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elfsWARNING: I cannot emphasize enough that here be spoilers. Maybe you want them. Maybe that’ll make the art and gameplay worthwhile.
There are stories that let us be heroes. Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, Half Life are all such stories. Prey was such a story until the epilogue, at which point the story changaed so much I swore to never play it again. (I did, but I skipped the epilogue). There are stories where our heroism is very much a choice (the first two Bioshock games, or Cyberpunk 2077), and there are stories where the point is to say that being the hero doesn’t always come with the ending you thought it did (Bioshock Infinite comes to mind).
I write science fiction. I’ve thought a lot about the Simulation Problem, the moral infrastructures of aliens and robots unlike ourselves and how those would interact with human consciousness and human frailty. I’ve cheered for Free Guy, a dumb (but fun!) movie that has as one of its central themes Wittgenstein’s maxim for believing if someone has a soul: if you can’t tell if someone has a soul, your only moral choice is to believe and act as if they do until proven otherwise.
Clair Obscur’s theme is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the hero, or not. It doesn’t matter if you have a soul, or not. Your very existence is worthless in the eyes of God.
You spend the first two-thirds of the game with Lune, Sciel, and Mielle, as well as the others. You learn their backstories, their sadness at being in so broken a world, their tragedies that led them to join the expedition, gamble their lives on potentially hopeless task, and against the slimmest of odds save their world. The game shows you in slow, beautiful steps how their suffering, their love, their loneliness, and the companionship they’ve found in this adventure make them human.
At the end of Act II, you learn your friends are “not real.”
The prologue introduces the Paintress, a monstrous, bony figure on the horizon who is inflicting all the pain and suffering the citizens of Lumiere face. In Act I you meet “the man with the white beard,” who slaughters almost all of the expedition, leaving only a handful alive, the core of your party. Act II brings gives them names: the Paintress is named Ailene, and the man with the white beard is her husband, Renoir.
Ailene and Renoir are gods. In their world (of which you see barely two minutes in the entire game), there is a war between The Painters and The Writers. Nobody says why; I dug up every piece of lore I could and couldn’t figure it out. Both of these groups have the magical power to create new worlds by painting (“Canvases”) or writing them. An incident killed one Ailene and Renoir’s son, and left one of their two daughters, Mielle, hideously scarred and crippled by burns. Ailene took one of her dead son’s paintings, added a ton of detail to it, and gave him a city, Lumiere, in which they could live together.
Renoir had once been trapped in a painting decades ago, and Ailene saved him. Renoir and Ailene know that entering a painting eventually drives you mad, but Ailene would rather have had a lifetime with her son and go mad. Renoir entered the painting to drag Ailene back to the “real world,” but Ailene fought back; Mielle followed him to help her mother. The resulting battle caused The Fracture and caused Mielle to lose her memories, so she thought she was just another citizen of Lumiere, and Gustave adopted her and taught her how to live in the Fractured world.
That’s the overarching Lore. You just spent more time reading about it than the game itself spends showing it to you in dialog and flashbacks.
At the end of the game, Mielle has gathered enough Chroma (a form of magical power mostly used as currency in the game mechanic) and come into her own power enough that you, the player, are to make a choice for her: drive Renoir out of the Canvas, or let him burn it.
If you drive Renoir out of the Canvas, the people you’ve spent hours and hours with, the people the game told you to care about, get to live for as long as Mielle keeps her sanity. Eventually, though, she will die. Mielle wants this. She wants to live as an ordinary person, live out her days in a reconstructed Lumiere with the friends she’s come to trust and love, to see them happy, to see them live out the lives the narrative told us they deserved.
If you let Renoir destroy the Canvas, Mielle has a chance to live out a “real” life, in the real world, in a burned shell of a body, it’s skin barely able to move, blind in one eye, unable to speak. There’s a whole human mind back of that remaining eye, but her family treats her with contempt. Ailene’s attachment to her son will be broken and she’ll have a chance to be healed.
Your choice, then, is to take the risk that your life means something and deserves a chance, or to accept that it doesn’t mean anything at all and your death will give the gods (with whom you have almost no contact and who view your very existence as a problem) a chance at some closure.
Like, no. To hell with that sort of premise. It made me angry with an incandescent rage that all that time was buildup to “Oh, let’s give Renoir a chance at closure.” He murdered a city already. He’s been abusing his power to create and then neglect life for decades. He gets less than ten minutes of screen time and we’re supposed to accept that his feelings, his “life forces on us cruel choices” bullshit, matters more than our friends, our companions, and our lives? Just because he’s some arbitrary definition of “really real?”
