I've been living with Expedition 33 in my head since its release a couple months ago. It was one of those experiences where you find yourself experiencing a work of art and think: "this will be discussed for years and years to come."
It was huge enough to actually distract me from appreciating the game I'd played immediately prior, Lies of P, which was less revolutionary but still an excellent game.
It's actually kind of fascinating: Lies of P takes the Souls-like genre of action RPGs and infuses it with a more personal, emotional sense of stakes. I love FromSoft games (see like a third of the posts on this blog) but I do find that my engagement with them is far more cerebral than emotional, my analysis more an exercise in parsing what story it is we're receiving than necessarily processing my emotional response to them.
Lies of P has its own cryptic lore, but also delves down into the themes of what it means to be human with a story filled with tragedy, grief, and regret.
But dear lord, I don't know that I've ever felt more emotionally gut-punched by a game than Expedition 33. There were moments in Alan Wake II that might have matched it, but its biggest such moment was subverted with a twist. Expedition 33's twists are the twist of a knife. There are profound philosophical questions raised by the story, but I think that this game encourages you to engage with them on a deeply emotional level.
While it's a turn-based RPG - a genre whose fading from prominence over the last 25 years or so has been a strange thing as someone who remembers an era when that's what an RPG was - Expedition 33 does have some elements that resemble Souls-likes games - its resetting of most monsters when resting, its regenerating items (rather than having you stock up on consumables,) and its challenging dodge and parry mechanics (which, to be fair, are at least as old as Super Mario RPG, though the fact that these fully avoid damage makes it feel more like the high-stakes dodging of a Dark Souls game).
What I'm sort of curious about, though, is to what extent there is an underlying hidden plot behind the main story.
In fairness, I don't know of any other games that get quite as conspiracy-board-complex with their hidden backstories as those from FromSoft. I actually think that the Remedy Universe (currently just Control and Alan Wake II, and retroactively the first Alan Wake) gets close. I've even seen some interesting videos suggesting there's a lot of hidden story within the Zelda games.
But the explicit story of Expedition 33 is already so grand and truly original that it almost feels like it would be kind of redundant to seed so much of a subtly implied one.
And yet, there's clearly something there.
Ok, that's plenty of preamble. Let's get into spoiler territory.
You're invited from very early on to suspect that some key piece of Expedition 33's story is being held back. Why is the place the humans are from called Lumiere when it looks so much like Paris. Why is Lumiere's Eiffel Tower twisted and its Arc de Triomphe shattered?
And why is there this one house with doors hidden across the world, which houses, at least at first, a terrifying man with a crater for a face?
I had some crazy early theories - one was that the Nevrons we fought were actually changed/reincarnated versions of the people who had suffered the Gommage (the second boss, Goblu, is distressed by our picking of a flower like what Sofie had held, and I thought for sure we would discover that the creature was actually Sofie reincarnated. No joy on that one. I also thought that "the white-haired man" was a future version of Gustave. Also very much incorrect on that.)
The ultimate big twist happens after we defeat the Paintress and return to Lumiere. Seemingly the end of the game, except the game has dropped far too many hints during that supposed final dungeon that something strange is going on, and when the final Gommage takes everyone in Lumiere regardless of youth, the horror raises an enormous question of "what the hell is happening here?"
And the answer is that the world of the game is an artificial one, painted with some kind of magical art, and that everyone within it other than the Paintress, the Curator, and Maelle was created by a person from the real world.
We discover that the conflict between the Paintress and the Curator is actually the conflict between grieving parents - Aline wishing to remain within the artificial playground her late son had created as a child, and Renoir believing he must force her to confront the real world and is willing to destroy his son's work to bring his wife back.
Part of what makes the game so emotionally rich (and painful) is the fact that nobody's really a "bad guy." Everyone has sympathetic motivations, and the moral, ethical choice to make of what to actually do is not clear. The player is presented with two choices, with Verso and Maelle ultimately carrying on their parents' trauma-induced paths - of destroying in an effort to end suffering, or of preserving in a manner that also enables denial and avoidance.
I say there's no bad guy. But is there?
To get explicit: The Dessendre family is a group of talented Painters - not mere artists, the Painters in this world (and this is the "real world" part of the game) have basically magical powers. The one power we for sure know they have is that they can create painted worlds (hello Dark Souls reference!)
The Dessendre family lives in Paris in the late 19th century. Renoir and Aline have three children, Clea, Verso, and Alicia, and have trained their children in this magical art. Clea and Verso are closer in age (I'm not sure which is the older sibling,) and are probably around 30, while Alicia was a "second waver" who is only 16. (Strangely, a lot of my childhood friends were like this, with siblings born in the 70s while they were born in the mid 80s like me).
The Painters, of whom the Dessendres are only some (though given how enormous their house is, I'd guess they're quite prominent ones) are engaged in a conflict of some sort with "The Writers."
And the Writers... the Writers are the biggest enigma in the game. Really, they remind me of the Gloam-Eyed Queen, a figure in Elden Ring who is never glimpsed, and only mentioned in a handful of item descriptions, but is implied to have played an enormous but unclear role within that world's lore.
