GamerEscape

Being on a bit of a RPG spree lately, I was quite intrigued by the opportunity to get a look at Sandfall Interactive’s upcoming title, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, what with it seeming to have a nice fantasy/sci fi blend and a photorealistic art style. For this preview, we played through an early demo offering around five hours of content. Plenty enough to get a feel for the game and get to know its world and characters.

For a demo like this I tend to focus on the gameplay elements over the story, as RPG demos often have different or removed story elements so as not to spoil the full game, but we do get to experience a bit of it here. Gustave is our main character, who is a member (possibly the leader?) of Expedition 33. The Expedition is on a continuing mission (from those Expeditions which came before) to seek and defeat the Paintress, a quite unusual antagonist who paints a number every year, and everyone who is that age will disappear. Each Expedition seems to represent those in the final year of their life, thus in this case everyone in Expedition 33 appears to be 33 years of age.

After arriving at their destination, a great battle ensues and the Expedition is largely wiped out. Gustave encounters a man who is much older than everyone else (which is unusual because there shouldn’t be anyone over the age of 33). During the battle Gustave blacks out and awakens later amongst scores of bodies, and the game begins with you searching for anyone of the Expedition that may have survived. From here, story elements are rather spaced out, and while there are some deep moments to be felt, things played out a bit slowly for my taste.

Expedition 33‘s combat gave off a distinctive yet somewhat familiar vibe for me. I’ve played a fairly wide range of RPGs, and with its character-by-character turn-based system making me think of various games such as the now-defunct (sadly) Dissidia: Opera Omnia, The Last Remnant, and probably several others I can’t name quickly, combined with its quick time event (QTE) system which made me immediately think of Super Mario RPG, the game combined multiple popular combat system elements into a remarkably cohesive experience. I even felt a little bit of Metaphor: ReFantazio in there with its battle UI and camera view.

And then on top of that, there’s a rather unique and fun mechanic, wherein each character has a ranged attack that can be aimed freely on their turn to strike weak points or damage enemies that evade other types of attacks. It’s worth noting here that I was encouraged to use a controller for the demo, but as a rule, I make sure any game on PC is fully playable with mouse and keyboard, and actually found mouse control to be very useful for the aiming mechanic.

The characters available to play each have a unique skill tree, and special items you can attach to them which grant bonuses and tweak how they play, giving some room for customization. I gained access to quite a few skills and it was enjoyable working out how different characters’ skills could work together. For instance, one character might apply a burning effect and then another character can exploit that to do more damage with a different skill. This felt important to optimizing the characters’ potential.

I would caution that the game seems to rather heavily rely on the Mario RPG-esque quicktime events (press a button at the right time while attacking/being attacked to do more damage or avoid a hit) which could be tricky for players with limited dexterity. Some enemies will force you to either dodge or die on almost every attack, so one slip up with your timing can end a battle.

There is an accessibility option that will eliminate the offensive QTEs so, thankfully, the developers seem to be conscious of this. But it’s worth noting that some players would rather not lower the difficulty, so I’d like to see them consider at least easing the difficulty of the defensive QTEs or make failing them a bit less punishing. Another option might be to include a battle restart command, since learning enemy attack timings is so critical and requires some failure along the way.

As far as story goes, I didn’t get to see too much in my time with the game, but it was enough to get a feel for the characters and their personalities. There’s an interesting dynamic going on with the party characters, whom both look out for each other, at least out of obligation, but definitely not without some head butting. Any good RPG party needs friendship with a bit of friction and I saw that here.

Generally, I liked what I saw with my short time with the Expedition 33, and I’m definitely interested in discovering its world and its combat system when the full game launches.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is set for release on April 24th, 2025, for PS5, Xbox Series, and PC.

Preview copy provided by Kepler Interactive. Screenshots taken by writer.