People of Earth are idiots!

I tried hard to write no spoilers in this post. I describe the world as established in the prologue, and some pretty generic descriptions of places throughout the game, but I’m keeping the plot points to myself.

I enjoy playing video games in which the writer makes a few promises: that the person you’re about to inhabit is someone interesting, and that the world in which you’re about to awaken and try to fix is itself interesting. I’ll play games with one or the other: the Doom franchise is just plain ordinary physically challenging fun, but the art is amazing; Dead Space gives us a brave but tortured soul whose first close brush with evil makes him the unhappy savior of the galaxy in chapters written with thought and care; Prey is both incredibly pretty and gives our heroine reasons to sacrifice her humanity piece by piece to save her space station’s crew and, ultimately, Earth itself.

Clair Obscur hits those notes with grace and precision. The premise is pure video game fantasy: 67 years ago, a horrifying supernatural event (which the people in this story have come to call “The Fracture”) tore the world into pieces and unleashed monsters, leaving only a tiny island of human survivors struggling in a city call Lumiere (which is this world’s Paris, complete with a half-melted Eiffel Tower). Lumiere is losing its struggle, and every year it sends its strongest men and women out to try and find the source of evil and stop it.

That’s not spoiling it; that’s just the intro. I’d be spoiling it if I told you why the Expeditions are sent out every year, why it’s “Expedition 33” if the Fracture was 67 years ago, or why I cried at the end of the friggin’ Prologue, much less at several points throughout the game.

I was warned that at the end I’d “cry in technicolor.” I didn’t. Almost did, but something stopped me. But that’s for the other post, where there will be massive spoilers.

You spend the majority of your time with your party: Lune (your cleric), Sciel (your wizard), Gustave (your mechanic & warrior), Mielle (your warrior), and eventually you’re joined by Verso (warrior) and Monoco (tank). None of them are called these things, but these are clearly the roles they play in your party. They are all incredibly well-written people: Lune was always a lonely child, isolated from her peers by her connection to the Lumina (the source of magic in this world); Sciel is filled with rage at the unfairness of the world but wants to be loving and humane underneath it all; Gustave is awkward and charming and you want to hug him but yow, is he deadly in combat. You have dialogues among them that lead to “relationship scores” that unlock certain adventures or abilities. It’s not a particularly new system, but the voice acting, mocap, and just general quality will keep you glued.

The combat is… annoying at first, then easier later. The game doesn’t explain anything, so maybe this is spoilery, but the characters clearly understand it even if the player doesn’t, so I’ll give it away: “Pictos” are talismans with spells you can learn and use in combat, and you can use them the moment you get them, but you only have three Pictos slots. “Luminas” are spells you have learned; once you’ve mastered a Picto (by using it four times in combat), the spells becomes accessible to the other members of your party without the talisman, and you have Lumina slots for them. You earn Lumina slots by finding Lumina or earning it through combat, and you distribute it to your party during the “rest at camp” mechanism. Luminas have different “Lumina point costs,” so when you find some Lumina, you dole it out to different characters to give them slots for buffs.

Combat is Japanese Role-Playing-Game style: your party (maximum of three) face against an enemy party (again, maximum of three) and you pick either spells you know (buffed by Luminas and Pictos) or just go with your base weapon attack, in a turn-based system. Every character gets a number of “actions” per combat; spells consume actions, and base attacks give more back. “Who gets to play when” is determined by the relative Speed attributes of your characters vs the monsters. Different weapons interact with different attributes (speed, strength, health, agility, luck) and some have buffs based on your character’s magical ability.

And everyone has some kind of magical ability, but their metaphors for “what Lumina does” are different for each character, and you have to learn all of them to be effective. Lune’s is straightforward and elemental; Sciel’s is kinda like tarot cards with a light-vs-dark motif, and when she’s in “twilight” she does double-damage; Monoco’s is based on shape-shifting. It’s all weird and clever and fun in battle.

Pictos come with “secondary effects:” a higher health, higher speed, or higher damage. So once you’ve learned one and have the Lumina slots to equip it without the talisman, you may want to trade it for a more generic one that gives you a better chance of surviving in combat.

The biggest controversy in the came is the parry mechanism, a QTE (or “quick time event”). If a monster attacks, you can dodge the blow, but you have to learn the precise moment when you can dodge during their attack animation. The dodge “window” is 0.3 seconds, which is actually pretty learnable for most people. Or you can “parry,” which also does damage back to the monster in an instantaneous counter-attack, but the window for that is only half of dodge: 0.15 seconds. That takes longer to master (You get really tired of hearing Mielle shout “parry it!” when a monster attacks someone other than her). You do a lot of dying but eventually you find the rhythm of a monster’s moves and learn to hit the “parry” button in the right pattern and combat becomes a lot simpler after that.

If there’s a problem with the game it’s that the third Act doesn’t tell you what you should do next. It has a single mission: “Find and kill the final boss.” Each of your characters has laid out a side-mission for you, which you should do to unlock future abilities, but they’re very much side missions; if you were confident in your ability to parry, you could end the game immediately, but you’d miss out on a lot of great art and storytelling– and some pretty important lore.

It is without a doubt one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, both in terms of the art and the characters, the dialogue, the sound design, the music (OMG, the music!), everything about it.

I’d almost recommend it if the ending hadn’t filled me with such rage and loathing that I actually regret playing it, I deleted it the moment the game was over, and I’m very unlikely to give it another play-through, ever.

You can read that part, if you like, but it’s got massive spoilers.