Clair Obscur paints the finest RPG

A friend asked me yesterday for a game to play. He'd been away from controllers for a while, called himself an RPG guy, and still talked about his last favorite, The Witcher 3, the way you talk about good company you were sorry to leave. I platinumed it back in the day, so we already agreed on the basics. These holidays have handed me some breathing room, since my daughter, the one I usually share a controller with, is spending more of her days at her grandparents', which is how I wound up back in Cyberpunk 2077, finally playing it now that the bugs are gone and the thing runs the way it always should have. I'll probably write about that here too. After months of worrying I'd never find the time to play again, I'm not wasting a minute.

One title kept muscling its way into the conversation, the one that stuck with me most these past few years, and not only because it's French, though I'd be lying if I said that didn't help. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33^[1] I loved from the first minute to the last, which doesn't happen to me much anymore.

The story I didn't skip

Confession time. I usually skip a game's dialogue the way you skip ads, itching to get back to the controller. Clair Obscur cured me of that. Its world, built around painting and what painting erases, pulled me in until I caught myself listening to every line and then dreading the next one. I won't give any of it away, because the world is worth the trip and deserves to be found on your own, but the premise fits in one cruel little sentence, an expedition sets out each year to push back the deadline, and the thirty-third is yours. The rest you earn.

Turn-based combat learns to dance

Controller in hand, Clair Obscur pulls off something I'd written off as impossible, making turn-based combat exciting again. You pick your moves like in any old RPG, except nothing about it is passive, because every enemy attack can be parried, dodged, or countered in real time, down to the fraction of a second^[2]. It plays as much like a rhythm game as an RPG, and I found in it, as someone who burns his evenings on the Souls games, that sense of a dance I thought belonged to pure action. Square Enix, which spent years walking its Final Fantasy games off turn-based combat, might want to look twice.

I fought with my eyes closed

Then there's the music. Lorien Testard wrote it, weaving opera into metal across more than a hundred and fifty tracks and eight hours of music, and I keep it on loop long after I put the controller down. It went on to top Billboard's classical chart for six weeks and win Best Score at the Game Awards^[3]. None of that surprises me.

In combat the soundtrack does far more than decorate. Enemy attacks announce themselves to the ear as much as the eye, so I often trusted the sound to time my counters, and on the fights I knew by heart I closed my eyes. Dancing a dodge blind, guided by the music alone, is a pleasure I never expected from a turn-based game.

It isn't all a stroll, mind you. One of the last optional bosses struck me as unfairly hard, the kind you only clear by following a guide to nuke everything before it lands a hit, and part of the content the studio added for free to thank its players^[4] pushes the punishment further still. I left some nerves there, and a good chunk of my pride.

What it'll cost you

Figure on thirty hours or so to follow the story straight through, fifty if you wander into the side quests, and up to seventy if, like me, you have to turn over every stone^[5]. The game swept nine Game Awards, a record, Game of the Year included^[6], so you almost certainly didn't wait for my blessing to start. But if the world passed you by, take the plunge, especially since the story shuts its last door while letting a little light through, and I'm already watching to see what gets painted next.

So, bravo to the developers, the musicians, everything holding this thing up. Every one of those trophies is earned.

Weeeeee.