I’m going to make this pretty short since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been talked about so much since release, what with being a hit at launch, then winning awards, then having awards retracted, then news about the studio resisting the pressure to expand so they can get their next game out more quickly… suffice to say that the game is a critical and popular success.
I started playing at launch (April 24, 2025) and finished yesterday, Jamuary 24, 2026. And this wasn’t my typical ‘start over half a dozen times’ playthrough. The Save Game I finished on was the same one I started in April. My playtime was a little under 43 hours. I’d leave the game for weeks at a time before remembering it and circling back.
I liked it enough to finish it (mostly because the story, which somehow never got spoiled for me, had me very curious) but why the long breaks?
Basically I found Expedition 33 hard to get back into after ANY kind of break. When I’d play a good long session I would love the game, but if I left it for even 2 or 3 days getting back into it was difficult for me. It all comes down to the combat. Combat is turn-based with player-reaction coming in the form of dodging or parrying enemy attacks. By tapping a button at just the right time you can dodge or parry an enemy’s attack, mitigating damage and ideally leading to a counter attack. When you’re playing consistently and learn the enemies’ devious patterns (they tend to try to fake you out, but each enemy type has a few varieties of attack that play out the same way every time) and get good at parrying, especially, it is a lot of fun and combat becomes substantially easier.
But for me, at least (remember: I am old as dirt), even a couple days away and I’d have to re-learn all these defense patterns and I would SUCK for the first half hour or so. And, another quirk of mine is I often play games in very short sessions…like 30 minutes or so.
While it took 8 calendar months to finish, I’d guess the bulk of my progress came in 3 or 4 spurts where I really focused on the game for a couple days. I guess this is all a long-winded way of saying that this is a game best enjoyed all at once. My advice is that if you haven’t played yet, when you do pick a time when there aren’t other games plucking at your attention and just focus entirely on this one until you’ve finished. To me this feels like the best way to enjoy Expedition 33. Oh and if you have both an Xbox and a gaming PC, don’t play this on both platforms at the same time. The dodge/parry timing is just different enough between the two platforms that it’ll really throw you off.
My only other issue with is is the lack of a map. That’s a personal peeve. I really like having a map, ideally with ‘fog of war’ so you do have to travel all the pathways to discover them, but after that you have a map. Presumably one of your party members is on cartography duty!
Everything else about the game: the story, the characters, the artwork and the music, was amazing. The characters in particular were some of the most beautiful I’ve seen in a game in a long time.
I have no idea if the devs will be coming back to this IP, but if they do I will surely play the next game in the series. My only request to them is to give us a difficulty slider specifically for the timing of the block/parry. I could have put the game on Story mode which I guess makes the timing more generous, but I didn’t want the enemies to hit less hard or have fewer hit points. I just wanted to be able to effectively dodge and parry even after a break from playing.
