Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review (PC) – Mastery Of The Medium

Right out of the gate, I was thrilled to see a new take on turn-based RPGS with the introduction of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This made me follow the cycle of this game closely, and so when it finally showed up in my email, I became ecstatic. It’s time to finally dig into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.

Game Name: Clair Obscur Expedition 33
Platform(s): PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Sandfall Interactive
Publisher(s): Kepler Interactive
Release Date: April 24th, 2025
Price: $49.99

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has you in the shoes of Gustave as he prepares for a festival with his adopted sister Maelle. This festival starts with a giant being known as the Paintress waking up and painting over the current 34 with the number 33. Once it is done, all the people who are 33 or older get turned into rose petals. Gustave joins an expedition called Expedition 33 that has a goal to try and take down the Paintress before she wakes up in another year. Maelle wants to join Gustave because she is bored with Life in Lumiére, the town they have lived in the entirety of their lives. Gustave wants to join because he is 32 and knows he won’t survive another year if the Paintress wakes up to make the number 33 into 32.

This opening is rather dark and dreary, but it hooks you instantly to want to take down the Paintress to prevent future tragedies from happening. Throughout the opening, you can walk around Lumiére and find orphans and people scared for their lives and the lives of their families. Even so, there is also intrigue in who the Paintress is and why she is constantly turning people into rose petals.

Traveling Towards The Paintress

The first thing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 throws at you is a combat tutorial. You can attack with a normal basic attack. You can also use a skill, every skill has button prompts that add extra damage or effects to your skill. If you mess up the button prompts, your skill still goes through. One thing the game adds to combat, though, is active combat dodges and parries. If an enemy attacks you and you parry at the right time, you can counterattack.

There are also AP or Action Points in combat. You start with two AP and then, when it is your turn, you get one more. You can get another AP for a base attack during combat. Skills cost AP to use, and you can also use your gun to shoot at enemies at the cost of one AP per bullet. Some enemies have spots where, if you shoot them, it deals massive damage or can add effects to their allies. Some effects are good or bad for the enemies.

There are many ways to build the characters you like. First is with Pictos, accessories you find throughout the game that have passive effects. Each character can equip three; when you use them enough, you can use Lumina points to permanently equip the passive. You can also add three attribute points to a character’s stats. Stats are arranged from Vitality, Might, Agility, Defense, and Luck. Vitality is health, Might is attack power, Agility is their speed, which affects their placement in the turn order, Defense is Defense, and Luck, which affects critical rate as well as how often RNG ailments work.

Another way you build your characters is through the skill tree. With each level up, you get a skill point. You can use these skill points to unlock the character’s skills. Each character’s skill tree is personalized, and you can build them however you want. You can build Gustave into a tank or a lightning damage dealer. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an RPG that lets you customize your characters to a pretty insane degree.

Outside of combat, you have some map and dungeon exploration. You can run with the right trigger held down on a controller, but the best part of the maps is the designs they have. They are all linear maps with paths that divert away for optional routes, and even some puzzles you can find. Sometimes it gets you to a pretty difficult sub-boss that shows up out of nowhere at optional routes, but they give you good loot like weapons or special Pictos.

One problem with the traversal outside combat is that there are platforming pains. There are areas of the game that require you to jump at precise moments or run and jump to get a good distance. The problem with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is that the platforming system is not forgiving. The jump by itself is pretty small, and controlling the characters is pretty difficult. You can only climb handhelds that are yellow or certain rock handhelds that are hard to tell sometimes, with how the terrain looks similar to the interactive elements of the maps.

Saving Lumiére

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a stunningly beautiful game. Every area you go to is unique and creative. Colors and textures are amazing, each character has strong, realistic designs. Starting in Lumiére was one of the best choices in this game to show you just how beautiful the artists’ designs came out to be. You can get lost in these areas even though they are pretty linear, just because of how enthralling they look.

Enemies are inspired by Soulborne designs. Large, giant, monstrous behemoths with equally large weapons. They look scary, and fighting them gives you a sense of satisfaction by tearing them down. I love that giving your character a new weapon changes that weapon in combat. A lot of the time, high fidelity games will change the stats but not the appearance.

For the most part, Clair Obscur: Expedition ran well on my high-end PC. With a 78003XD CPU and an NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super GPU, it had no problem with 120 FPS 1440p. However, cutscenes are locked at 30 fps regardless if your PC can handle them or not. Also, with how they did the lip flaps in-game with the voices, doing 120 FPS makes it look really weird if you are trying to follow the character’s voices in the dialogue. It looks considerably better at 60 fps with lip synching, but 30 FPS mode is the way it looks the best. It is a shame because I liked playing at 120 FPS, but I couldn’t deal with the lip sync being as wonky as it was. I also didn’t like the timing of parries or attacks at 120 FPS. It felt like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was designed with the console in mind, with 30 FPS and 60 FPS options, but not optimized for 120 FPS play.

I would not recommend this game at all if you are trying to play it on a Steam Deck. It runs at around 45 FPS, but it looks atrocious. Hair textures and terrain textures are super grainy and take you out of the game entirely. I then tried it on my RoG Ally, and it had far better visuals, but it only played best locked at 30 FPS. 30 FPS for me was fine personally. If you are deciding to play this on Steam Deck or RoG Ally, I would suggest RoG Ally for the best overall experience.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has some of the best pacing in an RPG ever. It has three acts that are 10 hours each, giving you 30 hours of main story. The story never drags, and honestly, each act ends in such a giant way that it forces you to want to continue playing the game. It does a fantastic job also of not overloading the player with too much lore for them to handle. It drips lore as much as you can handle it. There is also a lot of environmental storytelling in the areas you travel to with each expedition journal from prior ones, and from looking at where dead expeditioners ended up. There are 67 years’ worth of expeditions, and you get a good chunk of them shown throughout the areas you experience.

Experiencing The Unknown

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has music that will inspire you to want to go on an expedition. There are so many types of music in this game, ranging from exploration to melancholy. There is a lot of emotion in each song, and you will understand just how the game wants you to feel. The battle music alone will make you want to stand still in combat as you let the glory of each note pierce your ears.

The overworld map is pretty easy to navigate in the game, as you have only a compass that points north, and you have to just keep heading north to get to the Paintress. However, with no minimap, it can be a bit difficult to find your way in the normal area maps. You also don’t get any markers, so if you do the optional routes to get the treasure and hard optional boss fights, it can be tough to remember where you were just going.

Greatness

Overall, I highly recommend Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This game is a true love letter to an era of turn-based RPGs from yesterday with Legend of Dragoon, Golden Sun, Chrono Trigger, Final Fantasy X, Super Mario RPG, and tons more. If you don’t like turn-based RPGs, this might be the one that could grab you with how dynamic everything feels to play. There are some things I wish I had options for, like minimaps and a way to look back at what I just did, but they aren’t deterring me from the overall experience at all. These characters and this world is one I had so much fun and whimsy over exploring. This is a world filled with tragedy, but also one that offers lots of reasons to keep going throughout the dark periods, with how engaging everything is.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was provided to us by Keplar Interactive for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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