Even a month or so after its release,Clair Obscur: Expedition 33has made a lasting impression on the gaming communityfor more reasons than I can count with my two hands.
Its innovative gameplay blends turn-based JRPG mechanics with parrying and dodge mechanics. Its art style undeniably draws inspiration from beautiful 19th-century Belle Époque aesthetics (1871-1917). And, probably the most incredible of all, it was created by asmall yet dedicated 30-person core dev team at Sandfall Interactive.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Vs. Persona 5 Royal: Which Game Is Best?
Two massive and influential turn-based RPGs, but only one clear winner.
All these factors make itone of the most impressive gamesto have come out this year, if not this generation, and allowed this “JéRPG” torekindle the community’s love for video gamesamidst a corporate industry that pursues trends and pumps out content instead of art.
Its success celebrates French creativity and has evenearned the attention ofFrance’s President Emmanuel Macron.Expedition 33islightning in a bottle,and I’d be utterly shocked if it doesn’t winGOTY in 2025.
Most impressively,Expedition 33has anevocative narrativethat hasmade me cry several timesduring my first playthrough, and that alone makes it eligible for a GOTY nomination at least in my book. Sure, games likeThe Last of Us Part 2andRed Dead Redemption 2have gotten a few tears out of me, butExpedition 33’s opening and its many scenes have made me sob like never before.
Almost the entirety ofExpedition 33’snarrativetouches onthe theme of loss, exploringthe corrosive nature of grief and how it affects those who were left behind.From the way Lumierans face death with the mantra “For those who come after,” to the way each character you’ve met has dealt with a traumatic grief,Expedition 33’snarrative ultimately revolves around the crumbling Dessendre family after Verso’s tragic death.
Heavy Spoilers: I write this with the assumption that you have completed at least one playthrough of Expedition 33, so this is a final warning that there will be heavy spoilers for the entire story!To give a quick recap,the world in whichExpedition 33takes place is a painted, fictional, and idyllic world created by Verso when he was a child.That is, until Verso’s tragic death, which devastated the Dessendre family, spiraling uncontrollably into a cataclysmic event that left the Canvas' inhabitants caught between the conflict between mourning parents Aline and Renoir.
Verso’s death was the catalyst that kicked off the sorrowful tale of the Dessendres, and barring the late Verso himself,each member of the family deals with the loss differently from the next.With that said, we can examine howeach member of the Dessendre family represents a stage of grief in theKubler-Ross Model.
Since the fire, our family has crumbled. Aline in the Canvas. Clea fighting her solitary war. [Alicia], a living ghost. Verso’s death broke us.
Denial - Aline
Also known as the Paintress,Aline is depicted as the primary, looming antagonistic forcethat is responsible for countless Lumieran deaths due to the annual Gommages and Nevrons.
But even at the beginning of the story, something is off about this looming presence in the distance. Aline is portrayed as a gray colossus hunched in front of the monolith, silently weeping before writing a new number every year.
Even someone like Sophie, who faces imminent Gommage, comments thatthe Paintress “looks sad.“Her observation proves prescient, asAline is but a mourning mother whose mind deteriorates with each passing day inside the Canvas.
Once theproud matriarch of the Dessendre family and leader of the Painter’s Council,Aline is now but a husk of her former self. Verso’s death has completely devastated her, and her inability to function has not only jeopardized the stability of her family but also indirectly doomed the Canvas.
This is another trick. She’s not Alicia. You are not my Verso.
Aline represents Denial, a perpetual stage that traps you in a state where you refuse to accept reality, and instead drown in all forms of escapism.
The human mind will always have a hard time processing the shock from a deeply traumatic event. Because the pain is too much to bear,those who are in denial tend to escape through unhealthy coping mechanisms,often through substance abuse (which can also be alluded to via Aline’s toxic obsession with her Painted family), their work, or simply refusing to acknowledge the loss.
In Aline’s case,she engulfs herself in Verso’s Canvas to spend an unhealthy amount of time there, so much so that it is actively eroding her body and mind,deteriorating from the caustic grief that eats away at her.This manifests in her inability to tell apart fiction from reality, and, in a more literal sense, her crumbling true form.
As noted by other members of the Dessendre family,staying inside a Canvas for too long is dangerous for painters. Still, Alinedoesn’t seem to care, allowing herself to slip further and further away from nothingness, which seems preferable to living in a world without her son. With Renoir actively trying to erase the Canvas, Aline knows her time in the Canvas is limited, and yet she fights tooth and nail to immortalize the memory of her son.
Aline is so deep in denial that, before the events of the game, she created Painted copies of her family to cope with the loss so thatshe could live with this fully conscious facsimile of her family instead of the one she left behind in her reality.
Anger - Clea
The next stage of grief is anger;this includes lashing out at those around them to find justice, revenge, or simply to feel something as they wade through their numbing trauma.
