I did not reviewClair Obscur: Expedition 33, but through my entire first playthrough, I thought it had 10/10 potential. The combat is perfect, the writing is engrossing, and the characters are some of my favorites in any game I’ve ever played. Before I could issue my unofficial score though, I needed to see how it ended. If the mystery of the paintress came together in a satisfying way, only then would it be allowed on the very prestigious list of Eric’s Perfect Games.
While I didn’t review Expedition 33,our own Ryan Tompson-Bamsey did, and you should definitely give it a read.
For the first 25 or so hours, it really could have gone either way. Expedition 33 has an incredible narrative hook and perhapsthe best prologue of any game ever(it’s on the list of Eric’s Perfect Prologues), but once you get into the meat of the game, the story has a tendancy to stack questions on top of questions. By the time you’re finally facing off with the Paintress you still don’t really know who or what she is, and part of me wondered if we’d ever find out, or if we’d be forced to fill in the gaps ourselves. Well, wedofind out, and boy, what a mindscrew that one was, right?
Family Matters
Expedition 33 throws a lot at you at the end of Act 2, and to be honest, I’m still trying to put all the pieces together. When the Expedition gets back to Lumiere to celebrate their victory over the Paintress, it’s pretty obvious that something unexpected is going to happen. And yet, what happens next still manages to be completely unexpected.
The end-of-act reveal is that the Paintress was never responsible for the gommage, and, in fact, she’s been protecting everyone from total annihilation. The number she paints on the front of her monolith is a warning to the people of Lumiere; a way to tell them that she’s slowly losing her power to keep the oldest among them alive. With the Paintress defeated, the true annihilator’s power is unleashed, and the entire population of Lumiere, regardless of their age, is gommaged all at once.
That’s a pretty big twist that makes it hard to imagine what could possibly happen next. Everyone, including Sciel, Lune, and Maelle, has just died, leaving behind only the immortal Verso and his gestrel BFF Monoco. To make things even more inconceivable, it seems that Verso knew this was going to happen and still went through with killing the Paintress. It’s a lot to take in, but before we even have a second to digest all of that, an infinitely bigger reveal happens: nothing in this entire world was ever real.
In the epilogue that follows, we learn about the painters and their war with the writers. Verso and his family are all painters, people who can create worlds within paintings using the power of lumina. Verso is killed by the writers while saving his sister, Maelle, who is actually named Alicia, from a fire. The family matriarch, Aline, is consumed with grief, and retreats into a painted world that Verso created as a child - the last remaining connection she has to her son. This is the world where Expedition 33 takes place.
Verso’s father Renior follows his wife into the painting to bring her back to reality. He wants to erase this world and force Aline to leave, and their ensuing battle causes the fracture that separates Lumiere from the rest of the content. In their weakened state, Renoir becomes the curator and Aline becomes the Paintress. She paints a new version of her family to stand by her side, including the Renior who tries to stop Expedition 33 from killing the Paintress, the ghostly version of her daughters Clea and Alicia, and our Verso - a shadow of her dead son.
Maelle is the real Alicia, who entered the painting to help her father rescue her mother, but due to the strength of the Paintress’ lumina, was reborn as Maelle without any memories of her real life. When Maelle is gommaged, Alicia regains her memories, and decides she wants to stay in this world with Verso and save the people she has come to believe is her family over the last 16 years.
How’s That For A Twist?
All of that is explained with subtle exposition over the course of about 20 minutes of cutscenes, and if you didn’t sit there slack-jawed just trying to wrap your mind around all of this reality-shattering new information, then I guess you’re a lot smarter than me, because I didn’t seeanyof this coming.
This is some incredibly bold storytelling - bolder even thankilling off the main character in the first act. Revealing a higher plane of existence that exists above the world we know at the very end of the story is a pretty challenging thing to do. Imagine if the Matrix kept Thomas Anderson on the run from Agent Smith for the entire movie before revealing at the climax that the whole world is an illusion, or if WandaVision hadn’t broken its Sitcom veneer until the final episode. It takes some pretty big ones to pull your audience into a world and make them fall in love with its characters, only to reveal at the very end that none of it was real.
I’m not much of a game replayer, but the moment the credits rolled, I couldn’t wait to restart Expedition 33. The ending recontextualizes the entire game, and I’m excited to see how that new information adds depth to all of the interactions between Maelle, Verso, and Renoir throughout the game. I want to see all of the little hints and discover things I missed. I still have questions about things like the Axons and their connection to Sciel and Lune, and I hope having the full picture now will make playing Expedition 33 again an even richer experience.
Sometimes twists are bad when they seemingly come out of nowhere, but Sandfall managed to deliver a complicated metaphysical backstory in a way that made me even more excited about what was already my favorite game of the year. Expedition is a certified member of the Eric’s Perfect Game club. That ending locked it in.
