2025-04-29 19:57:26

Only a few hours in but I felt compelled to leave a quick review to give this game the thumbs up it so clearly deserves. It's completely blown me away and deserves all the positive attention it can get right now.

It's an extraordinarily well crafted experience, visually stunning, mechanically fresh and emotionally resonant. You can clearly see the talent behind it. I was genuinely surprised to learn that some of the developers were in fact ex-Ubisoft developers, It's incredible to see what passionate developers can create when they're free from corporate chains.

Ironically, they've well and truly outdone their former employer in every way despite only having 1/70th of the manpower available to them. The world design is breathtaking and the soundtrack is phenomenal. A true work of art and exactly the kind of innovation the industry desperately needs more of.

2025-04-28 12:38:38

When 33 French devs escape from Ubisoft to build their own game they proved that the real issue with big studios isnt lack of talent or heart but horrendous corporate leadership.

2025-04-28 04:51:50

My God, this game. This is what I imagine Final Fantasy would be if Square Enix had continued using turn based combat. The combat seems like the natural evolution of what modern turn based should be, it's absolutely god-tier.

If I had to describe what this game is like, I'd say it's a faithful combination of the following games:

- Classic Final Fantasy
- Persona
- Legend of Dragoon
- Sea of Stars
- Metaphor ReFantazio
- Etc

If you like any of those, you'll love this, and if you don't like turn based combat for some reason, try this anyway, because it's the most engaging turn based system I've maybe ever seen.

The visuals are GODLY, the music is DIVINE, the characters and voice acting is all top tier, and the story/world building will blow your mind.

10/10 - Exactly what I wanted !

2025-04-28 01:50:52

Exceeded everyone's expectations. This game is triple A standard, excelling every element that makes a game good.

Excellent gameplay, soundtrack, acting, story, graphics. No controversy or drama, just a clean good game with minimal bugs (if any) at launch. No predatory micro-transactions, no significant content locked behind a paywall, no battlepasses. Playable offline, controller and keyboard friendly.

This game is only a few features from being a perfect game. Still Game of the Year for me.

2025-04-26 16:44:38

---{ Graphics }--- 2025 GOTY (To me)
☑ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☑ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☐ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☐ Decent
☑ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☑ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☑ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☑ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☐ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10
☑ 33

2025-04-25 23:24:31

It’s honestly wild and mind blowing that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was made by such a small team. Not “impressive for an indie”, just impressive, period. The sheer quality of this game, from the art direction to the combat systems to the way it all just feels so cohesive, speaks volumes about what can happen when creative people aren’t buried under layers of corporate and political nonsense.

And that’s the thing. This isn’t just about a few talented devs making a cool game. It’s about what the industry could look like if we stopped making creativity run a gauntlet of approval meetings, milestones, and metrics before it can even breathe. You can feel the difference in Expedition 33. It’s personal. It’s focused. It’s weird in the best way. The team clearly had a vision and were absolutely allowed to follow it.

Honestly, Clair Obscur is the kind of game you don’t just enjoy, you root for. Because it represents something bigger. It’s a reminder that games don’t need to cost $200 million or have 400 names in the credits to be meaningful. Sometimes, they just need a team with something to say and the freedom to say it.

This is one of those games. It’s special. And it’s a little rebellious, in the best way possible.

2025-04-25 08:31:07

I was hyped for this game, I saw a few pictures and 1 trailer, was told by many people not to look up too much because even seeing the party could lead to spoilers, I was told, if you love turn based RPGS you will love this.

I do love turn based RPGS, but I do not love this.

I have never seen a game have literally everything be perfect yet absolutely fumble the landing. The dodge and parry system can make or break your experience. If you are good at games like Sekiro or rhythm games ignore everything I said. If you play turn based games because you appreciate the slow and calculated gameplay or have bad reaction time this game will be a nightmare. I do not enjoy having a win or loss be entirely dependent on if i can press a button fast enough, this feel like a bunch of people sat in a room and said that turn based was boring and tried to make it fun. They didn't, they took away what is fun about turn based games for me.

