Sixty-seven years ago, the world broke. An island city reminiscent of early 20th Century Paris with a bent and distorted Eiffel Tower and an Arc de Triomphe which has been split in two harkens back to this event which separated the city of Lumiere from the continent and left it adrift in the sea. This catastrophe is called "the Fracture." In the aftermath of the Fracture, a monolith rose on the northern horizon. A giantess placed a glowing number 100 upon the side of the monolith, then collapsed into a fetal position at the base of the monolith.

Once every year, the giantess, named "the Paintress" by the citizens of Lumiere, rises from her place of rest and erases the number, replacing it with the next lower number. When she does so, all the people in Lumiere who have aged past the number erased are erased with it. They vanish into dust and rose-petals never to be seen again.

Initially, this event went largely unnoticed by the people of Lumiere. Eventually, however, the connection was made between the transition of the number and the disappearance of the people. Then the people of Lumiere began to send expeditions to the continent to see if they could stop the eventual doomsday and, if not, at least blaze a trail and prepare the way for future expeditions in the hopes that one expedition will eventually succeed.

It is here that the story begins. Gustave, a 33-year old inventor, is embarking upon Expedition 33 with his team of fellow expeditioners including his young ward Maelle. Their mission: stop the Paintress if possible, and do all they can to pave the way for those who come after.

From the very beginning of this story to its conclusion, Clair Obscur builds and holds your emotional investment in the cast, your interest in the mission and story, and it leaves you wanting more. The themes of grief, loss, hope, courage, self-sacrifice, and familial love run throughout the story and are painted in a deeply moving and beautiful way. Grief and loss are not glossed, they are foregrounded and, ultimately, Expedition 33 is a story that contrasts ways that grief and loss are dealt with. Hope drives the narrative, and the characters remind one another that the mission matters, even if it's only to give the next expedition a better chance. They challenge each other to have the courage to carry on and not give up hope.

Self-sacrifice for the sake of others is the motivating factor for the Expeditioners. Most of them dedicate the last year of their life, not to hedonism, but to work, sweat, bleed and possibly die to maybe stop the Paintress and her doomsday clock and to help those who would come after should they fail. Maelle, Expedition 33's youngest member, sacrifices even more.

And family? Well, family lies at the heart of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, hidden in plain sight.

In terms of genre, Clair Obscur is a French-made Japanese-inspired Role Playing Game. For those who play JRPGs, such as Final Fantasy X or Persona 5: Royal it plays very much like those style of games. When you get into a scuffle with monsters you see your party lined up facing off against the imposing baddies and you take turns whacking at your opponent by selecting which attack to do from a menu of available abilities.

The developers of Clair Obscur did a little twist on this by adding both offensive and defense reflex triggers. When a character attacks you are given a varying number of timed prompts to press a button in order to optimally perform the attack. Failure will often cause fewer hits to connect, halve the damage, or even hurt the character instead of the enemy.

Defensively, this is where they ramped this up to 11. In order to survive battles in Clair Obscur you must master the defensive moves of dodging and parrying. Dodging is easier, by which I mean there is a larger time window to execute the dodge and not dodging perfectly still avoids the damage. Parrying is harder, in that there is no room for error, but the trade-off is if you successfully parry every attack in the monster's move set for that attack (and there's usually more than one) then you do a counter-attack which damages the monster on their turn. There are dozens of bad things out there trying to take you down and they all have at least two different moves with varying tells, timing, and number of strikes. Bosses can have upwards of 10 different unique attacks which all must be memorized in order to effectively dodge, let alone parry. Every battle, especially at the beginning, feels like a fight for your life as a result. The game doesn't hold your hand on these attacks. You just have to learn them all the hard way. Paying attention to sounds, movement, and other tells can actually help but this is not an adventure to undertake while half-awake or with your brain on auto-pilot. All that to say: there are three difficulty settings and the primary way they affect the difficulty is by adjusting the timing threshold required for dodging and parrying.

The major up-side to this system is that if you dedicate yourself to getting really good at dodging and parrying, you can take down optional super-bosses way earlier than you normally could and grab the top-tier equipment that comes with it early, but the downside is it'll eat up a bunch of time whittling it down and retrying because usually a single mistake against an optional boss is fatal when you're under-leveled and under-equipped.

While exploring the stunningly and beautifully rendered environments on your adventure, you follow one of your characters in a 3rd person camera view from behind. The camera can be rotated to any angle, even while moving. You can assign any character in your party to be the character the camera focuses on and the other characters in the active party will follow along to either side. A complaint some have made about Clair Obscur (not me, I actually like this) is that there is no mini-map when navigating the environments. Like a true trail-blazer, you just have to navigate by recognizing landmarks, following the obvious paths and keeping your eyes peeled for side passages to explore. There are visual clues that help guide you through the areas, light lamp-posts, lanterns, and glowing coral reefs; basically, light will lead the way, but it's subtle and beautiful.

However, I will offer one critique here. Often, when navigating an environment, you will see a path you think you should be able to jump, walk, or climb up only to discover that there is an invisible wall stopping you from doing so. You walk forward until the air in front of you stops your forward progress. Sometimes you find yourself looking over the edge of a precipice. You decide to end it all and find you can't move forward off the edge. The invisible wall has thwarted you again. Then you visit a different area, see a precipice, and this time as you walk forward you careen downwards into a cavern where you land gently with a acrobatic somersault roll and take to your feet fully uninjured after falling from an unsurvivable height. There is even one area where you have to ascend a mountain of nonsensically piled stuff, much of which is free-floating, and falling only results in you being teleported back to the base of the mountain. It definitely is a nit-pick, but it broke the immersion a little for me.

