# Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Type: Game

Score: 4/10

Date modified: Dec 18, 2025

Is this game’s story good? Yes (generally). Does this game look good? Yes (generally). Is the atmosphere good? Is the world unique? Yes to both. Now, after saying all this, you can imagine just how catastrophically the gameplay fails for me to give it only a five. Had the gameplay even been mediocre this would’ve been more like a 9 but the combat is so mind-numbingly awful I had to struggle to keep playing this. The story only just barely kept me going. Remember this coming from someone with over 1000 hours in Hypixel Skyblock so I hope my words have a little weight when I say the gameplay is bad if I’m a man who can mine glass for 300 hours.

First I’ll talk about the good parts before we get into the parts that’ll get me death threats. Like I said earlier, the story and characters are really good and probably the best to be released this year. I’d even go as far as to argue that this game’s story is the best of any game ever released if I may be so bold. It’s pretty unique, exciting and the way this game always seemed to titillate me with a new reveal was the only reason I made it through.

To be bold once more but in the other direction however, saying it has the best story out of any game isn’t really saying too much as out of all the stories I’ve ever experienced, I doubt it would crack even the top 50 and I basically exclusively read slop at this point. Game stories are just really bad in general however, so this 7.5/10 story really feels 10/10 here. The prologue really does feel like a 10/10 story though, Kirsty Rider, the voice of Lune especially does insanely well (which is why it’s so unfortunate that Lune is so lacking in good moments) and Gustave is a character I felt instantly interested in with his great introduction. The mysterious man on the beach is just the cherry on top. A little later you meet Maelle (for the second time I guess but she joins your party this time) who I care less about than Gustave or Lune and then every other character who joins your party after Maelle I just don’t give a damn about at all. I’m sure if I could be bothered to hang out with the cast in camp I’d have learnt more about them and thereby found them more interesting but you cannot just show me a mystery like “who is the man on the beach” and then be like “why don’t you hang out at camp for a while?” It felt like the writing really started to fall by the wayside the longer the game went for and lacked any interesting character moments the first few hours provided me with (in the main story at least). And to top it off I wasn’t even all that satisfied with the reveal of who the man at the beach was which just about sucked out any of the interest I had remaining for this game. I know I sounded pretty negative here but the main story was, for the most part, good. At least the music never let me down. It’s incredible, it’s grand, orchestral and always fits the scene, bumping up the atmosphere to a new level. The vocals in it do more than I’d expect them to as well. It’s no surprise to me it topped the Billboard Classical chart.

Next up, graphics. This is something I’m less positive about. Obviously if you have eyes you can tell the game looks good but it also doesn’t look all that visually distinct or interesting. It looks a little too much like a generic Unreal Engine 5 game and the fact that it won the award for best art direction made me lose my shit because out of all the nominees it was easily the worst in that department. Again, the game doesn’t look bad, it’s certainly good at showing off spectacle but it didn’t blow me away.

Now the bad, firstly this game’s optimisation was absolutely abysmal. There is no reason on God’s green Earth that this game should be running worse than Elden Ring, RDR2, Hogwarts Legacy, The Witcher 3 or even Cyberpunk on my hardware when it looks worse than all of those games and also isn’t open world. I cannot fathom how the performance could possibly be this piss poor to the point I’m not getting 60FPS even on the lowest settings. I don’t have a 5090 or whatever but even then just in comparison to those games it doesn’t make any sense to me how this game could run this badly. Next, the real issue with this game was how god awful the gameplay is. I’m not a fan of turn based games at all which is why is was initially wary of this game, but after spending months listening to people talking about how “innovative” this game is on the JRPG formula and testimonials from people who had sworn off playing any JRPG after their grandmother had died playing Pokemon and E33 brought her back to life I finally caved and bought it. But do you know the giant innovation this game made? It’s just that you can dodge and parry. Except dodging is never better than parrying so really you can only parry. Stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. This means instead of doing one thing in every fight like traditional JRPGs, you end up doing two things now. Obviously an improvement but not enough to make this genre fun to me so if this game changed anyone’s mind about JRPGs I just have to assume they played the worst JRPG ever a single time and then swore them off forever without realising they never really disliked JRPGs. If you intend to scream at me about elemental weaknesses and shit just wait a minute because that’s my next point. This game is terribly balanced. Weapons, they’re alright, but Pictos are insane. When I first started the game Lune had Immolation which was a fire move so I decked her out with fire and damage buffing Pictos. This snowballed to the point that, by the time I had unlocked the Hell skill every other character in my team had become support and the moment I cast the spell every enemy on the screen turned into dust (a little exaggerated but it was pretty OP). I could’ve nerfed myself or played expert mode, but first off I completely forgot there were even difficulty options in this game after setting mine to their expedition mode (that’s my bad), but also nerfing myself just isn’t fun, it’s unsatisfying and really shouldn’t be my job. This whole balancing segment is pretty opinion based, I’m well aware and it is partially my fault but still I think they could’ve done a better job with it and also relayed to me in more detail what expert mode was because I had assumed it’d be like Terraria where for my first playthrough (with two people mind you) I was still getting bodied by every boss. If I had played Terraria’s expert mode off the bat I would’ve blown my brains out because as it suggests it’s for people that are pretty familiar with the game when in Expedition 33 I guess it just isn’t… This was all the case before I got to Act 3 however where E33 decides to go balls off the wall difficulty-wise to the point of making it frustrating to play. Again I could’ve just changed the difficulty however that’s an even more unsatisfying feeling than nerfing myself. Simon was one of the most brutal experiences I’ve had playing any game and after about four or five hours I finally took that fucker down and it wasn’t even all that satisfying… Anyways that’s my take on Expedition 33, feel free to chalk this up to me being a butthurt Silksong fanboy because that’s just facts. I’d have written more but I’ve used up just about all my hater energy at this point.

Forgot to mention how they made a Deluxe Edition Upgrade for $17.50 (NZD) and it went overwhelmingly positive on steam when all it adds are outfits. Lets be real for a second, if this was any other game that shit’s going to be rated mixed at best, that’s some real glaze if I’ve ever seen it and it just felt greedy to me.

Edit: I just watched this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls4QS3F8rJU and while generally I agree with the points he’s making, I can’t help but feel like this guy is a grifter. In this video he talked big about all these things so I Googled Threat Interactive to see what they made as it must be impressive but it seems not only have they never made anything but it seems like Threat Interactive is just one guy so it’s a little sketchy especially when he’s asking for 900K on his website. He says he’s going to unveil his game prototype but who knows if that’ll ever come (also his website looks god awful). It’s also just really hard not to get second hand embarrassment watching this guy talk like he’s a way bigger deal than he is, as if a company as big as Epic Games would ever care what he says even if he gets 10x as many subscribers lol.

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