How ‘Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’ Helped Me Grieve
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 released one day after the love of my life moved out of our apartment and 1,000 miles away, effectively ending our relationship. This unfathomable loss was impossible to begin processing, so my way to avoid dealing with those emotions was diving into this unexpectedly remarkable video game. Knowing nothing about Clair Obscur apart from its stunning review scores, I lost myself in what ultimately became an instant classic for me, skyrocketing, like 1000xRESIST before it, into my top ten games of all time.
Turning away from your reality is a key theme of Expedition 33, and that’s how I felt while I was playing it. Throughout my life, I had always been the one to leave romantic relationships. Being broken up with, especially by someone whom I had shared a nearly ten year connection with and was my first ever roommate, let’s just say, shattered me – a term in therapy that I would later grow to understand. Despite my attempt to avoid grief, I was in tears within the first 30 minutes of Expedition 33 – for the complex relationship we all must face with grief is at the core of what this game is about.
Expedition 33 begins with loss, but also immense beauty. And I think that’s what my experience of unpacking my breakup has been like. Over the past months, I have manifested so many of the ways the characters in Clair Obscur try to erase or confront their emotions. Sometimes, I reject them and harden myself to the prospect of future emotional vulnerability, like Lune. Other times, I nurture a keen sense of connection with the people I still love but have lost, like Sciel. Since my breakup, I have worked incredibly hard to reach a place where I can still fondly appreciate the good parts of the relationship I had while hopefully healing (and learning from) the bad ones. Though their struggles are entirely different in context and scale within Expedition 33, these characters showed me how to grieve – or at least what grief can look like.
One aspect of grief, I have discovered, is that you will forever carry a part of the grief object with you. Grief isn’t just something you go through, it’s a crucible that forms a new version of yourself. That’s why there’s all these sayings in Expedition 33 like, “When one falls, we continue,” or “For those who come after.” There’s an intrinsic notion within the game’s cast that grief binds us together, even as it rips us apart inside; the fireside chats are an excellent example of this. Expedition 33 features moments like Gustave, the early-game protagonist, holding a gun up to his temple after watching his entire group of expeditioners get brutally obliterated, and in that moment, I held my breath, because I felt his pain. I would have understood if the game had allowed him to pull the trigger, because sometimes there’s no one who can possibly understand or connect to your immense loss; it sometimes feels too isolating to bear the pain of grief yourself.
As the story progresses, you meet characters in Clair Obscur that respond to their grief by exerting an understandable, but ultimately destructive, compulsive need to exert control over it: the Dessendre family, specifically. We learn that the entirety of Expedition 33’s world is “painted,” or artificially constructed as iterations of the losses the Dessendre family members refuse to let go of. Trauma, in other words, shapes the world. Though I have not lost my brother in a fire, for example, this painted world concept alone fascinates me and strikes me as incredibly tempting in the wake of grief. For in my subconscious moments, despite hundreds of hours of therapy, journaling, reading self-help workbooks, and discussing my breakup with friends, there is clearly a part of my mind that wishes the world to return to my moment before the fire – before the breakup. Sometimes I wake up from a dream and realize it was about my ex, which tells me how much of a vacuum my brain is still trying to fill, despite the work I’ve done and the conviction I have to continue healing. That’s the world we’re playing in Clair Obscur.
To be clear, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not an all-timer to me merely because of my breakup grief parallels. The game is astoundingly affective, polished, and comprehensive as a narrative. It features some of the most memorable characters and story moments in recent memory, evoking the high points of titles like Final Fantasy XVI and The Last of Us, but sandwiching in several other influences that only add to the charm of this game. Clair Obscur’s combat is also addictive, spinning traditional turn-based combat into a Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door inspired timing system involving dodges and parries. Because of how well-designed the combat feels, I stopped dodging as soon as I succeeded at my first parry, and stubbornly continued parrying enemy attacks for the remaining few dozen hours of my playthrough. Despite immense challenge, it feels achieveable, and that’s simply representative of the success of the game’s overall design. And the brilliance here, for me, is that the attention span required to successfully parry enemy attacks was enough focus to take my mind off the breakup – just for a few minutes at a time – and that was a godsend.
Something that I love in video games is when they take breaks from being self-serious and melodramatic – I’m thinking the Yakuza series specifically – in order to have fun, whether that’s simply being whimsical as a developer or literally taking a break from the main action. Clair Obscur does both, and exceptionally well. I was often unrelatedly and involuntarily crying while playing Expedition 33, given the breakup’s recency, and despite those steadily flowing tears, I found myself laughing through them when characters like Esquie or Monoco showed up. Esquie, I think, is an easy fan favorite because he’s an enormous, powerful creature who has the lazy personality and quirkiness of an intense stoner – I mean, we literally have to recover his pet rock, Florrie. Every time Esquie had dialogue, I at least smiled. I even “Wheed” and “Whood” with him a few times, despite sitting alone in my now-emptier apartment. Monoco, similarly, was so incredibly deadpan – think Drax from Guardians of the Galaxy – that I couldn’t help but love him to death. Plus he has a foot fetish that he’s very open about, so good for him! Needless to say, when the inevitable plushies of these characters are sold, I’m pre-ordering them immediately.
