Every Thought That I Have About Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

24 Jul, 2025

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is good. I have played it in its entirety, and resonated with many of the ideas it puts forth. I'm writing this for three reasons:

1. To collect my thoughts about it shortly after finishing it, before I forget all of this stuff, or to cement it in my head before I forget it.
2. To develop those thoughts; essay-writing is one of the best ways to think, after all, and there's a shocking amount in this game to think about and develop.
3. People need to make stuff, need creative expression, and if my hobby time is all input and no output I will go insane. If I never put anything out into the world then I will exist a little bit less. I don't want my hobbies to be entirely consumption. I'd like to exist.

Expedition 33 is two games. You play one of them at a time. One game is a turn-based action game where you alternate between a resource-management offense and a timing-based action puzzle defense, and the other game is a walking sim where you ride through a linear story revolving around art and grief. There is a trace amount of glue between these two games, but they are mostly independent from one another. I have chosen to talk about the combat half first, not because it is more important, but because the people interested exclusively in action combat are not going to be able to delay gratification to endure the story discussion first, while people interested exclusively in arthouse French cinema are quite used to sitting through things to get to the stuff they want. I will have plenty to say about art and grief later, I promise, but first, we must talk about parrying.

I. Parrying

I had heard horror stories about the parrying even before starting the game. The particular one that stuck out was this post complaining about the nature of parrying:

Came across this image of someone beating a side boss underleveled by taking zero damage via perfect parrying/dodging... for 43 minutes! In other words, if you can play the real-time part effectively your turn-based strategy basically doesn't matter at all - you're guaranteed to win eventually 😐

I don't want to pick on this person specifically; it was a fairly widespread sentiment that was bubbling up in my various social media timelines, and it was a strong worry for me going in. The tutorial fights didn't help in this regard, either, because counterattacks felt so much more powerful than ordinary skills against the tutorial enemies. I started to believe that parries were going to be a required part of the game. The game was telling me that perfect parry execution would be the baseline for competent play. I would not put any stats into defense or health, since I would never get hit. I would never use healing items or skills. Getting hit a single time would essentially prompt me to restart the game until I could do each fight perfectly. I saw myself finding this to be too tedious, getting fed up, and quitting.

None of that happened, I'm relieved to report. I soon realized that getting hit was not actually going to wipe out my whole health bar, so it would have been foolish to restart off of that alone. If I'm not restarting immediately, I may as well invest in defense and health and healing, to maximize the number of mistakes I was able to make. Before I knew it, I was playing the game, well, normally. The idea that I would go parry a boss for 43 minutes started to feel absurd. It was possible, with enough practice, but I could also just progress the game to see the rest of the story instead! I was eager to see what would happen next. Why would I burn hours on what amounts to a self-imposed challenge run?

At that point, the appropriate metaphor occurred to me for the parry=invincibility argument. It was Dark Souls naked SL1 runs. The argument that parrying invalidates all other defensive strategy was the same as an argument saying that because someone, somewhere, can beat Dark Souls at level 1 naked, that levels and items are irrelevant to combat in Dark Souls. The critics were right that this is unusual for a turn-based game, where numbers alone can make battles mathematically impossible, but it's par for the course in action games.

The trouble comes from the inherent tension in combining action and RPG combat. There's a fantastic thread by indie developer malec2b explaining this tension, which I'm paraphrasing a bit here. In action games, the promise of the game is that all received damage stems from a mistake that you made. If you make no mistakes, you will take no damage. If you fail at a battle, you only need to play better next time to succeed. In contrast, damage in turn-based RPGs is more like a resource that gets unavoidably burned over time. You are spending a real-life resource (time) converting your in-game resources (health, mana, items) into experience points and money. Strategy can change the rate that you burn these resources by adjusting incoming and/or outgoing damage¹, but unless you're defeating enemies in a single turn with your free attacks, you will inevitably run out. So, you go back to town to visit some kind of healing station (an inn, a pokemon center, whatever), spend money to regain all your combat resources, and go back out to fight more. If you ever fail at a battle, there's probably no way to overcome it by getting better at execution. Instead, you need to change what you're doing: a different strategy, different party makeup, saving less MP or fewer items, spending more time outside the difficult fight gaining experience points in easier fights, that sort of thing.

When we attempt to combine these, we are faced with a tough problem: how avoidable is damage? We could lean towards action, and make perfect, mistake-free play feasible. If we do that, though, then the RPG resource management is functionally deleted from the game. We could lean towards RPG, and make damage unavoidable, but then we have unsatisfying action gameplay that doesn't really let you feel like you're gaining skill over time. Action RPG designers are forced to walk a tightrope between these two modes of investment and reward.

A useful comparison here is the combat system in Final Fantasy 7 Remake and Rebirth. That battle system allows you to run around to avoid damage, or even parry some attacks, but either option removes your offense entirely. While attacking, you are simply always going to be taking some amount of damage, and the resource burn loop is able to kick in. It's a beautiful compromise where you can mostly avoid any instance of damage, but not every instance of damage. You must pick and choose which to avoid and which to soak.

I am happy to report that Clair Obscur, for most of its runtime, pulls off this tightrope walk. Perfect parrying, to my great relief, is only really doable with a great deal of practice and patience, an investment that does not really justify itself in the first few hours of the game when its expectations are being established. I was thrilled when I felt naturally compelled to invest points in defense and health. My fears were unfounded! Mistakes are inevitable, and the whole defensive side of the RPG gameplay was still worthwhile. I'd rather be able to take four hits instead of three, so I'll level defense and vitality. No problem.

The parrying mechanic itself is a well-baked cake of interesting design choices. I cannot imagine how many revisions they must have gone through to land on exactly this mix to maximize fun. To start with, there is no consistent indicator for parry timing, which makes natural indicators a kind of balance adjustment. An early boss, for example, has a spell² that does two explosions on the ground, with the parry timing being the third hit in the same rhythm. That is the easiest timing in the game, with strong indicators. The medium level is most physical attacks having a cutting-air sound cue, while most magic attacks have a high-pitched ding just before the hit, in addition to clear visual windups. At the hardest end, you have different lengths between the cue and the parry timing, along with elaborate visual feints like jumps or flips or wind-ups that are easily mistaken for a hit. The Renoir boss fights are the laughable extreme of the visual feints, with all kinds of strange spins and wiggles that don't generate real hits, which gets rightly parodied.

Dodging makes these possible to decode safely. A dodge has a wider success window, and if you happened to hit what the parry window would have been, you're rewarded with a "perfect" dodge. The wider window makes dodging safer, but doesn't lead to a counterattack or generate AP to spend on higher power attacks³. Thus, the tradeoff is a wager. You can go all-in on a parry, betting that you will hit the tighter window to have higher risk (you take damage if you miss, rather than merely a non-perfect dodge) for higher reward (a counterattack, which means a quicker victory, which means fewer defensive turns requiring parrying). I liked managing this tradeoff quite a bit, and I especially liked that every hit was an individual decision. That lets me start an attack sequence going for parrying, but if I miss one, and then I can switch to dodging for the rest of the sequence, since missing one parry meant I wasn't going to get a counter anyway.

I said that it manages the action/RPG balance for "most of its runtime", however, because there are exceptions. When facing trivial enemies, the action component disappears completely, because getting the first strike is trivial and there is never a defensive turn at all. When facing difficult enemies, the RPG component disappears completely, because getting one-shot by everything means you basically can't miss a parry and still be in a position to win. This is most extreme at the beginning of the game (when most enemies are higher level) and at the end of the game (when most enemies are lower level).

