Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The short version

A debut studio walked up to the JRPG genre, painted over its dustiest rules, and delivered the best turn-based combat in years wrapped in a story that genuinely hurts. Expedition 33 is the kind of game that makes the industry's excuses — turn-based is niche, new IP is risky, you need 400 people — sound silly.

Story

Once a year, a godlike Paintress wakes and writes a number on a distant monolith, and everyone of that age turns to petals and smoke. The number counts down. This year she will write 33, so the 33-year-olds of Lumière board a ship, as expeditions have for decades, to sail out and kill her before she paints again. None of the previous expeditions came back.

What follows is a meditation on grief wearing the clothes of a fantasy adventure, and it commits. Characters you love are not safe — the game proves that within its opening hours and never lets you relax again. Gustave, Maelle, Lune, and the rest of the expedition are written with a novelist's patience, and the French-tinged voice cast delivers some of the best performances the genre has ever recorded. The final act makes a swing so big we sat in silence through the credits. Not every player will accept where it lands; every player will remember it.

Gameplay

Turn-based on paper, white-knuckle in practice. Enemies telegraph real-time attacks on your turn's off-beat, and dodging or — if you're brave — parrying them turns defense into a rhythm game where perfect play means taking zero damage and counterattacking for ruinous numbers. It is Sekiro grafted onto Final Fantasy X, and it works so well that going back to passive turn-based combat afterward feels like sitting in traffic.

Each party member is practically a different game: Gustave banks overcharge for burst, Lune converts spent spells into elemental stains she cashes in later, Maelle stance-dances between offense and defense. Add Pictos — passive skill gems that unlock permanently once mastered — and the build space gets deep enough that we rebuilt the whole party three times just to see what would happen. The one wobble: late-game scaling comes apart, with the right Picto combinations trivializing bosses that were murdering us an hour earlier.

Visuals & Performance

Belle Époque France dissolved into a painter's fever dream: parasols and wrought iron against floating archipelagos, enemies that look like brushstrokes given teeth. It's the best-directed RPG world in years, all scored by a soundtrack — Lorien Testard's — that swings from chanson to choir to distorted strings and has lived in our heads since April. On PC it runs cleanly at high settings; a handful of hitches in the biggest arenas, nothing worse.

Craft — 9.5

The parry-driven combat is a genuine genre contribution, the build system is deep without being opaque, and the presentation is world class. Docked only for the endgame balance wobble and forgettable traversal segments between fights.

Hold — 9.1

Fifty-five hours took us through the story and most optional content, and the post-game boss ladder is still standing over us, arms crossed. New Game+ with different party builds is legitimately tempting because the combat is the point, not just the vehicle.

The verdict

Herd approved with both nostrils flared. The best RPG of 2025 and the most confident debut in a generation. Bring tissues, and learn to parry.