The Worst Thing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The clear worst thing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is that someone got some game in their movie, but that's not much of a blog post. Instead, I'm going to share a few thoughts about narrative, and along the way, I will include some spoilers about Marvel's Midnight Suns and Clair Obscur. You have been warned.

Years ago, I played Marvel's Midnight Suns. I really enjoyed the gameplay, which brought together a lot of the pieces I enjoy in videogames. There were a few moments in the narrative experience that were frightfully disrespectful, enough that I kept a list on a scrap of paper on my desk with the intention of writing about them later. Unfortunately, I lost that paper, and so I never was able to assemble my player experience into an effective critique. The only part I vividly remember was not the first such part, but it is the one that made me start my list. Tony Stark is stuck in a position where he could save the world by killing his best friend, but he cannot bring himself to do it. It tears him up. He understands that this is about weighing his desires against the greater good. It's a competently designed scene. Immediately on the heels of that experience, my character ran into Tony at base camp, where he happily told me how he was making his grandmother's goulash (or something like that). It's a happy little encounter, a filler, something meant to make the player smile and enjoy the camaraderie. But in my playthrough, it immediately followed Stark's monumental crisis.

I call this disrespectful because it reduces narrative to content. While it's true that no narrative designer intentionally juxtaposed these story beats, they also did not prevent it. Give the player content, regardless of its sensibility, so that they remain engaged. That is the message underlying my experience: the player must be satisfied by feeding them content.

Sorry, that's been pent up in my fingers for years now. Too bad I lost the original notes, since I had more coherent suggestions at the time.

I'm currently in the third act of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. There are many parts of the game that I really enjoy, but there are other aspects that echo all the worst tropes of videogame design. In the latter category are the unforgiving and unwelcome platforming experiences. A reasonable person might ask why I don't simply skip them, and the answer is that the game doesn't want me to. The game is designed to provoke in the player the desire to complete these challenges so that we can get the mysterious reward at the end: maybe it's a hat, but maybe it's a game-changing picto. There's no way to know ahead of time without asking the Internet. Because little treats are scattered in the corners of each map, there is no incentive to ever follow the narratively sensible route—from the entrance to the goal, for example. Instead, the game designers want you to scour the edges of the map lest you miss something you need for the ever more powerful enemies. It's painfully common in RPG level design and always disconnects play from the authored narrative.

I controlled Maelle, the teenage heroine, to complete these platforming challenges, or at least the ones I could stomach, since I have since given up on them. It seemed like it was easier to land precisely with her than with the other characters. A quick search online makes it seem like I'm not the only one who did this. So, in my experience of the world of Clair Obscur, Maelle is the one who climbs across floating obstacles, jumps onto spinning disks, grabs bits of flotsam to pull herself up, and who falls hundreds of feet into the water, only to get up and try again.

In the game's third act, Maelle and company must climb to the top of an enormous structure. At one point, in a cutscene, she mentions off-handedly that she has always suffered from vertigo. 

Vertigo? Where did that come from? You're the one doing these crazy platforming challenges!

Shortly later, the party meets a peculiar Nevron who has crafted for Maelle specifically a set of wings. Wings! Yes, please! That is exactly what I need as a player to get through these awful platforming levels! Maelle gives them a glance then shrugs and says, "Vertigo, remember?" The rest of the party sighs and leaves the wings behind.

We could leave this as an example of ludonarrative dissonance if we were so inclined, but it's actually worse than that. From the very start of the game, we meet Maelle and Gustave on the rooftops, and they run and leap across the city of Lumiere. Maelle is especially pleased that she has acquired the technology that allows her to ninja-rope herself across huge gaps. This is her happy place in her job as a parkour courier.

To this, I can only shrug and say, "Vertigo, remember?"

I know that writing is hard and that managing a staff of writers is even harder, but someone should have noticed that there's a massive story problem with introducing a character trait that is contrary to the core gameplay, and that is only brought up once, and only to reject a thing that serves no purpose anyway. It's like seeing a straw man over the mantel in act one and never speaking of it again.