Explaining the Story of Expedition 33

These are my thoughts about the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (you can also read my review of the game). I wrote this essay to help me process the powerful emotions the game provoked in me. I figured that since I wrote it down I might as well share it.

Needless to say, this whole essay comes with a massive SPOILER WARNING. Reading this before finishing the game will surely ruin a lot of the surprise and fun for you.

Without a doubt, this is the most emotionally hard-hitting video game I've ever played. It's probably because the main theme of the game is ambiguous loss, something I've had to deal with for most of my life and with which the game writers are clearly intimately acquainted. Ambiguous loss is a type of grief where it's not certain you've lost the person. For example, when a loved one gets kidnapped or goes missing without a trace, or a loved one is lost in the grip of an addiction, or a break-up where the loved one is still in your life but their relationship with you is uncertain. You know the loved one is or may be still alive, but they're not accessible to you. Ambiguous loss is the hardest form of grief to deal with. It has all the problems of grief, but none of the closure of the certainty of knowing the person is really gone. So you're left in a state of pain, wanting, and confusion that can go on forever.

I found the game's story confusing all the way to the very end. In part, the writers deliberately made the story confusing by featuring different characters who share a name, or a single character with different appearances and names, and lots of situations where the characters (especially Verso) could have said more and didn't. The world-within-a-world didn't help either! My wife and I were speculating the whole game through as to what was going on. Alicia and Maelle seemed so similar. Were they alternate dimension versions of the same person? The Man With White Hair looked a lot like Gustave as well, were they related? As the game continued, my wife started to suspect that the game world was a fantasy world with a real world outside of it. But even if some of our speculation turned out to be correct, we had way more confusion and questions than answers.

I'm assuming you're reading this because there are parts of the story that don't make sense to you, or you're curious as to my take. I'll go over the main characters so we can avoid any confusion over who we're talking about. I'll also go over some of the main events and what motivated the characters to act as they did. Finally, I'll talk about the story's themes.

Contents:

• Main Characters
• Plot
• Themes
• Conclusion

Main Characters

• Alicia/Maelle: Alicia Dessendre and Maelle are one-and-the-same person (confusingly, there's also a Painted Alicia created by Aline, but she doesn't impact the plot very much). Alicia was attacked by a polity called the Writers and her brother Verso sacrificed his life to save her from the resulting fire. Alicia ended up badly injured. Her face was burned, she lost an eye, and her voice was destroyed. When she entered the Canvas, Alicia got repainted into a newborn Maelle by her mother, Aline. Maelle is motivated to save Lumière and, more broadly, the Canvas. Initially, she believes this means stopping the Paintress.
• Verso: Verso Dessendre is Alicia's older brother. He created the Canvas and left a piece of his soul inside. Then Verso died saving his sister, Alicia. His mother, Aline, found Verso's piece of soul and repainted it into Painted Verso. When you play the game, it's as Painted Verso. If he often seems mysteriously lacking in motivation, confused about what his family members are saying, and unwilling to talk about himself, it's because he's an incomplete person. Painted Verso lives in constant pain, knowing he's incomplete and causing his family to suffer. He wants to die so that his mother and sister can be free of their grief. However, Aline won't let him die. Verso's piece of soul is represented in the story by the ghost of the little boy.
• Aline: the mother of Alicia, Verso, and Clea, and the wife of Real Renoir. She's trying to save the Canvas to preserve the last piece of her son Verso's soul. In fact, she wants to stay in the Canvas forever so she never has to lose her son completely. Aline is also trapped in the Monolith. She uses her Paintress colossus to paint a number on the Monolith each year to warn the people of Lumière of who's going to die next. Aline is also occasionally seen in the form of the female ghost/projection.
• Real Renoir: the father of Alicia, Verso, and Clea, and the husband of Aline. He's trying to destroy the Canvas to save Alicia and Aline from their ambiguous loss of Verso. While he's trapped in the Monolith, Real Renoir is limited to destroying one year worth of people once per year. Through most of the story, Real Renoir is usually seen in the form of the Curator.
• Painted Renoir: the White-Haired Man; Aline created a more stern, white-haired version of her husband to help her and complete her fake family inside the Canvas. Painted Renoir is motivated to protect his family by preserving the Canvas and stopping anyone (especially Expeditions) from attacking the Paintress.
• Lune: a native person of the Canvas, who appears to be fully sentient and sapient, having been created via natural birth and not some process of painting.
• Sciel: another native person of the Canvas.
• Gustave: a native of the Canvas, he partly raised Maelle after her parents were erased.
• Monoco: a creation of Real Verso's, based on his childhood dog.
• Esquie: a creation of Real Verso's, based on his childhood plush toy.
• Ghosts/Projections: there are 3 of them and they are all real people (or pieces of real people), sometimes described as their soul or heart. The man/Curator is Real Renoir, the woman is Aline, and the little boy is Real Verso. Even though Real Renoir and Aline are trapped in the Monolith, it seems that they have some limited ability to move around outside using these projections.

