Expedition 33 has been an interesting journey. I started kind of lukewarm with it, with moderately high but tempered expectations, and the longer I played it and the more I thought about it the more I came around to liking it. And yet, it didn’t grab me; I only made it part way through the optional endgame stuff before feeling the pull away, in a shorter time frame than it seems I ought to have for this type of game executed this well1.
Let’s try to explore why.
There was a Patrician video recently (I think it was the Oblivion remaster one) where he points to Todd Howard talking about how he wished he could shadow drop more games because he hates marketing, to say that yeah, everyone hates marketing—it’s a thing that everyone has to do but nobody likes to do. It was interesting to me because this is something that hadn’t truly occurred to me, but it explains the corresponding trap that indie devs fall into where they seem to find traditional marketing distasteful and have to be sort of dragged into it by publishers.
I started getting Twitter ads for Clair Obscure: Expedition 33 around a year to a year and a half ago and it was visually and thematically evocative, so I wishlisted it and didn’t think too much of it. Then they announced celebrity voice actors and I was instantly worried—this is one of those things that’s typically a red flag for me2. It also seemed that their level of marketing budget didn’t quite align with the apparent attention they were getting for the purported small size of their team3.
Expedition 33 was designed to appeal to critics and casual gamers, something I’m relatively sure is the case because they’ve indicated in interviews that they made marketing choices with this sort of mass market appeal in mind. Guillaume Broche explains, in his guest appearance on Dropped Frames4, that it was an intentional choice to spend from their (smaller, non-AAA) marketing budget on decisions like quality voice acting and motion capture.
This successfully addressed the concerns I had about the game’s public presentation, especially with regards to the red flags from a few paragraphs back. But I have to really think carefully here—why is it that when a small developer does this it makes sense to be less cynical than when a large-budget game does it? It seems smart and savvy when a small dev team lead knows flashy visuals and celebrity voices make sales and yet when the clueless middle manager at a large publisher makes this call it goes bad so frequently that it’s an automatic heuristic mark against anyone else that does it?
Perhaps the distinction is in who’s making that call? If we circle back to the point about marketing being someone nobody likes to do versus has to do, it seems that Guillaume Broche and Sandfall understand that this was a trap to avoid, and in doing so it marks them as More Clever Than Average. It seems this is somewhere that Sandfall Interactive has leveraged their past experience to avoid making rookie mistakes, which is an extremely positive sign for developer quality as I've written about before. When a publisher is making that call a developer is being dragged into it for cynical marketing reasons5, that it’s something you merely have to do versus understanding when and how you need to do it. When it’s a choice made prospectively it’s coming from someone smart enough to realize their project is going to need the eyeballs and/or confident enough in their product to know it’s worth that deliberate angle of investment.
Before I try to explore what about Expedition 33 doesn’t quite work for me I want to start by pointing out some of the cool and great things it does. To be clear, I very much like the game and strongly recommend it6! But I don’t love it and I’m not completely sure why.
The game’s running thread is chiefly on grief and the reaction to it. The whole game’s premise, sending expeditions to vanquish the Paintress, is a fantasy on being able to physically fight that which takes from you. I’d heard before that the prologue was especially emotional for a lot of people and I was curious before going in to see if it would be the same for me, and now I wonder after if it wouldn’t have been were it not for my own recent slice of sad. Much of your journey is marred by loss that came before7 and continues to mark your path and facing down your own imminent doom, for those that come after. You come to find even your villains’ motivations are grief.
Guillaume Broche notoriously cites Sekiro as inspiration for dodging and parrying being central ways you engage defensively during battle. He also mentions taking inspiration from the post-7 Final Fantasies and you can definitely feel it; the offensive QTEs feel very FF8, the battle cadence and UI are evocative of FF10. The zone environments feel very FF13 to me except that they notably do not have a minimap, which was a deliberate choice to force the player to pay closer attention to their environments, more in line with Soulslike games, and you definitely should since the environments are visually rich.
The music is great, more bops than bangers, but they always fit and it’s delightful how battle themes change to fit each new zone.
The world is also rich and varied. The quantity of types enemies is somewhat limited but they’re used well inasmuch as that’s a drawback at all. The inclusion of a world map—also deliberate—is nice and serves well to break up the pacing and give you room to breathe in between major locations. The game’s not afraid to show you high level areas early and expect you to have the sense that you’ll be coming back to some places later8.
The game has some good, discrete mechanical complexity. Every character has a gimmick and playing well to it allows you to skyrocket in power quite appropriately to how carefully you engage with it, but the game does sort of lean heavily on level scaling for difficulty. There will be places and enemies you won’t be able to reasonably defeat until you’ve gone somewhere else in the correct sequence to level up, especially towards the end of the game. You can live easily without spending time deliberately farming but the option is there, for both levels and points for Lumina, the latter of which also serves well to open the game up over time.