“Why me?” they might ask. “Why is this happening to me?” The purpose of anger during the grieving process is toseek some form of catharsis, and Clea does just that by devoting herself to the war effort against her family’s enemies.
The oldest daughter of the Dessendre family, Clea is a gifted Paintress and is implied to have skills to match or even surpass her mother.She is self-assured, calculating, and most of all, believes that ruthlessness is mercy upon herself.
But above her prickly and frigid exterior lies a fiery and passionate soul who cares about doing everything in her power to help her family.
Verso traded his life for yours. I both love and hate him for that. The damn fool.
Most notably, Clea’s anger is shown through her unrelenting crusade against the Writers’ Guild,who were supposedly the culprits for setting fire to the Dessendre residence and ultimately Verso’s death.
Not only that, butClea is the creator of all the Nevrons that we encounter in Verso’s Canvas, which are hostile, aggressive monsters that kill to prevent the stream of Chroma from returning to its natural cycle.
Clea is a complex person who warrants an individual character analysis, though the information we have about her is considerably scarcer than the rest of her family, and there is even less context to the Painter/Writer feud in the outside world.
And Clea makes sense as the representation of anger. She’s not cold, as we’re initially led to believe–she loved Verso, and was described to have once played in the Canvas with him,sharing a meaningful bond with the now-miserable Francois, who is said to no longer sing because of her absence.
Verso’s death galvanized her in her one-woman war against the Writers, as she cares only about taking over the void of leadership her parents left behind, doing whatever is necessary to protect what’s left of her family.
Through dialogue in cutscenes, we can tell thatClea has grown resentful of the heavy burden that has been thrust upon her,and even some resentment towards her family, most of all Alicia, whom she still blames for Verso’s death.
Clea’s portrayal throughout the story shows that anger, though it can be channeled for productive ends, can’t really soothe the real trauma that bubbles underneath.
Bargaining - Alicia
Bargaining is the stage at which we feel helpless and out of control in our reality,so we try to find alternatives by fruitlessly negotiating with “what if” scenarios while trying to delay what we know deep down is inevitable.
Also known to us as Maelle, Alicia is the youngest of the Dessendre children. Because of the Writers’ attack that killed Verso, Alicia is left scarred and mute, suffering from a debilitating disability that she believes has robbed her of all agency and joy in life.
Not only that, butshe feels tremendous guilt for Verso’s death.Pair her out-of-the-Canvas life with her inside version, and she has lost two lifetimes' worth of loved ones, most notably Gustave, at the end of Act 1.
Alicia best represents bargaining through her behavior after she regains her memories and Paintress abilities, which havebestowed her the power to reshape the Canvas in her image and un-Gommage those who were lost.
Throughout her interactions with Renoir in Act 3,Alicia consistently negotiates with him that she’s different from her mother,that she can stay in the Canvas longer, and that Verso’s Canvas means too much to her for her to let go.
Destroying the Canvas won’t help us move on, it’ll just deny us the one place that helped us feel again.
It’s textbook bargaining, and Alicia even lies to Renoir when she promises him she’ll return to the real world, saying that she just needs “a little longer” in the Canvas. In her desperate state and intense emotions, it’s hard to tell whether she intends to follow through, and Verso even calls her out on it.
Alicia’s bargaining does work in the short term as Renoir eventually relents, but as he and (Painted) Verso have previously pointed out, it only delays the inevitable. Like Aline, if she refuses to leave the Canvas in fear that Renoir will destroy it,Alicia will eventually succumb and die from prolonged exposure.
In the final moments of the game, you’re forced to choose between Verso and Maelle–one wants to release the real Verso’s soul from the Canvas and erase the world so that the Dessendres can move on, while the other wishes to preserve the Canvas and bring everyone back with her divine Paintress powers.
If you choose Maelle and win,then you get what at first feels like a good ending. All is right in the Canvas–Gustave is back, and everybody who has died is brought back. Maelle finally gets her happy ending with her Painted family.
Despitesome believing that this is the “right choice,“that that Verso’s ending means the undeniable end of countless lives, what is shown to us in Maelle’s ending implies a dark and corrupted twist.
The final cutscene shows thatMaelle is asserting her control over the narrative with her Paintress powers,repeating the cycle that Aline had perpetuated, most likely falling deeper and deeper into her desperate grasp for power and control.
While both endings screw someone over in the end,Maelle’s ending is undeniably the most messed up,
What life? My life of loneliness in a shell of a body? With no voice and no future?
Bargaining is an attempt to regain control of a situation in which we feel powerless.When we grieve, we plead to the powers that be to change the outcome to soothe our pain. But it is itself unsustainable, as the constant “what if” questions and desire to regain control of a desired outcome will never happen the way we want them to.
Whether we like it or not, what’s happened has happened,and the past cannot be outdone. The Canvas was doomed the moment Aline and Renoir fractured its world. This world died with Verso, and everything Alicia and Aline did to preserve it was all to delay the inevitable and corrupt the memory of Verso.