II. Difficulty Progression

I had no idea, at the start of the game, that the combat was going to play so differently at the beginning and end. It's subtle enough that I don't imagine most players would articulate it that way, and even if they could, it does not sound quite as punchy as all the dire warnings about parrying breaking the game, so I never saw it. Instead, my early impression was something like this: If I go down the main quest path, I'm playing a game where parrying is a nice bonus. If I face any side bosses, then I'm playing a version of the game for sickos, where I'm meant to retry the fights repeatedly to get perfect parries to clear them. That's what I thought the balance was designed around, a normies vs. sickos dichotomy, and I didn't feel like spending hours on each optional fight, so I just excused myself from side content entirely for quite a while.

For some reason, the game is quite opaque to gauging difficulty, so I carried this conception for a big chunk of the game. The only in-game indication for difficulty is that zone entrances will have the word "DANGER!" in red if you are below some specific level, though it does not tell you what level that is for each zone. Optional overworld bosses do not get even this indicator, you pretty much just have to run into them and see if you get wiped out in one hit or not.

The uncertainty lasted until I reached the first Axon areas at level 28 and found that they had the danger warning on them. This was the first time I had seen the warning on a main quest area, so it was at this point that I figured out that it was level-related rather than being a permanent fixture on side content. I figured that skipping so much side content had caused me to become under-leveled, so I went back down the map to check out previous optional areas. Foolishly, I thought starting from the very bottom and working my way up would be a sensible order, so I went to Dark Shore (which I now understand is one of the highest level areas in the game) and ate dirt. Ah, well. I looked elsewhere.

An early side section that caught my attention was the Gestral Beach with the jumping puzzle. The overworld appearance of it as a huge tower of junk was enough to pique my curiosity, and once I realized there was not going to be any combat, it dawned on me that perhaps previous optional areas were like this, too. Much to my surprise, I found areas that were not full dungeons, but often just single-screen theme pieces or small self-contained puzzles. There were even multiple areas called "Gestral Beach" that all had unique minigames! I regretted not finding these earlier. There was just no real signal that anything off the main path might not be combat for perfect parry sickos. I went around and cleaned up all of those, including some now-appropriate-level combat areas. I entered the first Axon area at level 32, and left second one at level 42, and had a pretty balanced run for those.

Speaking of Axons, I felt that most of the bosses were well balanced. The Lampmaster at the end of Act 1 was particularly nice because the first phase was fairly easy for me, and then there was a cutscene with the characters saying "wow that was kind of easy", and then the second phase was much harder, and the cutscene after that had the characters out of breath. I'm so used to other games getting this wrong, with a trivial fight resulting in an exhausted cutscene or vice versa, that I have to give Clair Obscure some credit for this. Most of the bosses before Act 3 took me 1-3 attempts, and the optional Chromatic enemies took me 2-5 attempts, which is the sweet spot for me. In particular, I appreciate when the first run of something is way too hard, and I can feel myself learning the timings and the specific mechanics of the boss, and then overcome them. There's a spectrum between clearing a boss on the first try, and having to run it into the ground for hours before clearing it, and each main scenario boss (and side bosses in appropriate level dungeons) were pretty tightly within that zone. At least, that was the case for the first two acts which makes up the vast majority of the story portion of the game.

In Act 3, things get way worse on this front. Having no clear avenue for progression like level indicators on each area, I decided to just do the sidequests involved with maxing out every party member's relationships, and then finish the game. The sidequests were brutal; Monoco's in particular took a huge number of attempts. These leaned very far into the all-action-no-RPG side of the spectrum and were not particularly fun; I felt more relieved than accomplished after them. Once those were clear, I had apparently leveled up enough to make the final area and the bosses in it a breeze. Had I done these the other way around, it may have constituted a gentler progression, but that's the danger of having such a narrow window where the balance works at all.

After finishing the story, things got even stranger. I completed most of the areas, the overworld bosses, and most of the Endless Tower on a relatively consistent but gradually easing difficulty curve. Once I was around level 87, I went to Renoir's Drafts to finish leveling to the 99 cap, where the difficulty almost entirely flipped.

I realized at this point that the ideal Picto/Lumina build was to assume that the fight would end in one turn, and therefore optimize my party around that. As it turns out, there are tons of Pictos for increasing damage at the beginning of a fight (first hit, or full health, or not having been hit yet, or with all party members alive, etc.). On top of this, the bonuses stack multiplicatively rather than additively, meaning that even a small bonus can punch above its weight. For example, five 10% bonuses do more than one 50% bonus, because 1.1^5 = 1.61, so you actually deal 61% bonus damage. That makes it preferable to equip many low-% bonuses instead of few high-% bonuses. If you add even a 5% bonus on top of the 5x10% set, due to the multiplicative stacking, you end up getting a 1.1^5 * 1.05 = 69.1% bonus overall. You have increased the base damage by 5%, as well as all of the other bonus damage by 5%, turning your bonus into an 8.1% boost. Even if an attempt was made to balance around one or two of these being active at a time, the math makes this quite easy to get out of hand with the huge number of bonuses available, and it's pretty hopeless to try to keep the balance constrained to account for it. The decision to do the math this way is the primary reason there are so many "one-shot the final boss" builds floating around.

Once I had this start-of-battle bonus stacking in place, the encounters became trivial immediately. The enemy packs rarely got a single turn, and I spent several hours getting "no damage" experience bonuses doing laps in the Golden Tree area, mechanically just using the same abilities over and over. Satisfying RPG grinding, sure, but probably not the vision for what was ostensibly the hardest dungeon in the game.

Ironically, in this RPG-tilted version of the game, my original fears about parrying actually did come to exist in the game. It really is true that defense and health don't matter, and it really is true that healing abilities are pointless (or even harmful, since there are several bonuses which rely on being low health). The irony is that this was not the result of complete action mastery with perfect parries, but rather the result of complete RPG mastery, or at least mastery of reading all of the Lumina descriptions. Some of that is expected; over-leveling in RPGs or getting ultimate weapons through sidequests to trivialize the game is a time-honored tradition in RPGs, and one I enjoy, but it surprised me just how much it flipped my initial worries on its head after dismissing them dozens of hours prior.

I had left the last two Endless Tower encounters incomplete since I couldn't manage it with my haphazard leveling build back at level 87, but the buff stacking made them easy. I will confess that for the final superboss Simon, I looked up a build and did not design one on my own, since I was ready to be done with the game and start writing this, but it used pretty much the same principles. In the final hours of the game, the action side of the game had all but melted away for me, and I was skating through purely on the basis of the RPG mechanics. I don't hate this, but it felt a little awkward; I had spent the whole game improving my action skills, too, after all! Simon was probably meant to be that final action test, but it's sort of a mechanical choice: you need either RPG strategy mastery, or action timing mastery, but not both. There were apparently even more busted builds in the past that got patched out, so it's not like they were unaware of this when they rebalanced the game, but it must have been either intended or too tied up in the rest of the game's balance to have a clean fix.

The few times when the balance falls apart only makes me more impressed with just how much of the runtime the game is able to sit in that sweet spot, though. That can't have been easy! Part of this is helped by a constant stream of new Pictos; the individual damage bonuses didn't particularly stick out, and I was always cycling new ones in so that I could master them, so it was unlikely that a typical player would stumble into a broken set of Luminas by chance. Even though it swung out of whack at the end, they managed to deliver a great combat balance for the vast majority of the game, working in a genre hybrid that makes that as difficult as possible.