There is no element of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that I wouldn’t praise effusively – arguably, I should spend paragraphs exploring the optional side content, dissecting the leitmotifs in the eight hour soundtrack, and so on – but the part of this game I want to speak about last is the nature of the endings. Tied into my emotional experience of this game is the choice you are provided via the ending options themselves: Verso’s ending or Maelle’s. Though I was emotionally repressing the war inside me, the confrontation between Verso and Maelle in the game’s finale was an eruption point where I finally allowed some of my swirling thoughts to surface. The choice the game presents you with is, essentially, a life of painting or a life of peace.
According to Maelle, eliminating the painting – this fantasy world – is tantamount to genocide, wiping everyone she knows and loves off the map. She will lose everything. This party of people she’s bonded with over the course of our playthrough are clearly whole, despite their fictional nature, and deserve to have a say in the continuation of their own existence. And her life outside the painting is difficult, to say the least, due to her disfigurement from a fire – scarring her face, taking away one of her eyes and even her voice. So it’s a compelling choice when you consider whether you would want to be reverted back to that more painful life in the “real” world.
According to Verso, however, the Dessendre family – who generated this entire universe, more or less – will never find meaningful closure as long as this pretend reality is allowed to persist. It’s metastatic for the family’s potential healing process. Verso seems to feel responsible for the perpetuation of the grief that has formed and consumed this very world. Allowing him to spiritually rest at last seems like a mercy. Verso’s clash with Maelle is what I was feeling throughout the game, not about the game itself, but about how I should best handle my own grief: bury it to protect myself from hurting or let it ache openly and allow the wound to close one day.
I chose the “bad ending,” which is following Maelle. Despite everything I knew about Clair Obscur’s world, and despite everything I knew about my own grief, I couldn’t let go of the characters I had just spent dozens of hours connecting with. These people were special to me, and it felt wrong to destroy their existence. The final cutscene the game provides you, if you follow Maelle’s path, is clearly intended to depict how uncomfortable and artificial this suspended existence is for all involved, as though Maelle is playing Barbies instead of maintaining human relationships with her friends. Even the music ominously crumbles along underneath as you eventually receive a sort of jump-scare at the end.
Maelle’s ending didn’t teach me about my own grief so much as represented how I initially handled it. Though my now-ex partner had just moved out, I was holding onto innumerable belongings that reminded me of her, whether they were literally her old belongings that she chose to leave behind or more sentimental gifts she had given me over the years. I am proud of myself for steadfastly maintaining “no contact,” per my therapist’s recommendation, as you need time to neurophysiologically retrain yourself post-breakup – in my head and heart, however, I was refusing to let go of her. Over the course of the next several weeks, I moved to a new apartment to get a fresh start, and part of the catharsis of my move was purging those old belongings – not all of them, of course, but if it made me feel a lingering attachment to her, it had to go.
So ultimately, my experience with the endings to Clair Obscur was an evolution. While I initially picked Maelle, and still stand by that decision – it’s what felt right for my playthrough at the time – I ultimately side with Verso now, as a person and as a player. Keeping something on emotional life support because you can’t handle the loss is a corruptive strategy, and it’s worth even destroying some parts of yourself in order to allow that turmoil to dissipate. Verso very clearly has lived through cycles of grief, as he has lost everyone he has ever known and, compared to those who are subjected to “gommaging,” is basically immortal. So for Verso, he is trapped in this world of grief, and with that lengthened perspective, Verso wants nothing more than to be done – to escape this wheel of Samsara – despite the fact that he obviously still cares for everyone in both worlds, real and otherwise. Verso’s view and corresponding decision to destroy the painted world is the “good ending” precisely because it releases the pent up suffering that grief’s ruminating denial so reliably brings about.
I’ve written before how sometimes, you don’t interpret art, art interprets you. Clair Obscur presents a world of complete projection, a place built out of a need to escape into art to avoid the cataclysmic emotional reality outside of it. In that sense, Verso’s ending also signifies a hard line in the sand that declares how there are definitive limits to the manner in which we can escape into art. Sooner or later, Verso’s ending seems to suggest, we will have to face reality again. In my case, post-breakup, that meant I had to begin the Sisyphean work of putting myself back together again.
Thus, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of the most special games I’ve ever played – so much so that, like my breakup, I avoided the end. The satisfying takeaway for me, however, is that Clair Obscur will always have two levels to it: the game itself, which is basically perfect and scratches all of my gaming itches at once, and the context in which I played it, where more than anything I needed to escape into a painted world, but at the same time also needed to learn that you can’t remain in a painted world forever.
Thank you for reading. Your Patreon support keeps our community entirely Ad free.
