Expedition 33 Does Two Things I Hate, And It’s Still My Game of the Year

Sandfall Interactive has already been on a tear with the awards season only getting started. Clair Obscur cleaned up at the Golden Joystick Awards, and next week I’d be shocked if it doesn’t come away with some hardware from The Game Awards. While games like Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Death Stranding 2 are plenty deserving of accolades and will certainly garner attention, it feels like Clair Obscur has a certain momentum.

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I Love Clair Obscur, But It Almost Lost Me in Act 3

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a brilliant game, but a certain development in Act 3 doesn’t quite land like the rest of the experience.

For me, the timing-based combat, the story, the performances, the music, and the visuals add up to a memorable experience. Its gameplay is satisfying and addictive, the world is alluring, and the cast of characters will stick with me for a long while. I have a few games on my backlog that I need to get to, but right now, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is my game of the year. I’m not surprised that it ended up taking the top spot on my personal top 10 list, but what is surprising is that the game has earned the nod despite including two of my biggest video game pet peeves.

The first pet peeve that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is guilty of is unique to RPGs, and it involves forcing you to use certain characters as part of your team or swapping out characters without your control. I know this is pretty common for RPGs, but I’m the type of gamer who likes to invest in a specific team composition and go all-in on it. I like to have my healer/mage, my damage dealer, and my utility character, and then focus on leveling and optimizing them as much as possible.

Not knowing how much friction I might run into within the course of an RPG, I will typically do a fair bit of grinding to level/upgrade my core team members. Maybe I overlevel, maybe I don’t, but I usually like to unlock new abilities, get my weapons up to a higher level, and ensure that I have money to spend on useful wares. But then, when the game decides that I can’t have access to a character, for story reasons or otherwise, I get frustrated because a weaker character then has to rotate in. I’ve now lost a core member of my team comp and must try to make this new member work.

As I mentioned, Clair Obscur is not unique in this approach. Final Fantasy IV does this switch with Cecil very early on, Chrono Cross makes a very significant change to your core characters after the first act, and Final Fantasy 12 makes you swap teams frequently. It’s a pet peeve of mine and one that I practically expect at this point. But what makes the difference in Clair Obscur and other games is how they tackle it.

I think that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 approaches this idea by allowing all of your party members to gain XP (albeit less than the main ones) from battles. So, if you choose not to use Maelle, or Lune, or Gustave, or whoever, they will still be close to the level of your core team. For the sake of spoilers, I won’t go much further than that, but I appreciated that Sandfall made it easy to get over those potential switches.

On top of that, the mechanical differences between each character made it so I wanted to switch characters in and out. I had fun learning the value of each character’s mechanic relative to the enemy in front of me, and experimenting with different roles. Furthermore, I love how Sandfall tackled the fall state by allowing you to swap to a new expedition team if you’re starting three members were all eliminated. For every element of the “forced switch” that I could have been frustrated by, Clair Obscur had a reasonable answer.

The other pet peeve that Clair Obscur includes is platforming when the game doesn’t have the mechanics to support it. You can look up plenty of rage-filled forum threads about the Gestral Beaches in Expedition 33, and I, too, share that frustration. Final Fantasy 15 had an optional platforming section that did a similar thing, seemingly in an effort to mix things up. Without the precision of platforming-focused mechanics, jumping and sticking the landing can lead to a lot of frustrating moments, and on those beaches, it feels like you’re playing Only Up, not an RPG.

Like the Pitioss Ruins in Final Fantasy XV, the vast majority of the platforming in Clair Obscur is optional. I still felt compelled to finish those sections because I am a masochist and a completionist, but for others, they can simply walk away. Still, that is perhaps my biggest knock against the game. If the mantle was more consistent or if the roll after a sprint jump wasn’t difficult to control, I might have felt differently. I know I’m not alone in this one.

Even with those two elements that would usually take a game down a peg or two on my personal review scale, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is my favorite game of 2025. For the character swapping, I think that Sandfall Interactive has a handful of elegant solutions that made it a non-issue in my playthrough. The platforming, on the other hand, is a pain point, but it’s mostly optional. It’s hard to hold that against the game overall.

Really, it’s a credit to the game that I still think so highly of it despite it including those two pet peeves. And if those elements impacted your enjoyment of the game, I think that’s fair. To me, though, everything else around the game is so fantastic that anything “bad” never impacted my enjoyment.

Released

April 24, 2025

ESRB

Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence

Developer(s)

Sandfall Interactive

Publisher(s)

Kepler Interactive