Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a JRPG-style game with a linear story and a lot of combat. You play the part of Expedition 33, a group of people setting out to stop the Paintress from slowly murdering everyone in the city of Lumière. In exploration mode, you embody a member of the expedition (in over-the-shoulder perspective) and wander around a 3D world, encountering monsters and simple exploration and platforming puzzles. Combat is turn-based, but with a Souls-like twist: you need to do quick-time events to pull off your special abilities and—most crucially—to evade or counter enemy attacks.

It took me about 56 hours to play through the whole game on Story difficulty. I mostly stuck to the main quest, and did a moderate number of side quests and optional extras (such as the Petanks and the easier optional bosses).

NB: I've also written my (spoiler-heavy) thoughts and observations in a separate essay, Explaining the Story of Expedition 33.

THE GOOD:

• The Prologue does a great job of establishing the high stakes of the expedition and the growing hopelessness of the people of Lumière.
• The overall story is very engaging and mysterious.
• The graphics are great!
• The music is great!
• The events are meaningful.
• The characters are interesting.
• The voice acting is good (in English and in French).
• I love the ending of the game and the choice you have to make (Verso or Maelle). It's the only real story-defining choice you have in the entire game, but it's the right one!
• Expedition 33 is such a desperately sad game, but it's so well done that it's cathartic rather than enervating.
• The boss fights are generally really unique, interesting, and epic.
• The fights, in general, are hard enough that they certainly kept me awake and alert.

THE BAD:

• Maybe it's just not my forte, but the dodge and parry quick-time events were really, really hard for me to pull off. The timing is split-second. Further compounding the difficulty, most enemy attack routines involve multiple individual attacks during their turn. You have to parry each attack successfully to pull off a counter-attack. Even on Story difficulty, I successfully counter-attacked a few dozen times during the entire game. I mostly dodged, and this made the game more onerous to play (especially the boss fights). On the plus side, the brutal difficulty of the game did underscore the themes of the game quite well.
• The constant battles got a bit boring after a while. I was able to implement mostly the same combat routine each time. I shook things up by changing the active characters in my party, so it wasn't horrible.
• There were tutorials for all the major functionalities of the game, but most of them went by too quickly for me to really absorb them. I would have liked more opportunity to experiment and understand each lesson before moving on.

THE UGLY:

• It's kind of dumb that the people of Lumière didn't put more effort into reconnaissance. It doesn't make a lot of sense for them to be sending expedition after expedition into the unknown. This is throwing away people's lives without even knowing if you're making progress at all. For all they knew, every expedition was just falling off a cliff! One of the expeditions actually had radio technology, which makes this even more inexcusable.
• In a similar vein, near the end of the game we learn about Expedition 60 (the super buff expedition). A member of that expedition attempted to return home to Lumière to warn people that the Paintress is not the real enemy but he died from the Gommage before he could arrive home. We're supposed to believe that everyone in the expedition was 60 years old? They couldn't send a few people in their mid-fifties who could return home with valuable reconnaissance?