There are rest-stops along the way in the environments marked by flags planted by previous expeditions. At these flags you can adjust your ability points, rest and recover all your depleted heath potions, and spend any newly acquired ability points. Resting will respawn all the baddies you defeated, though, so if you backtrack you'll have to mess with them again or avoid them.

Each character in your Expedition party is completely unique. They have unique skills, weapons, and combat mechanics. One character has a metal arm he can charge with energy to unleash a massive discharge of lightning damage. Another character switches between various stances. Another employs kind of a light and dark mechanic. Since the fighting party size is capped at three, you have to put who you want in the party and who you want in reserve in case of an unfortunate total party wipeout.

Equipment comes in the form of Weapons and "Pictos." Weapons are character-specific, have various features and abilities, and can be improved as you go. Pictos are abilities that you can equip to each character which also provide some stat boosts. Each character can have 3 equipped Pictos. Once a character has fought, won and was conscious at the end of 4 battles with a Pictos equipped, the ability becomes available for any character to use by allocating a resource called "Lumina" towards that ability. Abilities can range in cost from 1 to 40 Lumina to equip and you get Lumina points by leveling up (1 per level) and by using a common item called a "Color of Lumina" at camp. The build options granted by this system are nearly limitless.

The visuals in Clair Obscur are gorgeous. The characters are life-like. They are not in the anime-style of Persona 5 or Trails games. They look like real people. They are voiced flawlessly and their speaking animations are near-perfect. The environments range from rocky and barren, to lush and forested, to bizarrely beautiful. But they all impress with unique design elements and immersive details.

Clair Obscur's soundtrack has won awards, and it deserves to. It has beautiful, sometimes haunting, classical themes punctuated by intense power-metal boss fight anthems. I don't know if I can say it any better than that, you just have to hear it to get it. The voice-acting was performed by top-notch by gaming dialogue professionals like Ben Starr and Jennifer English as well as Hollywood actors Charlie Cox and Andy Serkis.

I had a bug-and-crash-free experience on my Windows PC. Clair Obscur is stable and never made me worry about a sudden crash costing me hours of play. The controls are good, but as a PC gamer I prefer having a solid keyboard and mouse experience. Clair Obscur can be played that way, but the developers designed it to be played with a controller and they didn't put in much effort to make the keyboard and mouse experience a pleasant one.

The violence in the game you commit is in self-defense against primarily monstrous imaginary creatures. Some are more monstrous than others, but these "Nevrons" as they are called are nearly always hostile and attack you on sight. As you take damage, the characters are covered in spots of blood. Healing removes that effect, and walking around mostly dead will result in the character appearing to be covered in blood almost from head to toe. You don't dismember any of these creatures and their corpses disappear after defeating them. There are a couple of cutscenes where humans are dismembered or decapitated by villains.

As a French game, many of the particular or unique words are French, like "Gommage." A couple French-language swear words are also utilized in the English version, probably just to mix it up. Specifically, they are the French equivalents of the English F-word and S-word, but for some reason they just sound so much more polite in French. They also say the English F-word fairly frequently in the beginning of the story. How often these words are used diminishes later on in the story.

On the sexual content front there is surprisingly little to tell. The default outfits for the expeditioners are tailor-made for each character and are military-issue-esque in style. One character's default outfit displays her stomach. Beyond that, there are optional outfits for all the characters that can be found as you travel. Some of them are swimsuits, but they are styled after early 1900s bathing suits and are not trying to over-sexualize the characters. That's about as revealing as it gets. In the prologue you can interact with the door to a building where you can hear the sounds of people enjoying their last day of life before they are erased, but you can't enter the building or see anything. Without getting into spoilers, I will make some other comments along these lines. One character can pursue a romantic relationship with one of two other party members. They are only heterosexual options, and it's either one or the other not both in the same playthrough. When you complete that process and maximize your relationship with either person, all you get is a tastefully-worded text summary of what transpires. There is some very ambiguous dialogue between the two female members of the team who can be pursued by the male team member mentioned above which could lead you to conclude that they shared a same-sex sexual encounter in the past. However, I do not think it was the developer's intent for people to come to that conclusion.

To move towards the conclusion of this review I want to praise Clair Obscur's writers and developer for doing what I did not expect and producing a game with such a compelling story that deals honestly and beautifully with such real and relevant topics. I cannot spoil this game for you in this review, but if I could this review would be ten times longer. Suffice to say, the message of this game is about how to deal with grief and loss within a family and Clair Obscur portrays it masterfully. I've seen other articles say that the title of the game is a reference to an Italian art style that deals with contrast between light and dark. Maybe so, that interpretation has some merit. However, I think the meaning of the title is Hidden in Plain Sight. In French, Clair means clear, Obscur means covered, hidden. Clair Obscur literally hides a wealth of lore, story motifs, and foreshadowed plot elements in plain sight if you are observant. So that's my interpretation of the somewhat ambiguous title to this amazing story.

Clair Obscur took me about 100 hours to do two full play-throughs (one of which was in New Game+) so I could experience both endings and pursue both of the romantic options to give the fullest treatment and my most informed opinion of the game. I managed to get all the Steam achievements as well. In my opinion it was time well spent and it flew by. Even after all that, I want more things to do in the world of Clair Obscur and would gladly play it a third time, just for the joy of it.

-Mike Desmond