My first play session with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lasted about two hours, and I got through the tutorial and far enough to see the first few real battles. And then I didn’t boot the game back up for almost three weeks.

By the end of the second session… yeah, I can start to see why this is winning all of the awards.

First, the game is trippy and evocative as fuck. The principle bad guy is a goliath-esque woman named The Paintress, which is apt as every environment looks like it sprung directly from some artwork in the Louvre and/or a fever dream. The protagonists live on some kind of island protected by shields or something – with the world itself seeming to have been shattered by some older cataclysm – but the Paintress controls a countdown timer that nevertheless kills everyone older than a specific number. At game start it was 34, and now it’s the eponymous 33. It seems to increment on a yearly basis, but I’m not sure if that was specified (or matters). In any case, every year a small number of adventurers next in line to be erased gets together and attempts to bring the fight to the Paintress. Enter you.

Second, I do want to highly praise the motion-capture and general dialog thus far. It’s passionate, awkward, and deeply human in ways very few other games have been able to reproduce. Nearly 14 years ago, I was blown away by Mass Effect’s wink, and here in Expedition 33 I just witnessed a character search another’s eyes to see if they truly meant what they said. You know, her face close, the silence, her eyes going back and forth with purpose, debriding the layers of your soul. I don’t know how, but they captured it. The bar has been raised again.

We will have to see how it works out for me over the long haul, but my first impression of Expedition 33’s combat system… is that it’s not fun. Basically, it feels like a turn-based Soulslike. Everything more complex than a basic attack will have a Quick-Time Event sequence in order to juice the skill further. On the enemy’s turn, you are essentially required to either Dodge or Parry their attacks; Dodging has a more forgiving window than Parry, but successfully Parrying every attack will allow the party member to unleash a devastating counter-attack. I say Dodging/Parrying is “required” because the amount of damage you end up taking is significant, and your ability to heal is limited and only refreshed when you arrive at checkpoint flags, e.g. campfires. And yeah, enemies respawn when you rest.

What results is a truly conflicting game thus far. I encountered some enemies in the opening areas that were clearly higher-level than my ability to meaningfully tackle. “The designers just wanted to teach me that not every enemy needs fought, and/or that I may want to revisit places once I gained more levels.” OK, great, very Soulslike of you. Buuuuut, technically, if you just Parry all their attacks, you will defeat them eventually. Which then gets you thinking about why bother putting points in Defense or Vitality, when both are irrelevant if you don’t get hit in the first place. Is that the intentional design? Stack Defense if you aren’t good at the timing, and everyone else go glass cannon?

Again, this is all very early on, so perhaps things will improve. Somehow. Or perhaps the combat system is just something you put up with for the environments, dialog, and plot. That is a very old-school RPG sentiment for 2026, but I’m going to roll with it for now.