Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
SHOW TYPE
GAME
DEVELOPER
Sandfall Interactive
PROTECTION
M (MATURE 17+)
RELEASED
2025
Lead the members of Expedition 33 on their quest to destroy the Paintress so that she can never paint death again.
Every year she paints a number, and everyone of that age vanishes. The remaining expedition sails to her monolith. A Belle Époque France that went wrong: crumbling opera houses, sword-and-gun fights, and a turn-based RPG that still makes you parry.
Sandfall is a small French studio. The game sold millions without a lecture. Activists later complained the team looked too French. The Paintress is a villain, not a metaphor for your news feed.
Community verdict · separate from the catalog
No community verdict yet · In the catalog
Reviewed and in the catalog. Community verdict: not woke — 100% of 2 members did not file a woke label.
2 of 2 did not label it woke · 5 members to decide
Community rank · quality, not a gate
Low scores stay in the catalog.
Report a mistake
Same rule as woke labels: one report, a written reason, and the community +1 or −1 it — once per member. A net +5 applies the change. Editors can also apply it immediately.
No mistake reports yet.
Sign in to report a mistake. One report per field, per member.
Woke labels
Members can file a published criterion and itemized evidence. Other members +1 or −1 that reason — once. If 10% of members who weighed in file a label, and a reason reaches net +5, that rank keeps the title omitted from the database. Weak labels do not.
No labels filed yet.
Comments and reviews
Wes Calder
+2 cloutSep 2, 2026
This is basically Final Fantasy X if Tidus had a pistol and the summon was a fading France. Wait. Not X. X is the pilgrimage. This is a pilgrimage. Okay, it is X. I take it back and I don't. Expedition 33 is an action game that keeps stopping to be an RPG, which I mean as a compliment. You walk into a fight like it's a street brawl, then the turn order pops and you have to parry a giant's paintbrush in real time. I sat there grinning like an idiot because I have been waiting for a turn-based game to remember it can also be an action game without becoming an action-game apology. The plot is fantasy first. A Paintress on a monolith writes a number every year and everyone of that age gets erased. Gommage. I kept calling it the Gom Jabbar and then correcting myself out loud, which is how you know I was in it. That's the mystery: not "who is the villain," you can see her from the beach, but why a god would keep a census of death and what the last expedition actually found when they got close. Adventure is the rest of it. You sail. You camp. You pick through a Belle Époque that went moldy — opera houses, iron towers, stuffed shirts with swords. It looks like a history painting that started bleeding. I spent too long in one manor because the floor tiles were doing more storytelling than most cutscenes I've sat through this decade. The manor is the part I'll bore you with. Don't let me. Anyway. The tiles. Nobody stops the party to explain that the Paintress is a metaphor for late-stage anything. She's a woman with a brush and a number and if you don't kill her your friends vanish. That's a quest. I like quests. I named a tank in another game after Gustave and then I felt weird about it because of the prologue. You know the prologue. I am not typing it. Five stars. I have the parry timing in my hands when I close my eyes, which is either praise or a medical issue.