III. Non-combat Gameplay

This is going to be pretty short, but I did want to mention the general feeling of running around. It's not great! The movement feels like so many indie Unreal Engine games that don't do any customization to the movement. This isn't as bad as it sounds, though. Very little of the game relies on doing any kind of skill check in this regard. There is some light platforming in the later optional areas, but nothing outside the Gestral Beach jumping puzzle and maybe the Crimson Forest really has a harsh penalty for missing a jump, even though rolling off of narrow platforms in some endgame areas feels terrible (looking at you, Golden Tree). I am thankful for their restraint in this area.

The level design did get a little routine after running through each area enough. I didn't know this explicitly until after finishing it, but the main path is typically decorated with lamps or lamp posts, which lets you clear out side paths before moving ahead. The exploration is mostly about running down a main path, identifying side paths that may be more or less hidden, collecting the loot or defeating the optional miniboss on that branch, then going back to continue along the main path. Some of the side paths are a few steps, but some of them are large enough, and with enough internal branches, that it's really easy to lose track of the original branch you came from. Very rarely is there a true fork where both sides of a path lead to the same destination through different avenues, and I feel that more of these would have helped the variety a bit.

One thing working against the level design is just how detailed the world is. With no minimap, all of the navigation information has to come from examining the world itself. In lower fidelity games, this works fine, since most of the world tends to be flat (in the aesthetic sense, not the geometric sense), which leads to navigable paths being easily identifiable. They can still be hidden, by putting paths in an unlikely direction to look or explore (branching backwards, under stairs, behind a waterfall, etc), but once you see it, you can easily tell that it's there.

That is not the case in Clair Obscur. Sometimes paths take advantage of this and are just wide open in an unusual direction off the path, but occasionally paths will be hidden purely due to texture complexity hiding depth, like being unable to tell a cliff face is closer than one behind it, since the geometry is complex and the texture has no discernable edge. As a thought experiment, imagine detaching the camera and flying up above to see a top-down view: from that perspective, it would be somewhat difficult to even tell where the walkable part of the level is, much less how the paths connect to each other. It would just look like a blob of rocks and dirt without any differentiation. Since the optional-branch structure is so universal, this kind of navigation discernment ended up being the main skill involved in finding secrets, which was pretty exhausting and, frankly, pretty boring.

All of my complaining about this, though, is treating the world as pure utility, which it most certainly isn't. The same detail that makes it difficult to navigate ends up making it gorgeous to look at. The color palettes in particular are delightful, many areas having a striking single-color theme throughout, and then there are sections in black-and-white or a 4:3 aspect ratio. It did start to feel somewhat samey at the end, with just a few biomes, but I admit that's somewhat on me for choosing to play beyond the story, a tacit admission that I was now playing purely for gameplay and numbers rather than the vibes.

In front of the world is the user interface. There was clearly a great effort paid to making it look cool, which it does! Actually using it is less cool. Let's talk about the Picto and Lumina situation. Equipping a Picto works by either selecting a slot first and then a Picto, or selecting a Picto and then the slot. Sometimes it felt like I had to do both (slot, then Picto, then slot again). It's possible to save individual Luminas as favorites, but not whole loadouts, which made a lot of the late game changes annoying; I would have loved being able to duplicate Lumina loadouts to other characters, or switch between a general loadout and a boss loadout. Besides just the Lumina menu, having so many menus with unusual grids makes navigating between areas a little awkward. Every time I scrolled over to the Wardrobe button tucked away on the side of a character screen I felt like I was going out-of-bounds on the menu or something. I had to scroll over the equipped Luminas to get there which, now that I'm thinking of it, I have no idea why those are even selectable there in the first place. I don't know if that's a different shortcut to Luminas beyond opening the Pictos and pushing L3(?!) or not, which is how I usually got there. I don't want to demand everything be Destiny rectangles forever, but I feel like it could be a little less scrambled than it is.

The UI also fails on some of the characters. Gustave, Verso, Monoco, and Maelle all have perfectly clear character-specific gauges (though the math-head in me wishes Verso's showed the actual damage multiplier near the rank), but Lune and Sciel are pretty bad. I didn't fully grasp Lune's stains until near the end of the game, because the stains being animated sparkles rather than colors threw me off seeing the (fairly non-contrasting) colors as indicating much. When Lune gains a charge, there is briefly an actual icon that shows up over the gauge (a leaf for green, a flame for red, etc), but then it fades into the same sparkling animation that is only differentiated by color. The ability tooltips have a very small "+" in the upper right with the stains it grants, and the tooltip body itself has the stains that are consumed. Both of them look different from the actual stain gauge, and in the case of Lightning, a remarkably different shade of yellow. Most of the time I was selecting the tooltips that were glowing (indicating the bonus was available) without totally following why they were doing that. It wasn't until I had finished the story that I started using the weapon that gives stains on free aim, which led me to actually sit and consider which stains I was getting and how to use them. That got me a few hours of actually playing with the system, but by the end of the game, I was mostly just spamming Elemental Trick with 100%+ crit into Elemental Genesis and the specifics didn't matter much anymore.

Sciel's mechanics didn't fully sink in until my final hours of the game. I understood most of what she was doing, to be fair. I knew that applying and consuming Foretell stacks would put me into Twilight, with a damage bonus and a higher Foretell cap, but the Sun and Moon charges were completely lost on me. It wasn't until I started using her buff and support abilities for endgame setups that I realized that those, too, gave charges, and it was the first time I realized those could go higher than 1. Maybe I'm just dense, but I really feel like trying to cram an entire character's mechanics into one brief tutorial right off the bat made a lot of it slip past me; I would have appreciated the ability to get told the basics, then continue for an hour or so getting used to those, and then getting a second advanced tutorial with more of the quirks.

IV. Painted Story

Much thanks to my fellow story heads for enduring the gameplay up there. This game is not about parrying or stats or multiplicative damage bonuses. You have my permission to forget all about any of that. This game is about art. This game is about preparing your soul for death.

When people say that Clair Obscur takes inspiration from Japanese RPGs, most often they are talking narrowly about a combat system where your characters stand in a row and you select attacks from a menu. While that isn't wrong, it conceals an equally important inspiration, which is having a convoluted premise that immediately sets your imagination off. Japanese media has premises like "what if a fantasy dungeon was a biological ecosystem and you can eat the monsters" or "what if horse racing was done by a species of girls with horse ears instead of horses" or, perhaps most relevantly to Clair Obscur, "what if aliens came to Earth in a ship with the ability to destroy a major city, but sat idly above one instead". I could go on! The things these have in common is that they propose a simple change to a known base world (real or otherwise), and lead you to imagine all the knock-on differences caused by that change. This is not an exclusively Japanese thing (an American writer is responsible for the all-time great premise of a new device that emits a light one second before its button is pushed), but it is the engine at the heart of many of my favorite Japanese stories.

I believe the premise of Clair Obscur doesn't get enough credit in this regard. When I first saw the reveal trailer, it is this quality that made it stick out to me more than any other part of it. In that trailer, they explain the premise clearly: the Paintress paints a number, decreasing by 1 each year. When she does so, everyone of that age dies. Every year, an Expedition sets out to where she's painting with the goal of stopping her, or, failing that, laying the groundwork for the Expeditions that follow.

Immediately, I started thinking about the implications. How would people act if they knew the precise date of their death? How does society work with such a low ceiling on life expectancy? Do children know what happens? What happens to orphans? How does a society handle ~3% of its populating dying at once, a proportion that grows every year?

The game does not offer a neat explanation of the premise like the reveal trailer does; as far as I know, the voiceover explaining it is exclusive to the marketing. Instead, the game starts with the line "If you're gonna give someone flowers, you should probably do it before they wither and die." You're dropped into the world where people are using terms like Expedition and Gommage left and right without explaining any of it, leaving just enough clues to lead you down the path to absorb the rough meanings. The result is a slowly mounting sense of dread, culminating in that dread being confirmed as Gustave's 33 year old ex-girlfriend Sophie decomposes into flower petals in front of him.