Nope, not playing this game again.
There are stories that let us be heroes. Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect, Half Life are all such stories. Prey was such a story until the epilogue, at which point the story changaed so much I swore to never play it again. (I did, but I skipped the epilogue). There are stories where our heroism is very much a choice (the first two Bioshock games, or Cyberpunk 2077), and there are stories where the point is to say that being the hero doesn’t always come with the ending you thought it did (Bioshock Infinite comes to mind).
I write science fiction. I’ve thought a lot about the Simulation Problem, the moral infrastructures of aliens and robots unlike ourselves and how those would interact with human consciousness and human frailty. I’ve cheered for Free Guy, a dumb (but fun!) movie that has as one of its central themes Wittgenstein’s maxim for believing if someone has a soul: if you can’t tell if someone has a soul, your only moral choice is to believe and act as if they do until proven otherwise.
Clair Obscur’s theme is that it doesn’t matter if you’re the hero, or not. It doesn’t matter if you have a soul, or not. Your very existence is worthless in the eyes of God.
You spend the first two-thirds of the game with Lune, Sciel, and Mielle, as well as the others. You learn their backstories, their sadness at being in so broken a world, their tragedies that led them to join the expedition, gamble their lives on potentially hopeless task, and against the slimmest of odds save their world. The game shows you in slow, beautiful steps how their suffering, their love, their loneliness, and the companionship they’ve found in this adventure make them human.
At the end of Act II, you learn your friends are “not real.”
The prologue introduces the Paintress, a monstrous, bony figure on the horizon who is inflicting all the pain and suffering the citizens of Lumiere face. In Act I you meet “the man with the white beard,” who slaughters almost all of the expedition, leaving only a handful alive, the core of your party. Act II brings gives them names: the Paintress is named Ailene, and the man with the white beard is her husband, Renoir.
Ailene and Renoir are gods. In their world (of which you see barely two minutes in the entire game), there is a war between The Painters and The Writers. Nobody says why; I dug up every piece of lore I could and couldn’t figure it out. Both of these groups have the magical power to create new worlds by painting (“Canvases”) or writing them. An incident killed one Ailene and Renoir’s son, and left one of their two daughters, Mielle, hideously scarred and crippled by burns. Ailene took one of her dead son’s paintings, added a ton of detail to it, and gave him a city, Lumiere, in which they could live together.
Renoir had once been trapped in a painting decades ago, and Ailene saved him. Renoir and Ailene know that entering a painting eventually drives you mad, but Ailene would rather have had a lifetime with her son and go mad. Renoir entered the painting to drag Ailene back to the “real world,” but Ailene fought back; Mielle followed him to help her mother. The resulting battle caused The Fracture and caused Mielle to lose her memories, so she thought she was just another citizen of Lumiere, and Gustave adopted her and taught her how to live in the Fractured world.
That’s the overarching Lore. You just spent more time reading about it than the game itself spends showing it to you in dialog and flashbacks.
At the end of the game, Mielle has gathered enough Chroma (a form of magical power mostly used as currency in the game mechanic) and come into her own power enough that you, the player, are to make a choice for her: drive Renoir out of the Canvas, or let him burn it.
If you drive Renoir out of the Canvas, the people you’ve spent hours and hours with, the people the game told you to care about, get to live for as long as Mielle keeps her sanity. Eventually, though, she will die. Mielle wants this. She wants to live as an ordinary person, live out her days in a reconstructed Lumiere with the friends she’s come to trust and love, to see them happy, to see them live out the lives the narrative told us they deserved.
If you let Renoir destroy the Canvas, Mielle has a chance to live out a “real” life, in the real world, in a burned shell of a body, it’s skin barely able to move, blind in one eye, unable to speak. There’s a whole human mind back of that remaining eye, but her family treats her with contempt. Ailene’s attachment to her son will be broken and she’ll have a chance to be healed.
Your choice, then, is to take the risk that your life means something and deserves a chance, or to accept that it doesn’t mean anything at all and your death will give the gods (with whom you have almost no contact and who view your very existence as a problem) a chance at some closure.
Like, no. To hell with that sort of premise. It made me angry with an incandescent rage that all that time was buildup to “Oh, let’s give Renoir a chance at closure.” He murdered a city already. He’s been abusing his power to create and then neglect life for decades. He gets less than ten minutes of screen time and we’re supposed to accept that his feelings, his “life forces on us cruel choices” bullshit, matters more than our friends, our companions, and our lives? Just because he’s some arbitrary definition of “really real?”
Nope, not playing this game again.
