Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Lost Me in Under Thirty Minutes

It’s okay to not like a popular or lauded game, right?

Xbox screenshot captured by the author.

I should have listened to my gut.

The marketing for this week’s new game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 laid out a haunted, sad world full of monsters, mysteries, and intense turn-based battles. It looked aesthetically cool to me, but also like a game where I’d get bogged down by the mechanics and the general melancholy of the story. It also has a title that I keep mixing up in my head with another recent attempt at a new IP that no one remembers called Unknown 9: Awakening.

I was all prepared to skip it, even though it’s on Game Pass which I already have a membership for. But then the professional reviews came in. It scored nines and tens all across the board. It’s sitting at a 91 on OpenCritic as of this very moment. It was praised as the greatest RPG in years, and a defining achievement, and a sweeping incredible story that everyone should check out.

I hoped that my love of its impressive looks (all the more interesting when you learn how tiny the development team was) would carry me past my concerns. It didn’t.

Clair Obscure is a heavy, depressing, super sad game right from moment one. It’s about a world where an evil goddess being thing known as “The…