The only reason such an early character death has any effect at all has to do with the excellent writing and performances. Dialogue is naturalistic patter, and the rapport between the characters is established immediately, thanks in no small part to the severe introduction: these people are not explaining what the Gommage is to each other, and if they both know and I don't, then they must be pretty tight, right? Within a few lines between any two characters, it's immediately clear where their values overlap and where they clash. The first conversation with Sophie is a familiar, sheepish exchange between two ex-lovers who fell out with one another, but still know each other better than anyone else, and they definitely still harbor feelings for each other. The second conversation she has the decidedly unfamiliar exchange about whether having children in a Paintress-doomed world is selfish or kind. The surgical juxtaposition between these two drew me in immediately; my two favorite elements of stories are complicated relationships and convoluted premises, so this was a one-two punch aimed right at my heart.

Afterwards, we learn that the Expeditions are thought of as mostly a lost cause, at this point. Nobody expects them to succeed, their continuation is just ceremonial now to keep up morale. Another thread of premise to pull: when do you give up? Certainly, you can't exactly send out a ship full of five year olds to attempt the journey in Expedition 6, but where's the line? Eventually, all of the expertise in the world is lost, since there was not enough time to pass down the required trades to build the ship in the first place. But wait, by the time the Monolith has a 6 on it, any five year olds would have been born while the monolith had an 11 on it; that's likely too young for anyone to give birth, so there wouldn't even be five year olds. This is the kind of setting I love; one that you can interrogate and pick at, draw conclusions about, and have those conclusions reflected back at you in the story. In poorly considered stories, this practice will yield unexplored alleys at best, or plot holes at worst. I can't say that Clair Obscur is perfect in this regard (the view of ordinary society in Lumiere is too brief to throw too many of these out there) but it certainly never collapses the story entirely.

After Sophie's death and the Expedition's departure, I was shocked that the first obstacle the Expedition met was a guy who was recognizably human, wearing an Expedition uniform, and was visibly old. It's an amazing premise subversion because it immediately spurs questions, and unlike those about Lumiere society, the questions I had here did get satisfying answers eventually. The old man slaughters the majority of the Expedition, despite all of them being trained combatants. Looking around, there were piles of bodies from previous Expeditions that had met the same fate, and had not decomposed; instead, the corpses became statues, permanent fixtures against the landscape.

When I wrote about Final Fantasy XVI, one of my complaints about the characters was that the party members almost never disagreed with each other. After realizing that⁴, I started to look for it in other media. I learned that in good writing, or at least the type of writing I personally prefer, there is one character for each viewpoint on a situation it's possible to have. Characters who simply always agree with each other are pointless in this model, because they could simply be merged into one character with nothing lost to the story. RPGs can be particularly vulnerable to this, since the combat systems usually require a minimum character count, so there's a temptation to create characters for gameplay reasons even when the narrative doesn't really justify it. I worried that Clair Obscur might have this issue.

When Gustave finds a second survivor, Lune, they continue through the area and discover a note left at their planned rendezvous point, which indicated that a third survivor, Maelle, was taken to a third location. Let me tell you, it was such a breath of fresh air that the two characters, upon encountering one problem, immediately started screaming at each other. It's hard to convey just how excited I was about this exchange as a positive harbinger for the quality of the writing to come. Gustave is protective of Maelle and demands they move to find her immediately. Lune believes in protocol and wants to follow the original plan to wait three days at the rally point for more survivors. Both people have intrinsic motivations leading them to conclusions in direct contradiction with each other! Gustave wins this argument, but loses a second one about whether to continue moving after nightfall, showing that neither character can steamroll the other. We have distinct emotions and competing stakes. Now we're cooking.

Later, the two find the Manor and, inside it, Maelle. Once again, their contrasting characters shine through: Gustave has an emotional reunion and is apologetic he didn't come sooner, while Lune presses for details about how she got here and who her friend the Curator is. This sounds obvious, but it's another common pitfall in games writing: characters should have distinct voices. Imagine seeing the lines of dialogue in this scene without having the speaker's name attached. All you can see is that one person is emotional, while the other is interrogative. Guessing which character had which attitude is super easy, right? Even this early, we know Gustave's and Lune's characters well enough to know that Gustave is the one being sentimental and Lune is the one probing for specific details. Try this out in other games: read a line of dialogue, and ask yourself if it would feel out of place if any other character in the scene said the same thing. It is shocking how often lines will exist in a vacuum with the speakers assigned seemingly at random. Not here, though! A huge count in Clair Obscur's favor.

Unfortunately, the next section of character collecting dragged a bit for me. I'm afraid I am a heartless husk who has no affection at all for the tiny Gestral named Noco, and Sciel's introduction had far less of an impact on me than Lune's and Maelle's. Gustave and Lune are both characters who have internal motivations and a real sense of what they're about, whereas Maelle is something more like a mystery box who is not (yet) particularly expressive about her inner life. She mostly just seems to have surprising knowledge about the world to tell the rest of the party. Sciel has neither emotions nor mystery. She's not the worst character (Monoco is), but she wasn't really exciting.

I do admit that I love Esquie. He is very much of the mystery box variety, but he has such a unique manner of expression that he feels like an emotional character too, even if his inner life is just being a big teddy bear. I called my partner "mon ami" more than once while playing this game, which I blame on Esquie. One of my favorite voice lines is Sciel asking Esquie about something he is being characteristically opaque and indirect about, which obviously yields an opaque and indirect answer. I love her resigned "...okay" at that. In hindsight (and in rewatching the cutscenes from this section) I'm realizing just how much of later Act 1 is meant to be delivering revelations to people who are replaying the game after knowing the twist later, scattering little clues and nods to the state of the world. Much like the prologue, it is the Clair Obscur storytelling style to show you situations without introduction, let you take from them whatever meaning you can scavenge, and leave the rest on the floor until you can return with more context. The first time through, though, it felt like pretty ordinary hero's journey stuff, just going from point to point to check off adventurey boxes, because so much of what the game was handing to me I was immediately dropping on the floor, having no existing place to hook the information onto yet.

Act 1 ends with Renoir killing Gustave, which was genuinely shocking to me. The fact that he had character mechanics, equipment, and a whole skill tree was sufficient to ensure to me that he was sticking around forever. They sure got my ass! It was more than a little undercut, however, by having someone who looks almost identical to Gustave jump into your party at the same time, conveniently using all the same weapons. When I got to this part, I remarked to a friend that they must only have one haircut in France, but I later realized that out of the three human men in the story (Gustave, Verso, Renoir), two were supposed to look more alike than the third. Very annoying to have similarity be sometimes story relevant and sometimes not. In any case, we learn the old man's name is Renoir here, and that he was granted immortality by the Paintress, and is now dedicated to aggressively protecting her as he talks about how he must keep his family together.

At the end of the prologue, Gustave lost Sophie. At the end of Act 1, Maelle lost Gustave. I find it kind of interesting that Gustave rarely (maybe never?) mentions Sophie throughout Act 1, but Gustave's death completely redefines Maelle's character. They had much more time to establish the relationship there, and the voice performances really were incredible, but I think this is one of many observations about the psychology of grief that the game has to offer. Gustave was separated from Sophie before her passing, and he knew she was going to die. This means that he did not define himself in relation to her (because he had to prop up his sense of self while being away from her) and it also meant that he got to plan and deliver his final words to her when she passed. Maelle had no such advantage. Her sense of self was deeply intertwined with Gustave, and the loss was totally out of the blue. Both had the death happen right in front of them, but the different preparation creates a massive difference in effect. Sophie was extracted with a scalpel, while Gustave was extracted with a cleaver. The damage is severe and lasting, and that reflects in Maelle's character permanently from here.

