Clair Obscur (review, non-spoilery part)

I tried hard to write no spoilers in this post. I describe the world as established in the prologue, and some pretty generic descriptions of places throughout the game, but I’m keeping the plot points to myself.

I enjoy playing video games in which the writer makes a few promises: that the person you’re about to inhabit is someone interesting, and that the world in which you’re about to awaken and try to fix is itself interesting. I’ll play games with one or the other: the Doom franchise is just plain ordinary physically challenging fun, but the art is amazing; Dead Space gives us a brave but tortured soul whose first close brush with evil makes him the unhappy savior of the galaxy in chapters written with thought and care; Prey is both incredibly pretty and gives our heroine reasons to sacrifice her humanity piece by piece to save her space station’s crew and, ultimately, Earth itself.

Clair Obscur hits those notes with grace and precision. The premise is pure video game fantasy: 67 years ago, a horrifying supernatural event (which the people in this story have come to call “The Fracture”) tore the world into pieces and unleashed monsters, leaving only a tiny island of human survivors struggling in a city call Lumiere (which is this world’s Paris, complete with a half-melted Eiffel Tower). Lumiere is losing its struggle, and every year it sends its strongest men and women out to try and find the source of evil and stop it.

That’s not spoiling it; that’s just the intro. I’d be spoiling it if I told you why the Expeditions are sent out every year, why it’s “Expedition 33” if the Fracture was 67 years ago, or why I cried at the end of the friggin’ Prologue, much less at several points throughout the game.

I was warned that at the end I’d “cry in technicolor.” I didn’t. Almost did, but something stopped me. But that’s for the other post, where there will be massive spoilers.

You spend the majority of your time with your party: Lune (your cleric), Sciel (your wizard), Gustave (your mechanic & warrior), Mielle (your warrior), and eventually you’re joined by Verso (warrior) and Monoco (tank). None of them are called these things, but these are clearly the roles they play in your party. They are all incredibly well-written people: Lune was always a lonely child, isolated from her peers by her connection to the Lumina (the source of magic in this world); Sciel is filled with rage at the unfairness of the world but wants to be loving and humane underneath it all; Gustave is awkward and charming and you want to hug him but yow, is he deadly in combat. You have dialogues among them that lead to “relationship scores” that unlock certain adventures or abilities. It’s not a particularly new system, but the voice acting, mocap, and just general quality will keep you glued.

The combat is… annoying at first, then easier later. The game doesn’t explain anything, so maybe this is spoilery, but the characters clearly understand it even if the player doesn’t, so I’ll give it away: “Pictos” are talismans with spells you can learn and use in combat, and you can use them the moment you get them, but you only have three Pictos slots. “Luminas” are spells you have learned; once you’ve mastered a Picto (by using it four times in combat), the spells becomes accessible to the other members of your party without the talisman, and you have Lumina slots for them. You earn Lumina slots by finding Lumina or earning it through combat, and you distribute it to your party during the “rest at camp” mechanism. Luminas have different “Lumina point costs,” so when you find some Lumina, you dole it out to different characters to give them slots for buffs.

Combat is Japanese Role-Playing-Game style: your party (maximum of three) face against an enemy party (again, maximum of three) and you pick either spells you know (buffed by Luminas and Pictos) or just go with your base weapon attack, in a turn-based system. Every character gets a number of “actions” per combat; spells consume actions, and base attacks give more back. “Who gets to play when” is determined by the relative Speed attributes of your characters vs the monsters. Different weapons interact with different attributes (speed, strength, health, agility, luck) and some have buffs based on your character’s magical ability.

And everyone has some kind of magical ability, but their metaphors for “what Lumina does” are different for each character, and you have to learn all of them to be effective. Lune’s is straightforward and elemental; Sciel’s is kinda like tarot cards with a light-vs-dark motif, and when she’s in “twilight” she does double-damage; Monoco’s is based on shape-shifting. It’s all weird and clever and fun in battle.

Pictos come with “secondary effects:” a higher health, higher speed, or higher damage. So once you’ve learned one and have the Lumina slots to equip it without the talisman, you may want to trade it for a more generic one that gives you a better chance of surviving in combat.

The biggest controversy in the came is the parry mechanism, a QTE (or “quick time event”). If a monster attacks, you can dodge the blow, but you have to learn the precise moment when you can dodge during their attack animation. The dodge “window” is 0.3 seconds, which is actually pretty learnable for most people. Or you can “parry,” which also does damage back to the monster in an instantaneous counter-attack, but the window for that is only half of dodge: 0.15 seconds. That takes longer to master (You get really tired of hearing Mielle shout “parry it!” when a monster attacks someone other than her). You do a lot of dying but eventually you find the rhythm of a monster’s moves and learn to hit the “parry” button in the right pattern and combat becomes a lot simpler after that.

If there’s a problem with the game it’s that the third Act doesn’t tell you what you should do next. It has a single mission: “Find and kill the final boss.” Each of your characters has laid out a side-mission for you, which you should do to unlock future abilities, but they’re very much side missions; if you were confident in your ability to parry, you could end the game immediately, but you’d miss out on a lot of great art and storytelling– and some pretty important lore.

It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, both in terms of the art and the characters, the dialogue, the sound design, the music (OMG, the music!), everything about it.

I’d almost recommend it if the ending hadn’t filled me with such rage and loathing that I actually regret playing it, I deleted it the moment the game was over, and I’m very unlikely to give it another play-through, ever.

You can read that part, if you like, but it’s got massive spoilers.

Clair Obscur (review, the very spoiler and angry part)

WARNING: 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.