In the early stages a few missed dodges or parries will straight up kill you because the game is balanced around you basically being able to never be hit, but as you go on you can level to reduce damage, but this doesnt mean you can ignore the mechanic now, enemies will start inflicting statuses, attack down, defense down, stuns that take away your turns, marks that make you take more damage, some of their attacks chain up to 5 times making you weave dodges, parries and jumps. I could maybe understand if there was a flash or a button prompt to help you dodge, but there is none of that, or a setting to make dodging easier without setting the whole game to story mode, but there isn't. The devs realized people may not be able to do quick time events for attacks so they added an option to do them automatically, but nothing for dodges, if you cant do one you cant do the other.

I sadly cant recommend this to anyone who likes a turn based game for being turn based.

2025-04-25 07:06:20

This was initially a positive review, and I only intended to update it if, as I had written at the time, the game "catastrophically fails" later into it.
Now to be clear, I do still "recommend" this game, at least if you're into the idea of a turn-based Sekiro (with JRPG mechanics), I'm mainly putting this as a negative review to counter all the people who dropped positive reviews with 2 hours in the game.
There's a lot say about this game, I have completed all optional content and gotten all achievements (save for 2 common ones that I can't be bothered with rn) and it was a rollercoaster. There's a length limit for steam reviews, so I'll mostly be focusing on the negatives and let this be a note to my fellow french people, as there's plenty of reviews already talking about the positives, but first:

[h1]The play order[/h1]

So you want to play this game? the game tells you nothing, so here's the "intended" order in which you're supposed to be doing things:
[list]
[*] First, do the main story, you can do side dungeons as you go if their gates are yellow or blue (red = higher level than you, yellow = your level, blue = lower level). Most of the overworld bosses and enemies you find can be fought, but you'll find a few with healthbars in the hundreds of thousands or millions, those you need to wait until Act 3 of the story.
[*] At Act 3, you unlock the ability to do all the side content - but you should finish the main story first (you'll be able to go back to the side content after reaching the end), as the end of the story is balanced around you not doing the side content (there, you'll also find equipment that'll be very useful for the side content)
[/list]

[h1]Combat & Balance[/h1]

It's initially fine, but for most of Act 1 & 2 of the main story, the combat feels pretty bad. There are two main reasons for this:
[list]
[*] Your attacks's damage are capped at 9999, and you start reaching that cap very early (level 10...), so until Act 3 where the cap is removed, combat is frustrating as you are continuously c*ck-blocked
[*] Simultaneously, despite the damage cap, as you try optimizing your party, you do way too much damage to the story bosses. I've killed major story bosses [spoiler](the Axons)[/spoiler] within 2 turns, and clearly a lot of effort went into them and their mechanics, but you don't get to see it.
[/list]