The Writers, though, as far as I know, are left even more ambiguous than "GEQ." All we know is that the conflict they have with the Painters is violent - it's a war of sorts that seems to be going on across Paris (though whether this is out in the open or a kind of secret war is unclear - I don't know how much the game's Paris and its history is meant to match the one we know. This Eiffel Tower is not twisted though, so it's probably best to assume that all things are the same unless explicitly stated).
We know that Verso (the "real world" Verso) died saving Alicia from a fire. That fire was somehow the result of Alicia making some error and trusting the Writers in some way. Alicia was horribly burned, losing her voice, one of her eyes, and her face becoming scarred. Verso's death rocked the family and led to Aline's retreat into his Canvas.
There could be an entire post trying to break down how time works in the game - it's clear that time is passing faster in the Canvas, and possibly at a profoundly faster rate, because it appears that Verso's death on the outside was, like, probably a year ago at most, but within the Canvas, Renoir's plot to destroy it has been going on already for 67 years, and presumably there was significant time before that.
Each member of the Dessendre family other than Alicia has added significant elements to the Canvas, and I believe a number of these only occurred after Verso's death. Among them is actually the human population of Lumiere, which Aline created perhaps as a place to provide companionship for the facsimiles she made of her family.
If we assume that they existed for echo Verso's sake (this being the one who joins our party at the beginning of act two,) and if it's been only a year or so since the real Verso died, and that the echo Verso only came about after the real one's death, then it really shows the profound extent to which the time compression works: 67 years of Gommages and Expeditions, but presumably ages and generations prior to that when Lumiere was where "Old Lumiere" now is, all happening in this period of grieving for the family outside.
And that actually implies that Alicia's sixteen years within the Canvas, painted over as Maelle, have probably passed very quickly outside.
But I wanted to return to the Writers:
One thing that is implied about the Dessendre family is the way that the pressure to follow in the parent's footsteps is a source of tension. Clea, Verso, and eventually Alicia are all talented Painters, but we find that Verso (or at least his echo, but probably the original one as well) seems to favor music, playing the piano. Clea, whose role the developer have explicitly said was cut down in the final release of the game, might be subtly implied to be more of a sculptor, as we see a gallery of her Nevrons in the Manor.
And Alicia, in her room, has a typewriter. Perhaps her talents lay in the written word.
But this was also what somehow allowed the Writers to strike at the Dessendre family.
How this all works is left very open. If the Painters can make these artificial worlds, what powers to the Writers have?
Naturally, as a big Alan Wake fan, I'm tempted to think that their writing can shape reality. The horror of the Alan Wake games (especially the second one) that it's never quite clear what layer of reality one is in. Saga struggles as a story starts to overwrite her own personal history because she has been made into the protagonist of Alan's novel, and Alan himself isn't really sure where the real him ends and the semi-fictionalized versions of him begin.
I don't know if the folks at Sandfall are big Remedy fans (though it wouldn't surprise me,) but I do think that that theme of losing track of one's own identity is at work here as well.
We don't have any explicitly identified Writers - in fact, we don't actually have any individual characters from the outside world who aren't part of the Dessendre family. Thus, we really don't know why the Writers and the Painters are at war, and what they might have done to trick Alicia. Was Verso even the actual target?
We don't even really know what full suite of abilities the Painters have - within the Canvas, they're godlike in power, but is it limited to such environments?
While I don't know that it's one I'd endorse, I do think there's some validity to a theory that the Writers might be less of a real part of the game's world and more of a kind of meta element. In a certain explicit way, the Writers did kill Verso - as in, the writers of the game. Jennifer Svedberg-Yen was the game's lead writer (actually an American, despite how deeply French this game is). And on a meta-level, she killed him, because, you know, that's how the plot kicks off.
After all, Renoir and Clea take this position that the people of Lumiere aren't actually real people, and thus there's nothing immoral or wrong about destroying them. But on another level, we players know that Renoir and Clea aren't real either, being characters in a work of fiction. If the Painters are like gods in the world of the Canvas, are the Writers similarly god-like in the world of the video game?
But perhaps it's not so meta. I think that this kind of meta plot can often be alienating from the human drama of a story. Perhaps the Writers are no less fictional than our Painters here. If that's the case, then, what are their motivations? Why is there such a conflict?
And are these questions that the creators are remotely interested in answering? Or are they distractions from what the game is actually trying to say?
Because I enjoyed this game so much (I can write a lot about its plot, but it's also just such a satisfying game to play) I do hope that we'll see some kind of sequel to it. That being said, I think it would probably be best to move on from the story of the Dessendre family, which does raise the question of what the game would even be about.
As I've said before, I can imagine a future in which there are other Clair Obscur games that serve as spiritual and mechanical sequels but without much in the way of direct continuity - very much like how the Final Fantasy series works. I do wonder, though, if this vague meta-conflict could be a recurring theme - perhaps occasionally getting cryptic hints at it, but largely just serving as a thin connective tissue.
I'd also be happy to see Gestrals become the Moogles of a Clair Obscur series - even if the ones in this game were created by Verso, we could just hand-wave them as the series mascot.
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