Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lets you know very early on that you're in for an emotionally devastating ride. Our time with Sophie, Gustave's ex-girlfriend, is brief and more or less just a tutorial, but she stands in to represent the utter agony that is living in Lumiere with the Gommage.
It's a remarkable feat: before you really get to the actual meat of the game, you're already bawling your eyes out (unless you're some kind of robot).
But even in that segment, there's a bit of silliness: you can find a guy hiding in a trash can, somehow thinking that the mystical power that erases people above a certain age will just pass him by if he's hidden. It's dark, sure, but it's really silly.
And while we go from profound grief and sorrow to horror when the expedition arrives at the beach, and then see as Gustave, our optimistic hero, contemplates just getting it over with and shooting himself, the tone starts to lift once we get to Falling Waters. Finding the Manor and the Curator gives us mystery, rather than despair, and some relief at finding Maelle alive. But we also meet our first Gestral, Noco, and suddenly, in this deeply sad game, there's something profoundly silly.
It doesn't hurt that Flying Waters is a gorgeous area, and while Spring Meadows has plenty of beautiful vistas (also, the Mime fight does introduce some of that silliness earlier than Noco,) the surreal beauty of Flying Waters really was the thing that wowed me.
The beauty of the world of Expedition 33 is one thing - I think tragic stories often incorporate stunning beauty. But I think it's the humor of the game that really works to disarm you.
Let's go into deep spoiler space. It's crazy to think the game came out only last year, when it feels like it so quickly cemented itself into the canon of the medium. Spoilers Ahead. Er... actually, spoilers for both this and Christopher Nolan's film The Prestige
Ok, you might wonder why I brought up The Prestige.
My favorite of Nolan's films, and among my favorite movies of all time, The Prestige is a movie that has not one but two big twists in it. One twist, that one of its rival protagonists is actually a pair of identical twins, played brilliantly by Christian Bale, is something that an attentive viewer can piece together. But, working like the way magic tricks are described in the movie, this twist is itself there to distract you from the far crazier twist: that the film is actually science fiction, and that Angier, the rival magician, has been using a weird instant-cloning device invented by Nikola Tesla and allowing himself to drown every night of his performances in what might be an effort to frame his rival for murder or as a weird sort of repeated suicide, or probably a bit of both.
In a weird way, Expedition 33 does similar things: Gustave's death at the end of Act One isn't a twist in the sense that we're recontextualizing a lot of things we didn't fully understand, but it is shocking in the sense that we're learning that being the protagonist doesn't protect you from death. (And unlike Chrono Trigger, there's no major quest to save the main character.)
But the shock of Gustave's death and the arrival of Verso (upon a second playthrough, I realized that Verso is mentioned a ton before we actually get a proper look at him) kind of leaves us stunned, and we spend a decent chunk of time just getting used to Gustave's absence (the whole Forgotten Battlefield zone is basically the party being shell-shocked after this event.)
To be fair, I was deeply skeptical about our mission and the Paintress' actual motivations on my first playthrough, but I couldn't make sense of the weird comments like when Verso, after they defeat the Mask Keeper, saying "that was Verso wasn't it?" Or figuring out why the masked Alicia looked vaguely like Maelle.
But I for sure didn't call that the entire world was a construct and that only Maelle, the Curator, and the Paintress were from the "real world."
Ok, but I'm not here to review the twists of the game. I'm really here to talk about the way that normal tools of drama, like comic relief, only serve to make the tragedy of the story that much more profound.
We discover that the original Verso is the one who created the Canvas, and so the incongruously silly and fun parts of the world are, in fact, the way this place was intended to be all along. It was meant to be a place where just one little boy (and his sister Clea - weirdly it doesn't seem that Alicia ever went in there until after Verso's death. I wonder if, given the age gap in the family, perhaps when Verso and Clea got old enough to stop using it, they put it in storage before Alicia would have been old enough to play there) could just go around having adventures. It was a place for Esquie and Monoco and Francois and the Gestrals and the Grandis.
A year after the game came out, we got a free DLC that included Verso's Drafts, an area that is bright and childish, literally filled with candy. Our fight with Osquio, the silly evil version of Esquie, ends with an animation showing Verso reverting to a child-like version of himself and finishing the fight alongside Monoco, exactly the way that a little boy would imagine fighting some invented villain.
The tone of Verso's Drafts is full silly-mode. But we're reminded, when we think about it, that the boy who created all of that is dead. That our Verso is simulating a childhood he never really had (I don't know if the painted version of the Dessendre family started off as children, but I sort of assume that Aline painted them as they were when Verso died, and that painted Verso in particular was her attempt to recreate him as best as she could.)
Thus, every bit of fun, of humor, of whimsy, is a reminder of the fact that the wonderfully creative person who created all of this is gone, and that his creation was adulterated by his family members. There's almost a weirdly Gnostic thing going on here: if the original Verso was the actual Creator, the Paintress is kind of the Demiurge.
Indeed, we can only infer what was going on in the Dessendre family prior to Verso's death, but I think it's interesting that Aline's fixation is on something he created as a child. Parents can often infantilize their children, thinking of them always as the little children they once were, and failing to recognize the complex adults they become. There's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that Verso wasn't really happy with the path that his family had laid out for him, and while Renoir seemed to recognize that (whether that came along with suspicion or just regret is something I've kind of debated myself,) Aline may have kind of idealized Verso by thinking of him only as the creative child he had been, and grief probably would have super-charged this attitude.
Which makes it all a little more tragic: the Canvas didn't even represent Verso as he really was before he died. Aline wasn't just mourning the death of her adult son, but also the fact that he had grown up at all. And that means that the whimsy of the Canvas is tinged with the sadness of a family that might have already been falling apart before tragedy fully sundered it.
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