Plot

• There's a family of Painters living in Paris: Renoir (father), Aline (mother), Verso (son), Clea (daughter), and Alicia (daughter). They have a magical ability to both make paintings come to life and to send their minds into the paintings (where they have the power to change the painted world from within).
• The act of creating a painting leaves a piece of the artist's soul in the living painting.
• Staying in a painting drains your life force, and is lethal if you do it for too long.
• Time passes inside the painting at a much, much faster rate than in the outside world. It might be that one year in the painting is only 10 minutes in real life.
• Verso creates a living painting (the Canvas) with his favourite characters Esquie and Monoco. He occasionally goes into the painting to have adventures with his creations.
• The Painter faction has an ongoing war with the Writer faction.
• At some point, Alicia does something naive (we don't know what) that puts her in danger. The Writers attack her, and her older brother Verso sacrifices his life to save Alicia's.
• Taken over by grief, Verso's mother Aline goes into Verso's painting and stays there way too long. She finds Verso's soul shard and repaints it into Painted Verso. She creates a version of her husband, Painted Renoir, to defend her and her son.
• Aline is stuck in ambiguous loss, because her son is both dead and not dead. So long as she has access to Verso's painting, she will never be able to end her denial and accept the permanent loss of her son.
• Aline's husband Renoir and daughter Clea intervene by entering the painting to force Aline to leave. This causes the Fracture that breaks large parts of the painting's world. Aline and Renoir trap each other on different sides of a monolith. Clea tips the scales in Renoir's favour. With his slight advantage, Renoir is able to slowly destroy the painting, sucking away one year at a time from the people. Aline warns people of their impending doom by painting the numbers of the next year to be destroyed on the monolith, starting at 100 and moving down from there.
• Expedition Zero, which includes Painted Verso and is led by Painted Renoir, departs Lumière with the goal of finding survivors in Old Lumière and figuring out what's going on. The Expedition gets killed but Painted Verso and Painted Renoir survive by virtue of their Paintress-granted immortality. Painted Renoir learns that the Paintress is really Aline and resolves to protect her.
• By year 85, the city of Lumière learns about the Gommage and begins sending out regular expeditions to try to stop the Paintress. Painted Renoir attacks these expeditions.
• In the real world, Clea leaves the Canvas and tells Alicia that Alicia can help by going into the Canvas to help Renoir get her mother Aline out.
• Clea is kept busy in the real world dealing with the hostile Writer faction.
• Alicia goes into the painting. Alicia is quite inexperienced and her mother is able to defeat her easily. Aline repaints Alicia into the baby that becomes Maelle.
• At the end of the game's Prologue, the monolith reaches 33 and we see a 33-year-old Sophie die in Gustave's arms.
• Expedition 33 prepares to leave. Among them are the protagonists Gustave, Maelle, Lune, and Sciel.
• Expedition 33 arrives on the continent and Painted Renoir kills most of them. Some few are saved by a mysterious force (presumably Painted Verso and/or Real Renoir).
• Gustave reunites with Lune, and together they track down Maelle. She's inside the Manor (a facsimile of the Dessendre family's home in Paris), under the protection of the Curator (a projection of Real Renoir, in disguise). Real Renoir helps the expedition from now on, since their common goal is to stop the Paintress (Aline).
• Maelle starts having visions of Painted Renoir and Painted Alicia. She's too confused to understand the visions.
• At the end of Act 1, Painted Renoir catches up with Gustave and Maelle. Painted Renoir traps Maelle (he doesn't want to kill her because she's family) and kills Gustave.
• Painted Renoir tries to convince Maelle to stop the expedition. Ideally, he wants to bring her onside with the Paintress (Aline) to help against Real Renoir. However, Maelle insists on continuing to attack the Paintress and Painted Renoir prepares to kill her (which, since Maelle is really the painter Alicia, would drive her out of the painting).
• Painted Verso arrives and stops Painted Renoir. Painted Verso's motive here is probably that he recognizes the real Alicia. They also share a goal of wanting to stop the Paintress.
• Painted Renoir warns Painted Verso that slaying the Paintress would have drastic consequences (it would force Aline to leave the Canvas and allow Real Renoir to destroy it).
• Painted Renoir doesn't want to fight Painted Verso and leaves.
• In the aftermath, Painted Verso either knows or suspects the real consequences of slaying the Paintress. Hating his hollow life, Painted Verso commits to driving out the Paintress, ending his own caricature of a life, and saving Aline and Alicia from the misery his existence is perpetuating. He doesn't say any of this to the Expedition.
• Painted Verso mentions an energy shield protecting the Monolith, and that they could try destroying the Heart of the Paintress in Old Lumière to break the shield.
• Expedition 33 fights its way to Old Lumière. They reach the Manor and find Aline's projection inside. However, Painted Renoir stops them and Aline's projection escapes.
• Expedition 33 is forced to go slay the two Axons (colossi created by Real Renoir) to gather enough chroma/power to destroy the energy shield. Painted Verso feels the task is impossible (he'd tried and failed many times with Painted Renoir), but it turns out to be pretty easy. In fact, the Axons almost seem to want to be slain.
• The Curator (Real Renoir) crafts a special sword for Maelle, who uses it to break the energy shield and gain access to the Monolith.
• Expedition 33 attacks the Paintress colossus, which is not Aline but one of her creations. They can't hurt it.
• Aline sees the Expedition and initially tries to kill them. However, when she recognizes her children among the Expedition Aline instead opens a portal into the Monolith, which will allow her children to reach her at the top.
• Fighting their way through the Monolith, near the top, Painted Renoir stops the Expedition. They fight and the Expedition defeats Painted Renoir. Without really understanding what she's doing, together with the Curator (Real Renoir), Maelle/Alicia uses her painting ability to destroy Painted Renoir. As he is erased, Painted Renoir tells Real Renoir that he loves "them" too (referring to Real Renoir's family).
• Expedition 33 goes to the top of the Monolith, where they find Aline. Due to exhaustion, she's so deranged and paranoid at this stage that Aline can't tell if Painted Verso is Real Verso, Painted Verso, or some enemy trickster created by Real Renoir. She tells Painted Verso it's time to go home (to Lumière), and Painted Verso tells her she needs to go home (to Paris). Aline starts thinking she's being tricked, saying (incorrectly) that Maelle is not Alicia and (half-correctly) that Painted Verso is not Real Verso. Painted Verso agrees again, adding that "Verso is dead." This pisses off Aline and she fights the Expedition and gets defeated. This drives her out of the Canvas.
• Now that Aline is gone, Real Renoir is freed from beneath the Monolith. He destroys the people of Lumière, ejects Maelle from the Canvas, and prepares to raze the Canvas in its entirety.
• Outside the Canvas, Alicia finally remembers who she really is. Alicia gets mired in the same emotional trap as her mother. She re-enters the Canvas and confronts her father. She pleads with him to allow the Canvas to remain.
• Real Renoir refuses, insisting that he must destroy the Canvas to save Aline and Alicia. It's the only way to end the ambiguity of the loss of Real Verso. The choice Real Renoir is facing is horrible: to murder what's left of his son to save his wife and daughter, but he realizes that it's the only way. It really is. So long as the ambiguity remains, Aline and Alicia can't move on.
• Maelle/Alicia fights her father, defeating him with a guest appearance from Aline. Real Renoir is ejected from the Canvas, believing he has failed both his wife and daughter. But he holds out hope that they might escape on their own.
• Painted Verso insists that Maelle/Alicia must destroy the Canvas or it will destroy her (Alicia) and Aline both. Verso and Maelle fight. The winner of that fight depends on the player.
• If Maelle wins (A Life to Paint), then she is able to re-create all her lost friends. She enslaves Painted Verso (and the little chunk of her brother's soul inside him) to continue existing for her amusement. She has everything she wants, but it's hollow and cruel. Unseen, Alicia's father will soon have two more family members to bury.
• If Painted Verso wins (A Life to Love), then he ejects Alicia back to the real world and destroys the Canvas—killing the remaining piece of Real Verso's soul. The ambiguous loss ends for Alicia and Aline and they are able to finally find closure and end their grieving. Verso has once again saved his sister's life! It's a hard life, but it's real, and their family has survived.