When we travel to the Forgotten Battlefield, with large piles of prior Expedition corpses frozen in time, Maelle asks to bury Gustave (or at least his arm). Maelle is disturbed by the bodies, but also by the fact that she is, by far, the most affected by Gustave's death. Another observation about grief: when you feel overwhelmed by grief, you grow furious that everyone around you doesn't feel the same way. Your anger at the loss has no outlet, so it is displaced onto friends and family. Placing all of your anger into one target can help assuage the feeling of helplessness. If only everyone was as mad as me about losing Gustave, everything will be okay. If only we defeat the Paintress, every other problem in the world will melt away. It is a certain kind of optimism that is easy to fall into, but is rarely very useful.

I'd like to pause for a moment in our story progression to highlight what I feel is the weakest part of the game, since the Forgotten Battlefield section is representative of my problem with it. Between the funeral suggestion, and the outburst of displaced anger, there is a whole section of exploration and combat. None of that has any connection to the story whatsoever, besides perhaps the bodies littered around. After the outburst, a Nevron comes and smashes through the bridge they were on and starts a boss fight. The Nevron is a big guy with a sword, who pulls out a second sword. The name above the health bar is "Dualliste" which none of the characters will ever mention⁵. The two hemispheres of the game, gameplay and story, are oil and water. It is somewhat affecting that Maelle falls into a pool of blood around corpses right after talking about how she hates being surrounded by death, but it does not exactly rise to the level of being a story beat. The game is turn-based in this regard: a story turn, an exploration/combat turn, and they almost never meet.

outside a handful of boss battles with the actual named antagonists. This is by far the chief weakness of the game, in my opinion, and I would love to see if the creative minds at Sandfall can find a way to stitch these two together a little more elegantly for whatever they make in the future.

I pride myself on the ability to pull together disparate threads of a piece of art and pull some synthesis out of them, even if it's a stretch. I must confess here that, despite my best efforts, I have absolutely no means of synthesizing the themes of grief and art within Clair Obscur into the mechanics of turn-based combat with time-based parrying. They simply have nothing to do with each other. There are a handful of boss fights against named characters who have anything to do with the story, and every other fight may as well be a commercial break. I do appreciate that Maelle has fire abilities, reflecting on her character's (upcoming) relationship with fire, and Verso having abilities like "Burden", taking all of his party's debuffs onto himself in a way that metaphorically ties to his self-deprecating, immunity-fleeing nature as a character. Lune's combat abilities kind of make sense as a child of scientists studying magic. Monoco's abilities are only as deep as "likes to fight, so gets abilities from fighting" and Sciel's sun and moon theme seems absolutely random in relation to her suicidal-recovery character. Gustave's tie-in as being an inventor scientist type doing combat with a gadget he invented clears half the cast on this metric, and he didn't even get to stick around!

Anyway, returning to the story, the Forgotten Battlefield section ends with Gustave's funeral. Afterwards, they perform a very delicate trick at the camp scene. The problem is that Verso arrived out of the blue and seems to have advanced knowledge far beyond the scope of what the rest of the group does, clearly a mystery box character, but they need to also reveal his emotional core to the group since he is the new protagonist⁶. They pull this off by having him give a last gasp of that mystery (need to travel to Old Lumiere to destroy the Paintress's heart to drop the barrier around the Monolith), immediately draw a sharp line marking the end of his knowledge (he doesn't know what the heart looks like, only where it is and what it does), and then let him go through all the character relationship building scenes. Lune wants to interrogate him, Maelle wants to grieve with him (or at him, anyway), Esquie wants to say post-twist-relevant things (Verso is Verso's cousin!), and Sciel wants to talk about her deceased husband Pierre with a little widow-flirting on the side. I think this worked pretty well. I was eager to know more about Verso at this point in order to access whatever knowledge he has about the world, and even though there's not much more to squeeze out of him about the world, that curiosity got redirected into figuring out what his deal was and seeing everyone bounce off of him. The prospect of Lune grilling him over specific details was genuinely exciting, even if I didn't actually get to see the results of it.

Once Verso is humanized, we have to go pick up Monoco from his cave. Monoco's battle song is one of my favorite tracks, but sadly, Monoco's character is the worst. As far as I can tell, he is around mainly to be comic relief and to give Verso someone to talk to who he has shared history with. He serves that role decently, but as a character, Monoco himself is shockingly thin. I don't know, maybe I have Gestral Derangement Syndrome, but even Sciel is a powerhouse of inner life next to Monoco.

Once our gang is fully assembled, they go to Old Lumiere. This could have been an amazing opportunity for environmental storytelling! We could see some old shops, or specific enemies based on life in the old city, but there's none of that here or in any other zone. At the end of it, though, Verso is revealed to be the son of Renoir, and the masked girl who has been showing up in Maelle's visions is his sister Alicia. The rest of the party is angry, but I was kind of on Verso's side here. He is not helping Renoir! He was forthright about telling the group Renoir's motivations and state of mind, the information that is relevant to them. He was not dishonest about his own aim to defeat the Paintress. The mere fact of the relation seems completely irrelevant to him, and the other characters ought to feel the same. I have many friends with loving relationships with their families (as I have!), and I have many other friends who will never talk to their families again, with a full spectrum of possibilities in between. "Families are complicated", Verso and Maelle say throughout the game, and they are correct. Because of this disconnect, this did not feel like a major twist, but rather more of a lore detail.

In the subsequent battle with Renoir, Noco is killed. Once again, Gestral hater here, I have zero attachment to Noco, did not really care about his loss, and also did not really care about Monoco's grieving. Okay, I'm being harsh, there is one interesting nugget in here: Gestrals are capable of limited reincarnation. We can take Noco to a specific river and have him reincarnated. It will not be the same Noco; that guy is gone forever, but it will be some modified, restarted version of Noco. This may actually contribute to my distaste for Gestrals, since their deaths are not quite total and not quite final. Changing the specific instance of Noco just does not feel super consequential when every Gestral has the same personality.

The Manor, with the Paintress's heart in it, disappears after the fight. Verso says at first that this destroys the chances of getting through the barrier, but then reveals our next option: killing two large enemies called Axons, taking their hearts to the Curator, and having him craft a weapon that can pierce the barrier. Due to the fact you can do them in either order, the story is placed almost completely on hold at this point. The Axon areas, and the bosses themselves, are cinematic and gorgeous, of course, but they are generally just big momentary obstacles rather than proper antagonists.

Visage's theme is "the masks people wear can sometimes reveal more than what's behind it" and Sirene's theme is "dancing is a seductive and pleasant distraction." Sciel has a revelation about how she, herself, is a mask (maybe this is why she seems so bland to me?), and defeats the Mask Keeper. Sirene shows the characters people they love (in particular, Lune sees her parents and Sciel sees her husband Pierre). The way these tie into the narrative doesn't come until later (Visage is created in the image of Verso, and Sirene in the image of the Paintress), and so in the moment, they seem totally cut off from the rest of the story. Overall, the game as a whole would be worse without these sections since they are so aesthetically gorgeous and have satisfying exploration and combat, but I wish they came after the Act 3 revelations when I could more fully appreciate what they represented.