Expedition 33 joins Elden Ring as one of the rare games across history so far where the casual gaming zeitgeist was right on taste9, or at least where things align with my takes on taste.
So what’s missing?
I was ready to be disappointed by how the latter parts of the game resolve the mysteries set up in the first few acts but they dance pretty cleanly around what might be called kind of a tired cliché with regards to the overarching plot. The game wasn’t really too short or too long, wasn’t too hard or too easy on the middle setting and the combat is wonderfully engaging and only occasionally kinda bullshit. The writing wasn’t obnoxious, characters were perfectly believable. I kind of wish Lune would put on some damn shoes but okay.
My first theory was that the game needed one more party member to strike the right balance and I’m not sure I can cleanly explain why I think this might be. You never have more than 5 party members, which makes it feel awkward when the group size is 3 and, if like me, you neurotically seek to balance everyone’s levels. I feel like there’s room for one more personality, though again this isn’t something I can explain well.
The game has decent build complexity but on the other hand it’s also kind of easy to solve a problem and not need to engage with variation. The game gives you plenty of resources to respec but not much incentive to experiment once you’ve found something that works well.
Maybe there’s not enough variety in the side content? There’s plenty of it but it’s all sort of empty; kind of more of the same zone exploration & combat. There’s a bunch of one room spectacle zones that usually have a single collectible and some of them are visually interesting but they’re awkward distractions. The game has tons of beautiful landscapes but frequently doesn’t dwell on them. The gestral beaches were all atrocious. Act 3 starts in the style of FF8 where you’re plopped down in front of the final dungeon but are given plenty to do at the last minute, and again I got maybe halfway through all the extras before I found myself reluctant to open the game and had to push for the ending to put a bow on it.
I already mentioned it once but the game’s scaling is a little whacky. I ended up with some overpowered builds for everyone and yet I’d be hard gated by just not being the right level for something, which is kind of an annoying problem. Some things could be cheesed by having a single tank character parry everything, and this was sometimes a fun challenge and sometimes a boring slog. I was doing several magnitudes more than 9999 damage before the game gives you the thing that uncaps it.
Maybe the game was just intended to be short and tight? I think that’s fairly believable if you can believe the developers had both a love for the genre and a talent/mastery for/of game design. Even though it didn’t quite “grab” me I can’t think of much that you would need to add to push it into a doing so10.
8/1/25 edit: I had the thought a few days later that the problem here may be that, despite being executed very well, there’s not really anything here that’s new per se. Like, I think you could be accurately over-reductionist by calling the entire game a retread of Final Fantasy X with bits taken from other games. Turn-based RPGs are extremely not new, active gameplay elements in turn-based RPGs has been around since at least Super Mario RPG on the SNES, grandiose AAA-style environments are nice but not novel, and even the narrative structure is vaguely cliché. My instinct is, again, to clash these up against Infinite Wealth as a sanity check, and I can think of at least a few things Infinite Wealth did that are relatively novel or are things that speak to me better (eg the modern setting and the Yakuza-staple soap-style political drama are both delightful contrasts for a turn-based RPG). The belle-epoch France styling was great and I’d love to see more of that but I don’t think it was enough to carry things on its own.
Regardless, I’m very much in the large cohort of people who are now looking forward to whatever Sandfall Interactive does next.
Again, my personal gold standard for comparison here, especially for JRPGs, is Infinite Wealth, which I 100%’d through its endgame and put down reluctantly, wishing I still had reasons to keep playing.
I have Regalia: Of Men and Monarchs wishlisted/followed on Steam purely so that I can cite it to highlight the folly of trying to market your game only on voice actors.
My star point here was going to be how it was sort of crazy that they’d gotten Andy Sirkis for what may have been his first role in a video game, though a quick IMDB search shows that’s not the case—he’s done a handful of licensed big IP games (Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and one WH40k game) and also a few other relatively obscure games.
According to Guillaume Broche they landed Jennifer English and Ben Starr by sheer chance via anonymous auditions.
This is the closest I get to following gaming news, for better or worse.
Possibly, to run cover for an otherwise unimpressive game that will need the hype machine fluff.
It’s even got what I would say is a pretty fair price point if that’s something you care about.
You find a frankly unbelievable quantity of corpse piles scattered throughout, though this does have a minor narrative payoff.
It’s sort of quaint that there’s a diagetic reason that expedition 33 goes tits up pretty much immediately, barring the mysterious stranger, which you can discover upon returning to your very initial landing point.
And maybe Baldur’s Gate 3? There’s got to be way more beyond my unwillingness to eschew recency bias.
Except for Infinite Wealth-style class mechanics but look we can’t do this in every game.