there's just some content I do not care for. Overall, I had a great time with this game, but I do feel that there are some parts of the experience that could've been better and less frustrating.

This review doesn't contain story spoilers but there are details of gameplay mechanics.

The Good

Let’s start from the good first.

The gameplay loop is very engaging if not addictive. Soundtracks are great, and there are some that I’d definitely want to add to my own library. And it also has a very strong plot filled with well fleshed out characters that you learn more about as you progress through the game.

But I'll focus more on specific gameplay components. As a party-based RPG game, this game did so many things right! First, each character has their own unique mechanic that adds such a depth and uniqueness to each of them. Each of them also has their own skill trees where you can pick their playstyle. This is the closest system to that of Monster Sanctuary that I’ve seen, and that’s a big positive! They’re still not as good (I’ll reserve the why for the bad section), but it’s good enough for me. Customizing each character and building a team is very satisfying.

One prominent battle mechanic in this game is the time-pressed mechanic, which includes dodging and parrying. Dodging is more error-tolerant, but parrying has big rewards because you gain extra AP (Mana point in this game) and can counterattack with big damage when you do it perfectly. And parrying perfectly is SO SATISFYING. They’re not easy, but it’s part of the charm in the game. I usually don't play souls-like games but this must be how it feels to beat difficult bosses in those games when you learn their attack patterns.

This game did a good job to create hidden corners or optional "bosses” that give you good rewards like items or weapons. This game also doesn’t have random encounters making exploration a smoother experience. Non-random encounters blend well with how tough the enemies are. You get less fights number-wise, but each fight packs more substance. You don’t get full HP recovery but it works out just fine with refillable elixirs and potions. AP also resets for every battle.

All good designs that allow players to pay more attention to individual fights instead of worrying about resource management. Overall, I genuinely had a fantastic time with this game despite some of its flaws that I'll talk about next.

The Bad

Now it’s time for me to criticize everyone’s favorite baby in 2025. And there are a few big points not including more minor stuff.

Main critiques

Let me start with the 2 main critiques I have.

The first thing is the clash between parrying (and probably time-pressed mechanics more broadly) with team building and turn-based strategy. While I enjoy team-building and I always customize my team, there are several occasions in the game in which I thought “this feels like I can just parry my way through it.” And I sure did. This means the team-building aspect didn’t get pushed to its full potential because players can just “git gud” to beat certain battles (and some even require it). This creates a divergence in gameplay experience that tries to pull you in 2 different directions. Do you want me to approach it as a strategic turn-based battle or do you want me to engage in this semi-darksouls mechanic where I need to learn the rhythm of the enemies’ attacks?

But the bigger issue of the two I have is that their open world is highly unbalanced or too open, and this becomes very apparent in the 3rd act. This was exacerbated by the previous problem because you could parry your way through optional bosses and end up over-leveling your team for the story. Specifically, the first glaring encounter of this experience for me was me beating Chromatic Chapelier.

A battle summary scene showing "Victory" and stats of the battle with Chromatic Chapelin

After that fight, I was practically bullying the 2 axons. I almost had no need to parry or dodge any attack to win them, it was that EASY. And in the 3rd act, you suddenly get inundated with so many side dungeons and bosses you don’t even know where to begin. But because of their “let’s the player fuck around and find out”, I could easily run into a high level dungeon, end up beating it, and flattening the difficulty of the rest of the content. And that did happen… The final boss fight of the main story can’t even be called a battle for me. There was not a single attack from the boss because I finished it off before that even happened… It ruined the experience of this supposedly difficult game for me. This could’ve easily been solved by adding a “suggested level” indicator to dungeons.

Medium-level issues

These are not the biggest problems in the grand scheme of things, but they did create a moderate level of frustration and dissatisfaction.

First, while it has so much potential for you to customize the characters and create a specific playstyle for them, it’s still lacking in term of team synergy. Specifically, it’s pretty tricky to build playstyle of party members that bounce combo with one another, and this is where Monster Sanctuary does a much better job with. One part is there’s not enough shared mechanics for characters to combo on. The only obvious two are just Mark and Burn. But that’s it. But it’s also worsened by the fact that this game has a few too many components. To re-customize a build of a character, you need to adjust their weapon, stats, skills, pictos, and lumina. Five separate components is a lot. It’s a barrier to re-customization if you want to change a character’s playstyle, and you have to do this for 2-3 characters to create a balanced party.

Second, lack of (mini-)maps in dungeons. Like I get it, you want us to get lost and be immersed in these dungeons and giant-ass environment. But I was not having it. I generally find a lot of 3D environment to be overwhelming to begin with, and this is exacerbated by the fact that many regions of dungeons are not visually differentiable. There were way too many times where I had to walk through the same route again just to make sure I’ve explored it already. And this may be just minor inconvenience at first. The thing that pushed this problem into a medium-level issue is the fact that at a certain point in the game, you unlocked an ability to break through inaccessible areas that you’ve run into before in previous dungeons (though they’re optional)… I don’t know about everyone, but I shall not be re-traversing those dungeons just to find those hidden areas that I can now access specifically because they don’t have maps!

Third, the pacing… While if you only look at the main story, they’re well-paced enough. But once you consider how many side dungeons and side bosses there are to explore and fight, it clashes with the narrative of “urgency” in the game. Lune literally said “we have no time for detour” and repeat some variants of this many times. And I was like “gurl, we had detoured plenty.” It’s not the biggest issue for me, but it’s worth acknowledging.

Minor problems

Now I have a lot of minor complaints, so I’m just gonna list them down very briefly

  • This game could do without platforming. Seriously, it has no business here.

  • Verso’s Draft is better off not existing.

  • Weapon leveling feel a bit unpredictable sometimes (probably because of monster drop) and detracts a bit from player's choice freedom.

  • Honestly, maybe too many items? At a certain point, I gave up mastering all lumina.

Less about gameplay mechanics:

  • Maybe too much voice-acting. Mostly a problem at the beginning for me.

  • Soundtracks are beautiful, but I often got distracted by confusing soundtrack cues. Some random monsters just seem to have their own soundtracks without obvious reasons.

The 3rd category, no-comment: graphics

I played this game on Steam Deck. And after some modding, tinkering with Steam Deck and graphic setting, it looks decent. But if you tell me it’s the most beautiful game ever, I would not be able to make any comments on it since it looks like FF 13 grade (which is still pretty) with weird visual artifacts here and there.

Final Verdict

I still like this game a lot despite all the negatives. The fact that I've completed like 95% of this game should say that much. A lot of good decisions were made in regard for gameplay mechanics that made this game very engaging even though you can run into some bullshit (ridiculously difficult fights) and other bullshit (ridiculously easy fights). I can confidently recommend this game to people with a caution that it relies a lot on time-pressed mechanics than classic turn-based games, which makes it a game of its own kind.