After the Axons, things move fast. The Curator makes the weapon to break the barrier. The party goes to the Monolith and attacks the Paintress, only to discover that the large girl in front of the Monolith is invulnerable and not actually the Paintress. Then they go inside it to follow the real Paintress. They face Renoir again at the end, making a last stand to guard the Paintress. At this point I was getting a little suspicious. This is still Act 2, right? There are three acts, right? Did we flip over to Act 3 at some point and I just missed it? This sure does seem like, you know, the end of the game, and yet apparently there's still a whole chunk to go! Although there are not a lot of game hours left, there is a monumental amount of story to fill in. After defeating Renoir and the Paintress, we learn the true nature of the world.

V. Real Story

The game I played immediately before Clair Obscur is Star Ocean: Till the End of Time. I don't have nearly as much to say about it as I do about this, but please allow me to say a little bit about it here, and we'll come back to Clair Obscur in a moment. If you don't want spoilers for SO3, skip the next two paragraphs.

In Star Ocean: Till the End of Time, you're a sci-fi space guy whose ship crashes on a planet in the medieval age with castles and such. You work through various kinds of war and politics there, at which point your sci-fi alien enemies show up to kill you, followed by a big universal-scale laser guy showing up to take out you, the aliens, and everything else in the universe. You find a way to defeat the big guy which is to travel through a gateway to "4D space", which you do. There's a big twist! On the other side of it, you find that there is different kind of sci-fi city, and they are all playing a combination video game and reality show called The Eternal Sphere. You and all your friends, it turns out, were just lines of code in the game, and you shockingly jumped out of the game up into the real world, in order to go defeat the CEO of the game company that is trying to erase all of the "corrupted" game data.

On one hand, this is the pretty standard god-killing JRPG story that was so common in the era. There was a large backlash to it at the time and even today, though. Try searching this recent ResetEra thread about the franchise as a whole for the word "twist" to see what I mean. People interpreted this as the oft-hated "it was all a dream" type ending: everything up until now was fake, actually, and doesn't matter. They saw the rest of the game as having taken place in a "fake world", and now we're in a "real world", and the fake world doesn't matter anymore. I would like to declare that these two are the same. They are both fake, and they are both real, and drawing a distinction between the two on this axis is a pointless exercise. The game was trying (in the meager way that PS2-era games tried) to Say Something about fiction. That the things that happen in fiction don't have to manifest in reality to be meaningful to you. Yet it seems that many people took the message that if you go up one layer of reality, everything else stopped mattering, and then hated that interpretation. I hate it too! If we ever find out we're all in a simulation or something, and I wake up into a layer of reality one level above this one, I would still find it morally wrong to tinker with it or destroy it. I simply reject that that's what SO3 was doing.

Even if you've somehow read this far and are still unfamiliar with Clair Obscur you might see where this is going. At the conclusion of Act 2, from the fight with Renoir, the Paintress, and then Renoir again at the end of Act 3, the game dumps a truly dizzying amount of exposition on you about the true nature of the world, which took quite a lot of effort to even keep straight while slowly filling in puzzle pieces in the order it gave them to me.

The entire game so far is not the highest layer of reality. In the layer above us, there is a device called a Canvas. People known as Paintresses (or Painters, I suppose) can Paint on this Canvas, and bring new worlds into being, bound only by their creativity. Once things are Painted, they take on a life of their own, going about their lives according to the internal logic of the world, beyond the Paintress's control.

The Dessendre family lives in the higher layer of reality. and is composed of the mother Aline, the father Renoir, the son Verso, and the daughters Clea and Alicia. Everyone in the family has the ability to Paint. On December 33(!), 1905, their ongoing conflict with the Writers resulted in a house fire. In the fire, Verso lost his life saving Alicia, who survived with a scarred face and a damaged throat, rendering her unable to speak. The family mourned the loss of Verso, and Aline took it particularly hard. The one remaining trace of him is the Canvas he spent much of his childhood creating and playing in. That Canvas contains a part of his (literal) soul, now trapped inside and continuously Painting without a will of its own. Aline went into the Canvas and painted a copy of Verso from her memories, creating the party member we know, who I'll be calling Painted Verso from now on for clarity. She also painted her own versions of Renoir, Alicia, and Clea. She is living out her life inside the Canvas as an escape from the grief of reality where her son has died. Living inside a Canvas has a side effect: the longer she stays in there, the more she loses touch with reality, a kind of neurodegeneration that manifests as splotches of face paint.

Renoir enters the Canvas himself in an attempt to retrieve Aline, and she traps him inside the Monolith. When real people enter the canvas, they usually appear as figures with hollow faces, just a black void where the faces should be. Aline manifests as the Paintress (possibly with Painted Aline being the large girl at the Monolith that actually paints the numbers), and Renoir manifests as the Curator, who has been upgrading your weapons and created the barrier-piercing weapon for Maelle that allowed you to access the Monolith in the first place.

Painted Renoir, created from Aline's memories and wishes, is fiercely protective of his family as a unit. You may recall Maelle's outburst in the Forgotten Battlefield, lashing out with displaced anger against Lune and Sciel for not being upset enough to satisfy her, because she was righteously overwhelmed and could not handle being the only one feeling that way. Painted Renoir is Aline's version of this. She is completely distraught, and the way that she comforts herself is by designing her partner to be singularly devoted to family cohesion above all else in such an over-the-top violent way that makes her own grieving seem reserved and mature by comparison. He sees in black and white: you are either inside the family, or outside it. If you're inside, you are precious and irreplaceable. If you're outside, you are at best meaningless, or at worst a threat. His whole life, he struggles with Painted Verso, who can't quite seem to categorize as one or the other; his mental model is incompatible with a family member who voluntarily withdraws from the unit.

Clea remains outside the Canvas, but is helping Renoir by being the creator of all of the Nevrons. When a Nevron kills someone, that person's Chroma stays trapped in their bodies, which is the reason preserved corpses are so commonplace in the world. Without Nevrons, their Chroma would be released back into the Canvas, and be available as fuel for Aline's power. By creating enough people, and enough death at the hands of Nevrons, Aline will eventually be starved out and forced to leave the Canvas. In the world outside the Canvas, Clea is the most militant member of the family. She sees herself as at war with the Writers, and is willing to do so alone, though she supports Renoir pulling Aline out of the Canvas so that they can all fight together. She is much more standoffish than the others; she refers to her parents by their first names, and brusquely insults Alicia when she wants to help. Painted Clea is in the game, but as an optional boss, rather than in the main story, and is kind of a complicated presence that is honestly not worth explaining here.

Alicia's situation is arguably the driver for the whole story. She was worried for her parents and jumped into the painting, but couldn't maintain her Chroma and got hijacked by Aline. Her consciousness was merged into Maelle right when she was born, and until all of these revelations at the end of Act 2, had completely forgotten all of this. Maelle sharing an appearance with Alicia was what attracted Painted Verso and Painted Renoir's attention in the first place, and therefore drove much of the plot. Painted Alicia wears a mask and mostly stays silent, but Alicia (as Maelle) is outgoing and expressive. Once she remembers the limitations of her out-of-Canvas existence, she becomes just as attached to the Canvas as Aline is, not out of mourning Verso, but out of being able to live a life free from her disability. I find it a little interesting that she seemed to be about 16 outside the canvas, and then was essentially reincarnated inside the canvas into a newborn and lived another 16 years there, which makes her effectively 32, which is the same age as everyone else in the Expedition. Perhaps the real reason she wanted to go on the Expedition early is because she was, in a way, the exact age that the Expedition required.