Depression - (Painted) Verso
Once we realize that there’s nothing we can do to rewind time and return things as they once were,despair settles in and takes hold of us,transforming into a depressive state that lingers like a dark cloud of smog.
Depression is a hard one to find in the remaining Dessendre members, as the painted and real versions are essentially different characters. Still, Painted Verso, the one with whom we have spent the most time, best fits the bill.
Created as part of the Painted copy of Aline’s family,Painted Verso lives a depressing life of immortality.Since the Fracture and the first Expeditions, Verso has witnessed the slow but gradual degradation of the Canvas and the stability of the Dessendre family. His life, by all accounts, is filled with undying, unending misery.
“You’re tired of painting, aren’t you? I’m tired too…”
Throughout his life before the story, Painted Verso has aimlessly wandered the land beside Esquie and Monoco, struggling to make any human connections.
Verso only joins the Expeditions because of their mutual goal to banish Aline, though his motivations come from his desire for eternal rest, even if it means destroying the Canvas in which he exists and ending everyone else’s around him.
He has lied to his allies about the truth of the Canvas just so they could help him with his prolonged suicide, and his emotions and actions are impulsive whenever the opportunity to die presents itself.
Thanks to his curse of immorality, Painted Verso is shown to have a low sense of self-preservation and self-esteem, believing himself to be a pale imitation of the real Verso.
He’s lived a life filled with misery and pain like the copy of a dead man he has never met, nor will he ever meet. Verso is nothing less than suicidal, and he wants to be free from his suffering, pleading for Alicia/Maelle to unpaint him.
Acceptance - Renoir
Acceptance is the final stage of grief,one in which we finally come to terms with our reality and no longer deny what has happened.Most who have reached this stage direct their focus towards cherishing the memories of the late loved one and moving forward in their healing journey with the loved ones who remain.
Renoir represents Acceptance. While he is introduced initially as a villain and has some amazinglybadass boss fights, the Renoir that we’ve come to fear is the Painted Renoir, shaped by the grieving Aline.The real Renoir was the Curator,who had been helping Expedition 33 on their journey since early Act 1.
The entire conflict that plagues the Canvas revolves around Renoir’s attempts (with Clea’s help) to drag Aline out of the Canvas so that he can get rid of it, all in the hopes that this would deprive her of something to cling onto so that they can all move on as a family and heal together.
“For the sake of the living, we must part with the dead.”
Of course, this has put him not just in conflict with Aline, but eventually with Alicia.
We see him as a villain only because we’ve grown to love the inhabitants of the Canvas, and because of this, Renoir’s actions feel like the genocide of an entire Canvas, but “life keeps forcing cruel choices. We do what we must.” He only wants to free his wife from the grief that eats away at her.
It’s rare to find a decent antagonist with whom you agree, and Renoir is fortunately one of them.Consider his perspective:he has watched his wife wither and die from her long stint in the Canvaswhile his eldest daughter wages a one-woman war and his youngest is merely a ghost of her former self. Nobody sane would allow their family to continue crumbling in that manner.
If saving his family means making them hate him by destroying the last piece of Verso’s soul, then he is willing to make that sacrifice, and whether you like it or not,Renoir deserves some respect for that.
Among the grieving Dessendre family, Renoir is the only one who can see thathis family needs to stand together to heal,and they cannot do that if Aline and Alicia are too busy burying their heads in the proverbial sand.
Closing Remarks
Expedition 33is agame made with love,andits deeply personal narrative is perhaps one of the best the community has seen in recent years, exploring the very relatable and inevitable human experience of dealing with loss.
Sandfall Interactive knows just how important it is for them to form an emotional connection between the narrative and the player, andExpedition 33’smeditation on loss resonates with just about anybody.
Grief is an essential aspect of human experience; it is the price we pay for love,and it is important to remember the motto that Expeditioners repeat ad infinitum: “When one falls, we continue.”
We’ve seen the strife that grief has wrought on the Dessendre family and the Canvas.No matter who we are, we are all affected by the void of those we’ve lost.While those like Aline and Alicia may choose to refuse to face their pain through escapism, we can see the destruction it can bring not just to themselves, but to those around them if they don’t properly process their trauma.
We must accept things as they are, not how we want them to be.
In time, it is only through properly processing the pain with adequate support that we can truly heal from grief.In Renoir’s words, the best we can do in the face of grief is “hold onto each other.“And as the white Benisseur in the Red Woods says, “Grief is not a burden to be carried alone.”
I’m reminded of a moment at the beginning of the game between Gustave and Sophie before her Gommage.Gustave says somberly, “I’m not fine,” to which Sophie responds, “You will be.”
Grieving is natural, and while the healing journey may last a lifetime, you will be okay as long as you have people (like Esquie) who will be there for your “wheeeeees” as well as your “whoooooos.”
Life is but a journey of “wheewhoowheewhoos.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review
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