It takes no longer than the opening minutes of gameplay for players to fully understand what style of movement and traversal Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has. Absorbing all of the eccentric environmental storytelling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 unfurls with the public preparing for the annual Gommage in Lumiere, players instantly race across rooftops with exceptional speed and pass by miscellaneous furniture piles between magical grapple points or chords of magic to descend or ascend like a pole.
Later, overworld traversal on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Continent is remarkably fluid once Expedition 33 mounts Esquie to barrel forth and swim at incredible speeds. It’s not until players begin exploring the game’s countless dungeons and named areas that they’re presented with tricky areas they’ll need to hop across in order to retrieve chroma, colours of lumina, or pictos. Then, everything is amplified astronomically when Expedition 33 stumbles on their first Gestral Beach and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 becomes a full-blown ‘rage game’ platformer.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Hexga Quest Guide (Lustrous Rock Crystal Locations)
Hexga requires players to collect some lustrous, shining, glimmering Rock Crystals in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 so that it can be complete.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Becomes a Rage Game at Gestral Beaches
Janky, unwieldy movement is intended not only for swiftly traversing wide, sparse landscapes, such as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s overworld, but also for navigating narrow beams and making difficult leaps from walking, jogging, or sprinting/gliding animations. Here, players exercise micro-jumps and account for momentum propelling them too far.
Platforming isn’t a big part of Sandfall’s epic and cinematic turn-based RPG, though, until players reach Gestral Beaches and are met with some of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s most daunting trials. Indeed, Clair Obscur features sparse Gestral Beaches that are home to precarious platforming challenges and reward players with swimwear cosmetics for Expedition 33.
One Gestral Beach features a unique minigame dubbed the Gestral Beach Rafting Volley Club, which encompasses a particularly taxing trilogy of volleyball sessions revolving around players’ overworld attack mechanic and timing its dogged recovery as a parry.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s first Gestral Beach platforming course can be a doozy in and of itself, but it’s no Gestral Ascension. If the bizarreness of this platforming sequence strikes players as familiar at all, it’s likely due to one of the following so-called ‘rage games’ and their demoralizing nature:
- Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy
- Jump King
- QWOP
- ALTF4
- Only Up!
- A Difficult Game About Climbing
- Get to Work
Rage games make names for themselves by being miserable experiences and causing each failure to sink players’ stomachs as they lose most, if not all, of the progress they had made with any exhausted time and energy now flushed. There’s always a semblance of knowledge downloaded the farther players can ascend or reach as they’ll likely have some memory of how to complete a troubling section after failing it once or twice.
Still, rage games are not for the faint of heart and the satisfaction derived from their completion may not be as fulfilling as some might hope it would be once they’ve endured tirelessly for however many hours it took them. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is nowhere near as grueling as any actual rage game is, but the lack of grace in precision-platforming can echo similar sentiments of lighthearted panic and frustration.
Only Up! In particular may be the most comparable rage game regarding what players are tasked to accomplish in Expedition 33, specifically in the most “fiendish” platforming challenge, Gestral Ascension, that has players climbing exclusively upward.
Gestral Ascension boasts a ton of nightmarish jumps and maneuvers to perform, and players careening into the waters far below and having to restart the whole challenge is a perpetual threat. That said, Gestral Ascension is a mere footnote in a laundry list of tough challenges players encounter, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s Chromatic nevrons, and bosses like Golgra or Sprong who’re simply too tanky to effortlessly tackle when Expedition 33 originally discovers them.
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OpenCritic Reviews
- Top Critic Avg: 92 /100 Critics Rec: 97%
- Released
- April 24, 2025
- ESRB
- Mature 17+ / Blood and Gore, Strong Language, Suggestive Themes, Violence
- Developer(s)
- Sandfall Interactive
- Publisher(s)
- Kepler Interactive
WHERE TO PLAY
Once a year, the Paintress wakes and paints upon her monolith. Paints her cursed number. And everyone of that age turns to smoke and fades away. Year by year, that number ticks down and more of us are erased. Tomorrow she’ll wake and paint “33.” And tomorrow we depart on our final mission - Destroy the Paintress, so she can never paint death again.
We are Expedition 33.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a ground-breaking turn-based RPG with unique real-time mechanics, making battles more immersive and addictive than ever. Explore a fantasy world inspired by Belle Époque France in which you battle devastating enemies.
- Engine
- Unreal Engine 5
- Number of Players
- Single-player
- Steam Deck Compatibility
- Playable
- PC Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- Xbox Series X|S Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- PS5 Release Date
- April 24, 2025
- Genre(s)
- Turn-Based RPG, JRPG, Fantasy
- Platform(s)
- PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC
- OpenCritic Rating
- Mighty
- X|S Optimized
- Yes
- File Size Xbox Series
- 42.33 GB
- Wiki