So! All of this is carefully revealed at the end of Act 2 and start of Act 3. You defeat Painted Renoir, and the Curator (real Renoir) helps Maelle (real Alicia, but also Maelle still) Gommage him, which we now understand to be a kind of eviction from the world of the Canvas. I have written all of the above descriptions of the Painted and real families here, but I should mention that while I was playing through it myself, I did not have such a clear grasp on any or even most of that information. I was aggressively scratching my head at this part in the moment; it is a lot to keep track of, and my conception of the universe was shifting moment to moment, so it was tough to lock in on any one thing. I didn't want to form any bedrock assumptions about the world anymore, because the bedrock kept getting chipped away.

While all of that is revealed to the players through flashbacks and other scenes, the characters themselves are mostly left in the dark. Once the Paintress is defeated, Esquie flies everyone home to Lumiere for a huge party. On the way, Sciel points out that they have so much time now, which really affected me. Imagine that tomorrow there's some breakthrough treatment for heart disease and cancer and everything else, and the life expectancy of everyone is now 200. I don't know if everyone does this, but I am constantly living while thinking about what percentage of my life is spent, and what percentage is left in front of me, and this situation would just about scramble my brain. I felt for Sciel experiencing that bliss.

You may have noticed that the conflict here is between Aline the Paintress, who wants to sustain the world, and Renoir the Curator, who wants to kick her out. Once we succeed in removing her, we learn that the countdown was actually Aline's waning power holding back Renoir, protecting less and less of the population from his Gommage. Just as Lumiere is ecstatically celebrating the continuation of life, there is an explosion at the Monolith, and everyone in the city is immediately Gommaged, including Lune and Sciel. Renoir's new goal is to destroy the Canvas entirely, because as long as it exists, it will be a temptation for Aline to lose herself in it again. Maelle, Verso, and Monoco survive the Gommage, and find that they are once again fighting for survival.

Maelle discovers her ability to Paint, and she is able to restore Lune and Sciel to life, which creates quite a conundrum as to the nature of Painted life in the Canvas. They seem to have all of their memories (their first words are their very last memories, "we Gommaged"), so they are seemingly meant to be the same exact beings with continuous consciousness, rather than artist recreations like the Painted Dessendres. I don't want to dwell on this too much, because the game itself does not seem to acknowledge this distinction. "Painting isn't about verisimilitude, it's about essence," Verso says to Maelle to guide her Painting, and I completely agree with him. While there's an amount of fun to be had in making all of the lore in the puzzle box click into place, the enterprise of art is to place a feeling into your mind and feel the ripples from it. Maybe this metaphysical question has some interpretation that causes such a feeling, but it sure doesn't in me.

At the end of the game, Verso says "We're all hypocrites, doing the same thing to each other." He's describing a chain of people with intractable opposition. From Renoir's perspective, his family outside of the Canvas is catastrophically divided, and the first step to bringing everyone back together is to get everyone out of the Canvas. Alicia is directly opposed to that. "Here, I have a chance to live. Out there, I merely exist," she says. Her disability is excruciating and intolerable; Renoir calls her a "living ghost" without offering any means of addressing the lifestyle she can expect outside. Then another layer down, Painted Verso is exhausted from the immortality selfishly granted to him by Aline. He wishes to stop existing, and he recognizes that the remaining shard of Verso's soul, rendered as a void-faced child laboring over a Canvas, also probably wants to stop Painting. Renoir and Verso want to wipe the Canvas, while Alicia wants to keep it going forever, and there is absolutely no compromise position possible between these two. All three sides are completely understandable, yet mutually exclusive. This is the best kind of dilemma you can put in writing.

I will confess here that I picked the wrong ending, which is Maelle's. My thinking was that wiping the Canvas is permanent, but letting her stay is at least possibly temporary. I made the exact same mistake that Alicia made, and that Aline made before her. As the details of this ending were carried out, I felt a growing sense of dread and remorse. Recovering Lune and Sciel seemed innocent enough, since they had just died moments earlier and, I mean, there was still gameplay left. Recovering Sciel's deceased husband was a little worse, but she was really looking forward to it and I know what that meant to her from her relationship levels, so sure, I can stomach that. Recovering Gustave was when my heart sank; that absolutely should not have happened. Verso steps up to play the piano, looking miserable. He may as well be in chains. Maelle's face showed the chromatic rash that Aline had at the peak of her madness, and it dawned on me in horror that she is absolutely never leaving. There's no reason she would. Even if her decision isn't permanent, her disability outside is. The time when she prefers that world to this one will never come, and thus, she will never make that decision. She will run away from death until it kills her.

Choosing Painted Verso's ending is better, although it's not completely clean. In this ending, the Canvas is erased. The Dessendre family stands over Verso's grave and, at long last, properly begins mourning him. Alicia clutches an Esquie plushie as illusions of the characters wave goodbye and Gommage behind the grave. I'm conflicted on this one, because the characters in the Canvas are quite clearly sentient beings. These are not authored characters that only exist in the Paintress's head, they exist with their own consciousness and will, and thus are not direct metaphors for fictional characters. There's not really any kind of real-world analogue of this situation at all. I have no real defense against anyone calling this an act of genocide. However, it can be considered a sort of religious relationship; the Dessendres are gods that set the world in motion, and perhaps they have the ultimate authority over them. If a religious deity showed up one day, people might protest at that deity's right to wipe out our own world, but the realm of morality feels a little moot at that point, right? That's about as close as we can get to thinking about this ending. Not ideal, but it's not like Maelle's ending has a tremendous respect for life, either. As Renoir says, "life keeps forcing cruel choices," and there is no good outcome from this dilemma. The ideal would be for Canvases to not exist in the first place. Fortunately, that world is the one we inhabit.

VI. What Art Should Do

As I said at the start of the story section, Clair Obscur has plenty to say about art. I spent much of my life not quite understanding art (perhaps a decade from now I'll consider my present self to still not understand it), so I would like to speak quite plainly about what I currently view as the function of art, and what Clair Obscur has to say about that. For this, forgive me, I have to start from dead simplicity before working my way up.

I am writing words right now. Specifically, I am forming an idea in my head, and I am encoding that idea in language in a way that I hope will reconstruct that same idea in the reader's head. If I am thinking of an apple, I may choose to encode that idea as the word "apple", and you will receive the word "apple", and decode it in your mind, resulting in that same idea now existing in your mind. An apple is a culturally and semantically stable thing, and so this idea is transmitted more or less exactly. Consider the cycle though: my idea, encoding, decoding, your idea. This is its own sort of canvas, and each step can have some fuzziness to it.

Language⁷ has low bandwidth and high resolution. Assuming we both have wide and shared vocabularies, I am able to describe ideas with high specificity to make sure the idea in your head is no different from the idea in mine, more or less, but the time it takes to write and read is fairly high for the amount of idea you get out of it.

Art is the opposite of this: high bandwidth and low resolution. When you look at a painting, the idea that forms in your head is not precisely the idea in the artist's head. Instead, they provide a whole basket of signal fragments. Your own life, experiences, culture, the context of viewing, and countless other factors determine which fragments from that basket find their way into your hands, which fragments are invisible and intangible to you⁸, and how the fragments you do take are warped in your possession from whatever the original intent (if any) was. The process of forming this idea, at least initially, is basically instant (high bandwidth), but not specific (low resolution).

