David Wesst

Clair Obscur is a refreshing take on high-resolution turn-based RPGs. It’s not just the gameplay, or the beautiful aesthetics and sound—the narrative takes some risks in storytelling, with various twists that I haven’t seen in many years.

It’s not perfect—but it’s pretty great. Here's my take.

What I Didn't Like

Getting Lost

As much as I appreciated the beauty of the graphics and amazing environments, I found myself continually getting turned around and lost in the various dungeons and levels. No doubt, things look beautiful, but there is no landmark to center myself in a level so I know which way to go—or at least I didn’t notice one.

This isn’t a dealbreaker by any stretch, but it happened enough throughout my playthrough that it took me out of the experience a few times over.

What I Liked

Innovation on Turn-Based Combat

Clair Obscur’s combat system has a lot going on. So much, in fact, that it overwhelmed me at the beginning—but over time you start to see how it all fits together. Eventually, I managed to set up combos between the players and felt exceptionally powerful.

Maybe too powerful, but I probably could have fixed that by bumping up the difficulty.

It turns out that turn-based RPG battles are not a dead form of gameplay. Imagine that.

Character Performances

I'm no sound design expert, but these scenes were delivered by some real talent—on both the acting and directing sides.

I played through in English, and the voice performances were great. They felt very natural, like they were done in the same room. There are scenes where the characters talk over each other, which is something I haven’t heard—or at least don’t remember hearing—in a high-fidelity RPG for a very long time.

It really had me looking forward to the next cutscene, like I was watching a TV show or something, eagerly awaiting the next episode.

Story and Character Development

No spoilers from me here—but there are a number of twists and turns between the acts that I just couldn’t predict. Surprises in video game stories aren’t as common as I’d like—probably because it’s hard to write twists for a story that players control the pacing of.

But Clair Obscur pulls it off. Multiple times.

Beyond the twists, the character development is great too. There are whole sections that are optional but provide gameplay perks if you go through them. When I rolled credits on the game, I didn’t realize I had missed so many character development story beats, so I went back and completed all the character storylines. Very much worth it.

The Conclusion

I honestly cannot remember the last time a video game made me think this much about the characters and themes in the story. Although it gets heavy at times, they do a good job of balancing the dark and dreary pieces with the funny bits.

And like I said in the opening—this game is refreshing. I feel like it fulfills the promise that the recent new (not remake) Final Fantasy games just haven’t been able to deliver on.

But the game is not perfect—although I love it. There are a lot of menus that continually need to be revisited. The environment design doesn’t guide the player enough. But the core of the game and narrative are solid. I genuinely hope there is some DLC to explore parts of the lore that we didn’t get to visit in this game.

All in all, a solid game—and I’m eager to see what Sandfall does next.