At Act 3 of the story, you finally get to play the "real game", and the balance mostly works. It's really a shame that you have to be 15 hours into the story for the combat to finally become the way it's meant to be, and not this weird watered-down version. Some other things, too:
[list]
[*] The combat is incredibly-biased towards parrying. You have a choice to either dodge or parry, the idea being that dodging is the safe method to avoid damage, and parrying is the high-risk, high-reward way. The reward for parrying is so great however that you should always do it, there's a few special enemies even that can only be beat by parrying.
Parrying is what gives you action points for skills, parrying is what lets you counterattack, which is an incredibly high source of damage, and counterattacks are also the main source of stun damage. Dodges in theory give you a bigger window, but in practice you will often miss your parry because the enemy did a feint, and dodges do not give you a big enough window to recover from that either.
[*] There's a good number of enemies with attacks that you have to suffer first before being able to avoid them, they either have feints or unreactable speed. My favorites (not) are the well-telegraphed attacks with sound cues, followed by an immediate second hit.
[*] Fighting the merchants is a fun idea and a nice change of pace in the middle of a dungeon. Until the endgame anyway, where merchant fights start to become 1v3 fights, which turns them into annoying, painful fights, [i]just to be given the right to buy from them[/i] (and the prices are certainly not cheap either!)
[*] Now let's talk [spoiler]Simon.[/spoiler] [spoiler]Simon[/spoiler] is a superboss. Very clearly the last enemy you're supposed to fight in a playthrough, but the fight really didn't feel great. [spoiler]Phase 1 is fine, Phase 2 just is unfair. You do not get healed into phase 2, but you lose your gradient gauge buildup, it was cool finding that out after I saved it during phase 1. First off, why can he just remove your dead party from the battle? What's the point of revive items then? Why is such a mechanic RNG-based of all things, making it entirely luck-based whether your run is over or not? Secondly, yeah, unreactable attacks woven into really long combo, and insane AoE attack with insane damage.
There's virtually no difference between hard difficulty and normal difficulty for Simon. You get oneshot anyway. And that really shouldn't be the case?? As advertisted by the description of normal difficulty, what I expect is a challenging fight where I'll be constantly on the backfoot, [i]not[/i] a fight where missing a single parry/dodge wipes out my entire party. That's just not fun. If I wanted that, I would have chosen the hard difficulty.[/spoiler]
[/list]

[h1]Other Notes[/h1]

[list]
[*] Dungeons tell you if they're higher level than you; overworld enemies however do [i]not[/i], which makes for a poor experience of finding out the hard way.
[*] The autosave is wonky. It doesn't seem to ever save in the overworld. When I was going through overworld bosses, after beating 2 and losing to a 3rd one (turned out it was way above my level), I was rolled back so far I had to redo the 2 I had beaten..
[*] The overworld map display is very barren of information. This isn't inherently bad, Elden Ring has that, but see, the key difference is that ER lets you place your own markers on the map so you can keep track of the location of things. A map with no information on which I cannot write the information myself is just bad UX.
[*] The pictos (equipment) system is rough. You cannot upgrade them, you have to hope you'll find the upgrade you need soon, but you're more likely to find an ugrade for some pictos you're never gonna use..
[*] Presumably this is what the "Lumina" system aims to partially address, but that has its own issues; The Luminas get really out of hand during the endgame, as you have so many to keep track of, and it makes any attempt to respec your character pretty annoying.
[*] The weapons system is a bit better than the pictos; you can upgrade the weapons, [i]but[/i] you can also randomly find upgrades to weapons for free, and if you had already invested in that weapon, ofc you do not get your investment refunded.. Not all weapons have free upgrades either (or not in areas that you're close to reach), so it's not something you can just patiently wait for
[*] There's a lot of weapons! There's like, ~20 weapons per character, which can widely change their playstyle, and that's pretty cool! However, their damage mostly scales with your character's stats, so you often have to reallocate your character's stats to make the best use of them. This is not free, and while the item it costs [i]is infinitely farmeable[/i], it makes the process unnecessarily tedious and disincentive experimenting with builds.
[*] At the time of writing this review, 10 days since the release of the game, all the weapons that only scale with one attribute still do not work. (Their scaling breaks upon upgrading past S-rank)
[*] The mimes would be an interesting encounter if they were a one-time encounter. As recurring encounters, they're really annoying, especially compared to the other reccuring encounters like the Pétanks
[*] [spoiler]You only have use for one Bourgeon skin, so why do all the Bourgeons drop one? What am I gonna do with it?[/spoiler]
[*] The words "m*rde" and "p*tain" aren't translated if you play in english. For me it doesn't matter, I speak french, but why make it incomprehensible to the people who don't?
[/list]

2025-04-24 10:58:21

Goes to show what the industry is capable of if you arent under the thumb of a greedy company, These devs left ubisoft and the first game they make is a masterpiece.

2025-04-24 10:21:40

When 30 (!) French devs escape from Ubisoft to build their own game, they proved that the real issue with big studios isn’t lack of talent or heart, but horrendous corporate leadership.