Sholva Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review

A Masterful JRPG. As a fan of JRPGs, having a game like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 makes me very happy, for so many reasons but, basically, it’s clear the developers of this game really love their video games, the ones that made them who they are and do what they do, and that’s how you get a good video game. Let’s talk a bit about PC specific stuff, like Performance: being an UE 5 game, we can see it’s a little heavy on the GPU side of things, it uses Software Lumen as many UE 5 games do, a shame there’s no option for Hardware Lumen, though and, on my Ryzen 7 5700X and RTX 3060 Ti, I can get quite decent performance at 1440p with Performance DLSS 4 (forced via Nvidia App), and a mix of High and Epic settings. Normally around 60 FPS, a bit more in some areas, less in certain intense moments, but mostly decent. There aren’t that many Stutters in this game, but it’s not completely free of them; as far as UE 5 releases, this game seems to be one of the smoothest ones, for me so far. The Story in this game is nothing sort of incredible, I can’t talk specifics, you need to learn about it yourself. It is not a very happy story kind of game, though, and Grief is a common theme, so be prepared for all of that. The Soundtrack is an absolute masterpiece, if I’m honest, very, very good, some tracks are still stuck in my head and the final boss theme really delivers. The Characters are beautifully portrayed by their respective actors, all of them, these characters are so good, reliable and relatable. I will remember this cast for a very long time, what a group, as it couldn’t be any other way in such an excellent JRPG. Combat is pretty fun and reactive, I played on Expert difficulty and the game can be extremely punishing the first few hours and also closer to the end, before you gain some levels and really powerful items, but honestly there are many ways to make super broken builds, or a good balance as I did, instead of going for the easy one shot stuff. That way, the bosses remained mostly challenging and I got to experience their incredible moves. Speaking of moves, this game is beautifully animated, some Bosses have absurdly elaborate animations, and it’s a beautiful dance to watch. Same for the playable characters, their skills have very cool animations too but, man, some boss fights in this game are insanely good. Visually speaking, this game is also very good looking, and with an enormous amount of variation between areas, with a great use of color and lighting. All in all, this game is likely going to be my GOTY, and I sure expect to see many nominations in several categories. It is also like a 50€ game in a time where some publishers believe 80€ and above should become normal: no, it shouldn’t, because as long as there are studios willing to do something fresh, unique and actually excellent, at a fair price, I will keep supporting such studios.