The idea that is reconstructed in your head from art is not, ever, the exact original idea behind the creation. If it is, then I believe it is definitionally not appropriate to label it as art. Instead, you have an idea mutually sculpted between yourself and the artist. The resulting idea is exclusive to you, since no two people will ever share the same life, and therefore no two people will ever build quite the same idea from the same piece of art as a starting point. In my subjective view, the quality of art is how strongly that idea resolves in your mind. Good art is whatever results in a complex idea or a strong emotion. Language caps out and strains against a sufficiently complex idea, or a sufficiently strong emotion. Only art can break through those limits and reach those upper echelons, and when art is capable of doing that, it justifies its existence as art to me. It could not merely be a persuasive essay, it could not be a philosophy book, it could not be an instruction manual. When the idea grows too large in my consciousness, it could only ever be art behind it.

Some art is much heavier on the encoding part. Take a look at Vermeer's The Milkmaid. If we ask people what is shown in this image, ten times out of ten we will get the answer that it shows a woman pouring liquid from a jug in front of a window. It won't be exactly the same answer though; some people will identify it as milk, or not. Some people will mention the woman first, or the window, or the table, or the jug, or the bread, or any element of it that sticks out more to them than it does to others. I was delighted to watch Juufuutei Raden's analysis and learn that part of Vermeer's encoding was an element almost nobody would mention: the nail on the background wall. At the time he was painting in the Netherlands, many households were buying world maps to hang in their homes, and in Vermeer's other works, world maps are indeed seen on the walls. That nail likely represents a world map that was hanging there before, but is now missing! Is that meant to be a metaphor for something? Did Vermeer even do that on purpose? No one can know, really, but whether he intended it or not, he put that into the work. Many authors deny the intentional use of symbolism, even when it frequently appears anyway. There's simply no way to avoid it.

Some art is much heavier on the decoding part. Here's Kandinsky's Composition IX. Take a minute to stare at it and see what pops out at you. When I do this, here's what I see: a big smiley face in the middle, a printed circuit board with a seven-segment display on the left, and a cartoony seahorse on the right. You might see something different! You might be saying "wait, that painting is from 1936 and printed circuit boards were barely invented, there's no way he meant to draw that", and you're probably right! It doesn't matter. I have taken things from my life, things that I recognize, and projected them into the painting. Just as authors including symbolism, this is an inevitable and unconscious part of looking at any art. There is an element of finding shapes in clouds here, but that's the point. As Ad Reinhardt wrote, abstract art will react to you if you react to it.

The process of this loose encoding and decoding can convey things that language simply cannot. I am, after all, unable to build a specific idea in my head that includes experiences from your life. I especially can't do that for every individual in an audience at once.

There is a chance that all of the above is completely obvious, and my apologies if so, but I wanted to outline my particular view in detail because Clair Obscur often feels as though it is speaking to that view in a surprisingly direct way. When Verso says art is about essence rather than verisimilitude, it's this distinction between language and art that he's describing. The Canvas is absolutely covered in eclipses, which I feel is alluding to the way that indirect messaging, we might say obscured messaging, can create a far stronger impression than if it was merely transmitting the idea directly.

A journal found in the Manor, likely from Renoir, says "art can be a Window and art can be a Mirror. And great art. Great art is both," which is then repeated by the Mask Keeper who says "great art is both window and mirror." That describes the encoding and decoding distinction. Interpreting art lets you learn about the artist and about yourself simultaneously. For instance, when Alicia dove into the Canvas and was pulled in by Aline to merge with Maelle, she was given combat abilities revolving around fire. It's easy to imagine that she had fire on the mind when it came to Alicia. What is that flourish, if not a window?

Art isn't just painting, of course, but writing has a strange place in the Clair Obscur world. There is apparently a faction called the Writers that opposes the Painters in an ongoing war. Journal entries recovered from previous expeditions are voice recordings rather than written journals on magic diamonds. When we first meet Maelle, she is seemingly recording such a journal on a desk, but later takes over to write on paper in Gustave's journal. That journal, Verso's poetry, the message from Renoir in the beginning saying where to find Maelle, and the number on the Monolith itself, may be the only acknowledged writing in the game, outside of whatever is going on with the Writers. I confess, I don't quite know what to make of this. The Writers as a group are only mentioned a couple times and never fully described, but it may be the case that Painting and Writing are anathema to one another, and the essence of that conflict has been carried into the Canvas as a bit of artistic expression.

In any case, we now have a working model of art: a way of powerfully, lossily constructing ideas in the minds of others. What should one do with this ability? Well, here's a view:

The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.

• Andrej Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (via Doc Burford's excellent essay on the Ace Combat series)

I thought of this quote quite a bit during the Act 3 revelations. In this view, the soul does not start pure, it must be made that way through the specific qualities of art that language alone can never transmit. It is a transformative process, whereby the version of yourself that exists after experiencing a piece of art is irrevocably altered from the version of yourself that existed before it, and with good art, the new version is the better one.

The art in Clair Obscur, that is to say, the Painted content of the Canvas, is twisted away from preparing anyone for death. The main function of the Canvas, as Aline is using it, is to trap grieving people in a permanent state of denial, and to prevent them from advancing to any other stage of grief⁹. It does not turn anyone good, it turns them into reactionaries who fight tooth and nail to resist any transformation at all. That's why Painted Verso is immortal, and why Gestrals can reincarnate. The vibrant Canvas world is suspended in grief.

Verso has a progressing relationship level with each other character, but the relationship with Sciel is more intimate than the others. She is a widow. She has lost her husband Pierre, and has mourned and moved onto being able to have a sexual, though not quite romantic, relationship with Verso. In Act 3, once it's revealed that Maelle can Paint her husband back to life, Sciel says "death isn't death anymore," and changes her view on the relationship. In her next relationship level, she rejects his proposition. It's a little unclear whether they sleep together one last time¹⁰, but the point is: she had recovered from the loss of Pierre, and that possibility of Painting him back to life made her immediately unrecover. Her loss is now impermanent and thus unable to be healed. Every moment without Pierre is a moment where he is being specifically denied to her. In an instant, she is placed in the same position Aline is: refusing to accept death and using Painting to delude herself into misery. In her case, at least, her loss and recovery is within the same plane of reality, so it's not quite as bad as Aline, but it really does seem like this kind of impermanent death would be catastrophic on anyone's psyche.

When Verso saves Alicia's life in the fire, he offers reassurance by telling her "you're okay." At the end of the game, when he is pushing her back out to reality and destroying the Canvas, he offers "you've got this incredible power to Paint. You'll never have to suffer a life you don't want." followed by "You're okay. You're okay. You're okay." as she fades away. She does not possess the power of language out there, but she has something better: artistic expression.

Clair Obscur pulls a marvelous narrative trick. First, it constructs a fantastical premise where death is always creeping closer and we are able to Paint worlds into existence. Then, it proposes some things that are true in that premise. In this world, the year of your death is always creeping closer. In this world, each Expedition lays the trail for those who come after. In this world, each Expedition sets out, knowing they won't be the last, but pushes the trail out a little further anyway, to continue building a project that they will not live to see completed. In this world, you can never recover from grieving while you believe in the possibility that your loss is not real or permanent. Now, take away the fantastical parts. Isn't it still true that we are collectively building a project we will never see completed? Isn't it still true that death is always creeping closer, even if it's not as close as 33? Isn't it still true that time with our loved ones is limited, and we ought to take as much care as we can to enjoy our time with them fully so we can carry as much of them forward as we can? Isn't it true that we must accept the reality of permanent losses or be doomed to never recover from them? The premise applies pressure to these conclusions to make them more vivid, and yet taking it away leaves completely real feelings. That's art! A beautiful magician's trick.

Our own ticking Monoliths is why I said at the outset that it is important to create things. No one can survive on mirrors alone. Show someone a window. There are people alive who you have not yet met who will love you and be loved by you, but they cannot find you through mirrors alone. And if you're going to show someone windows, you should probably do it before they wither and die.