Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Previewed by Xbox Wire

Much has been said about how the upcoming Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like a modern twist on the classic JRPG formula, with its flashy, turn-based combat, a massive overworld map to run around in, and customizable weapon sets. You don’t have to look hard to see influences from the likes of Persona, Final Fantasy, and other titans of the genre. Mixed with its engaging race-against-the-clock narrative and compelling Belle Époque-inspired art direction, Sandfall Interactive‘s first game has all the ingredients needed for a sleeper hit when it launches April 24, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Windows PC as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and day one with Game Pass.

Recently, I had a chance to experience Expedition 33 for myself with an extended hands-on demo that guided me through the game’s opening hours, learning more about its characters, getting a handle on its engaging turn-based combat, and exploring its dark, fantastical world. It’s a world that I’ve been eager to run around in since it was first revealed during Xbox Games Showcase 2024. In a world much like our own, the mysterious Paintress, who looks like a towering Greek god, awakens once each year and paints a number upon a giant monolith—upon which everyone of that age turns to smoke and fades away. As the game begins, she has painted the number 33, and a small team of adventurers sets out to accomplish what other expeditions have not—destroy the Paintress before even more souls are lost to dust.

But the expedition gets off to a rocky start. Shortly after arriving on the shores of The Continent, most of the expedition is decimated by otherworldly enemies, leaving you and just a handful of survivors to continue the mission. This is where my hands-on experience drops me in, reeling from this surprise attack and left searching for survivors, and answers.

RPGs by their nature are massive in scope, style, and depth. Expedition 33 seems to have taken a scrupulous scalpel to this principle, trimming a lot of the fat that can weigh down an RPG of this size. The zones we’ve seen so far in the early part of the game are incredibly dense and beautiful, but crucially linear in how you’re left to explore them, with optional areas allowing you to deviate from the golden path, yielding some loot. I’m OK with an RPG that doesn’t feel the need to offer a massive open world, so having some clear direction while being able to take in the sights feels oddly refreshing. And having these focused paths means that the detail of this world can be much greater than if it were spread out. Every step is packed with colorful, and at times alien, foliage while off in the distance you can see a cracked, broken world on the horizon. It’s a Mordor-like foreboding of what lies ahead for your party of heroes.

Battles also load quickly and keep you occupied as you’re tasked with parrying, dodging, or jumping over attacks that leave little room for you to “go through the motions” with any of the encounters I’ve seen so far. Level grinding is required somewhat but the battle system is so engaging and beautiful to look at that I didn’t mind having to spend some time leveling up by bashing on minions to advance past a boss guarding the next zone.

Figuring out each enemy’s attack pattern and precise timings is a crucial component to success in Expedition 33, especially with the higher levelled enemy fights. Thankfully, this difficulty can be scaled a bit to give you a greater window of time to land these dodges and parries if you desire (we played on “Expeditioner” aka normal difficulty for our demo), but it remains a core component of its battle system, and a degree of skill will be required on this adventure especially on the higher difficulty. It’s never Elden Ring hard, but just enough that you’ll need to refine your reaction skills for sure.

Starting out, each of your characters is designed with a specific and logical build to fight these enemies, complimenting the other members of your party, that can be customized later as you acquire Pictos (passives) and other weapons. For my hands-on time, my party was made up of Gustave, a hard-hitting warrior/engineer class who can harness lightning and fire a pistol; Lune, a powerful flame-kicking mage with healing abilities; and Maelle, an agile rogue with a pinpoint blade.

In battle, building up the AP meter (think mana in other RPGs) to unleash powerful Skills is at the core of your strategy with most encounters, but the only way to build that up is by either engaging in standard attacks or landing a successful parry (more on this in minute). So, there’s a balance to when and where you choose to spend your AP on Skills in battle. It’s here that the game keeps you dialed in as you must plan and execute your approach in every encounter with little downtime—nowhere is that more evident when it’s the enemy’s turn to strike.

Even though this is primarily a turn-based combat system, when the enemy attacks it switches to a real-time encounter that quickly raises the stakes. I’ve found that if your concentration deviates for even a moment, it can have dire circumstances for your party. Some of these enemies can hit hard, and if you’re not leveled up appropriately, you’ll quickly find that out. But if you’re reacting accordingly, you can flip the script on these enemies with powerful counterattacks. It’s technically possible to finish every encounter with zero damage from dodges and parries, so skilled players may be able to excel here—but that is not a skill in my personal repertoire.

While Gustave and Lune played out as you might expect for Warrior and Mage classes – and that’s not to say they were any less fun to play with—I was struck by the complexity of Maelle’s abilities and really liked how different she felt from the other party members, and from other games of this kind. That’s because her Skill powers are tied to her Battle Stance, which can cycle through three different damage effects when she strikes an opponent: Defensive Stance (takes less damage, gains AP on parry or dodge); Offensive Stance (50% damage dealt, but 50% more damage taken); and Virtuous Stance (deals 200% more damage). Being able to switch these without interruption (e.g. getting hit), is how you can maximize her Skills.

The way this can play out in battle is like this: She starts off “Stanceless,” basically neutral. If she attacks with “Offensive Switch” as her first Skill attack, she then switches to “Offensive Stance” to use on her next turn. Or she can strike with “Spark,” which sets enemies on fire, kicking off a prerequisite to activate “Virtuous Stance” on the next go around to land some high damage attacks. It’s an awesome and in-depth approach to combat encounters that really kept me thinking about the next attack, and then the one after that, keeping me engaged with every encounter and not taking any turn for granted.

Other hallmarks of RPGs are here as well, with weapons that you can level up and the previously mentioned Pictos that you can swap in and out from your party members—each hero can have up to three passive abilities equipped at once—with varying ranges of effects. Examples include Dodger (grants AP with successful dodges) or Burning Shots (gives your character’s ranged attacks a chance to inflict burn damage). I found nine Pictos to play around with during our demo session, and as we saw during the Developer_Direct, there are hundreds of these to uncover giving you an incredible amount of depth and customization.

I also got to experience a bit of downtime between battles in the form of a party camp. Here, you can interact with members of your expedition, giving the actors some breathing room to bring these characters to life, with Charlie Cox (“Daredevil: Born Again”) as Gustave, Jennifer English (Baldur’s Gate III) as Maelle, and Kirsty Rider (“The Sandman”) as Lune lending their talents here.

When I first met him, Gustave was traumatized by the events from the start of the journey, with Lune becoming his steady force of reason and Maelle, the youngest of the group, realizing some untapped power of her own. By the end of my hands-on time, Gustave had steadied himself, Lune was becoming even more intrigued by the Continent, and Maelle had begun to grow into a powerful fighter. Seeing this character development over only the start of the game left me eager to learn more – and these characters and their stories (not to mention excellent performances from the actors) have helped bring them and this world to life.

There’s a lot to like already about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I’ve just scratched the surface. There’s at least two other characters to play as, so I’m intrigued to see how they complement the other members of the expedition. The game hints at an epic yarn and I’m eager to pull that thread to see where it goes when Expedition 33 launches on April 24, 2025, for Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5 and Windows PC as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and day one with Game Pass.