Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game that tells a story utterly drenched in mysteries. There are multiple massive twists in the story that left players deeply conflicted as to what the better of the two endings you can choose for the game really is.
Diving into the game when it first came out with no sense of what the story held (not even knowing that Verso was going to be a party member, and so not really thinking much of his many, many mentions by NPCs before he shows up for real) the game's massive twists really shook me - particularly after finishing Act Two, I had to just step away and take the rest of the day to recover.
But while those big reveals in the main plot do totally reframe the way you think about the story, there are subtler mysteries and hints at some of the background that aren't really answered in a straightforward way.
We're going to go deep into spoiler territory here.
So, I think in my initial playthrough, I was primarily concerned about the lore of the actual "real" Dessendre family that existed primarily in the real world - the one that contains a Paris we can assume is more or less like the one we know, only one in which there are people capable of making magic painted worlds (and whatever the hell the Writers do).
One of the somewhat confusing elements of the story is that there are two versions of several characters: Aline created painted copies of her family members after Verso's death. As others have pointed out, the fact that she recreates Alicia with the horrific scarring and burns that her actual daughter suffered when Verso died suggests that she blamed her youngest daughter for her son's demise.
But I also think that there's some implication that all these family portraits are a little skewed - based less on what her family was actually like than how she thought of them. We don't really get much of Painted Clea's original personality, because she was tortured and transformed by the true Clea. But Painted Alicia lives something of a cursed life, and Renoir is callous and cruel - perhaps a reflection of some of the feelings she had toward her actual husband.
Of course, the true Renoir - the Curator - is the one actually behind the Gommage, but unlike his painted reflection, there's a desperation to this. He values Aline more than the invented world of his dead son, and by the end of the game, Renoir is clearly now working primarily to rescue his daughter from the same fate his wife had been lured into.
What's kind of interesting, then, is that Renoir has his own family portraits in the form of the Axons, and there is real judgment within them - his version of Verso is a representation of lying and dishonesty, his portrait of his wife is one of beauty, yes, but also specifically a kind of lulling into complacency (did he make the Sirene Axon before or after Verso died?)
There are some deep red-string-and-corkboards ideas that Renoir might have suspected that Verso was working with the Writers (the real-world versions) but we're also left with the playable Verso, the portrait of him by a grieving mother. Theoretically, he should be an idealized, perfect version of her son, and yet we have a hinted background of his own duplicity.
As I understand it, the painted Dessendres once lived in Lumiere (probably Old Lumiere) and may not have even realized their nature, at least until it became clear that they couldn't die. Aline might have lived with them, fleeing the reality of her grief. We don't know precisely the timeline, vis-a-vis the Fracture (when Lumiere was tossed far to the south where it is at the start of the game) and then the beginning of Gommage.
But the first of the Expeditions, Expedition Zero, was led by Renoir, and Verso was there along with it. So, presumably, Renoir didn't know his own nature (to be clear, painted Renoir).
Verso explains Renoir as someone who believes he gets his immortality from the Paintress, and that's why he fights so viciously to defend her. I think that actually makes logical sense - upon discovering that he was one of the Paintress' favored creations, he became devoted to her.
Indeed, we do see that there's actually a small cult to the Paintress - there's a guy in Lumiere who worships her, and we find shrines to here in some places. Perhaps Renoir encouraged the creation of this cult?
But we also find evidence - as early as Maelle's Nightmare after Flying Waters, if memory serves - that Verso participated in the sabotage of earlier expeditions, and I think even murdered his own Lumieran lover.
Now, this was probably under the domineering pressure of his father. Of course, the horrible irony of the Expeditions is that they would only serve to achieve the opposite of their goals - as we find out when we defeat the Paintress at the end of act two, her defeat means the Gommage for all. So, even though it's horrible for the Expeditioners, Painted Renoir was technically preserving Lumiere while his real-world counterpart was trying to destroy it.
This puts Verso's role in the game's story in a really strange place: To what extent does he know what he's doing by helping the Expedition?
See, I think that the primary motivation is to release Aline, or at least that's what he's telling himself. In the early years, he's helping Renoir (and maybe Clea and Alicia) kill the Expeditions to keep the Paintress alive. Verso understands that Aline isn't truly his mother, or perhaps more precisely, that he isn't truly her son. And so, he goes with us to eject her from the canvas.
So, is Verso just lying to us throughout Act Two?
I honestly think it was kind of a weird choice for us to play "as" Verso after Gustave dies, as Maelle seems to me the more straightforward protagonist. It does open up the romance options for Lune and Sciel (Maelle is a minor, after all) but we're left with the most mysteriously motivated character as the "player character."
It's also pretty interesting how Verso and Gustave are connected - I think there's some interpretation that Maelle had somehow actually created Gustave, or at least steered him into being. While she was born into Lumiere sixteen years after Gustave was born (actually, is he specifically 32, or might he be slightly younger?) we don't know how much Canvas time passed when she was entering it and bombarded with Chroma. Given that there was a whole period of history in Lumiere before the Fracture, and then the conflict between Renoir and Aline (the real ones) has been going on for at least 67 Canvas Years, while the real Verso has probably only been dead a year at the outside, it stands to reason that Alicia's entrance into the Canvas before she is born as Maelle might have been well before Gustave was born.
Gustave is a deeply likable character, but is that because he was literally created to be the ideal older brother? If Renoir made an Axon based on Verso that was all about deceitfulness (or, more charitably, being hard to read - there's a version of this where Renoir is lamenting that he didn't develop a deep insight into his son's personality) and Aline made a Renoir who was still deeply connected to his childhood games and imaginary friends, Maelle made the deeply present, committed, protective big brother that she unconsciously remembered Verso being, and perhaps idealizing Verso beyond what he actually was.
My sense is that Verso was Aline's favorite child. Meanwhile, even if he's the "villain" of the game, Renoir, I think, favored Alicia (I think it's notable that we find her after the beach under the Curator's protection). This does, though, mean that Clea probably wasn't either parent's favorite. Is that, then, maybe why she's such a callous and cruel person?
While I really think that part of the point of Expedition 33 is that there aren't any pure bad guys, Clea is arguably the most villainous character, unleashing Nevrons on the canvas and draining the will out of her painted counterpart and Simon, and acting pretty crappy to Alicia.
Though again, the fact that her Axon, which was slain, is holding up a big chunk of Old Lumiere, suggests that Renoir, at least, saw in her someone who was willing to take on heavy burdens. Indeed, one can interpret her impatience with the grieving process as being the only member of the Dessendre family still focusing on the conflict with the Writers.
(Again, though, more conspiracy theories abound that Verso might have been a turncoat, and even possibly faked his death, though I take any theories about the real world with a heavy grain of salt, as there's just so little evidence to work with.)
But the point of all this is that playing the game a second time around, I certainly understand better the cryptic things that are said in those early cutscenes - Painted Alicia reaching out to Maelle in her sleep, expressing commonality with those who "know not that they are not," basically hinting to us about the painted nature of the Lumierans.
At the same time, though, the nature of the painted Dessendres overall life and timeline is vague enough that even having beaten the game, some of the allusions in the dialogue is still not totally obvious.
Boy, though: what a beautiful and sad game.
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