Themes

Expedition 33 has some really meaningful themes:

• Coping With Loss: virtually every character in the game has to cope with loss—not just Aline. Everyone from Lumière has lost someone dear to them and is facing their own imminent death. Maelle lost her painted parents, Gustave, and (as Alicia) has the ambiguous loss of her brother Verso (with the additional guilt of feeling responsible for his death). Gustave lost Sophie. Sciel lost her husband. Lune lost her parents. Real Renoir has to cope with the ambiguous loss of three people: Verso, his wife Aline, and his daughter Alicia. Painted Verso has to cope with the loss of himself: knowing that he's a cardboard cutout of a real person.
• Addiction: the game really helps the player to understand how loss and ambiguous loss (especially) can lead to substance abuse. The desire to fill in the empty space where that person used to be can be overwhelming. Every aspect of the story weaves together a love for Real Verso's creation, making it all the harder for the player to make the right choice at the end—the choice to end Verso's caricatural life and free his family.
• What's Real and What Matters: we're playing a game that takes place in a fictional world, that itself has a fictional world inside it, that itself has various mini-games and duels you can participate in. Does Painted Verso's story matter less because he's a character inside a story inside a story? When you duel the Gestrals in their arena, is it any less meaningful because you're 3 levels deep in a game? If Lune or Monoco are fake people we shouldn't care about, then why should we care about Alicia? She's also fictional! In the end, these stories and these people have meaning separately from whether they exist or not objectively. That meaning helps us to understand ourselves, our relationships with each other, and the world we live in.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the characters of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, like those of us in the real world, have to accept that death is inevitable and inescapable, and to accept it. It's only after accepting it that we can find hope and move on with our lives. It's an important lesson for all of us. Hopefully, after playing this game, we will all feel a bit more ready to handle this reality when it comes calling.