Even a month or so after its release, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has made a lasting impression on the gaming community for more reasons than I can count with my two hands.
Its innovative gameplay blends turn-based JRPG mechanics with parrying and dodge mechanics. Its art style undeniably draws inspiration from beautiful 19th-century Belle Époque aesthetics (1871-1917). And, probably the most incredible of all, it was created by a small yet dedicated 30-person core dev team at Sandfall Interactive.
All these factors make it one of the most impressive games to have come out this year, if not this generation, and allowed the RPG to rekindle the community’s love for video games amidst a corporate industry that pursues trends and pumps out content instead of art.
Its success celebrates French creativity and has even earned the attention of France’s President Macron. Expedition 33 lightning in a bottle, and I’d be utterly shocked if it doesn’t make GOTY in 2025.
Most impressively, Expedition 33 has an evocative narrative that made me cry several times in my first playthrough, and that alone makes it eligible for a GOTY nomination at least. Sure, games like The Last of Us Part 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 have gotten a few tears out of me, but Expedition 33’s opening and its many scenes have made me sob like never before.
Much of Expedition 33’s narrative touches on the theme of loss, exploring the corrosive nature of grief and how it affects those who were left behind. From the way Lumierans face death with the mantra «For those who come after,» to the way each character you’ve met has dealt with loss one way or another, Expedition 33’s narrative ultimately revolves around the crumbling Dessendre family after Verso’s tragic death.
Heavy Spoilers: I write this with the assumption that you have completed at least one playthrough of Expedition 33, so this is a final warning that there will be heavy spoilers for the entire story!
To give a quick lore recap, the world in which Expedition 33 takes place is a painted, fictional, and idyllic world created by Verso when he was a child. That is, until Verso’s tragic death, which devastated the Dessendre family, spiraling uncontrollably into a cataclysmic event that left the Canvas’ inhabitants caught between the conflict between mourning parents Aline and Renoir.
Verso’s death was the catalyst that kicked off the sorrowful tale of the Dessendres, and barring the late Verso himself, each member of the family deals with the loss differently from the next. With that said, we can examine how each member of the Dessendre family represents a stage of grief in the Kubler-Ross Model.
Denial — Aline
Also known as the Paintress, Aline is depicted as the primary, looming antagonistic force that is responsible for countless Lumieran deaths due to the annual Gommages and Nevrons.
But even at the beginning of the story, something is off about this looming presence in the distance. She is portrayed as a gray giant hunched in front of the monolith, silently weeping before writing a new number every year.
Even someone like Sophie, who faces imminent Gommage, comments that the Paintress «looks sad.»
Sophie’s observation proves prescient, as Aline is but a mourning mother whose mind deteriorates with each passing day inside the Canvas.
Once the proud matriarch of the Dessendre family and leader of the Painter’s Council, Aline is now but a husk of her former self. Verso’s death has completely devastated her, and her inability to function has not only jeopardized the stability of her family but also indirectly doomed the Canvas.
Aline represents Denial, the stage in which you refuse to accept reality, and instead drown in escapism.
When a deeply traumatic event occurs, our minds often have a hard time processing the shock. Because the pain is too much to bear, those who are in denial opt to escape through unhealthy coping mechanisms, often through substance abuse (which can also be alluded to via Aline’s toxic obsession with her Painted family), their work, or simply refusing to acknowledge the loss.
In Aline’s case, she engulfs herself in Verso’s Canvas to spend an unhealthy amount of time there, so much so that it is actively eroding her body and mind, deteriorating from the caustic grief that eats away at her, which manifests in her inability to tell apart fiction from reality and her crumbling form.
As noted by other members of the Dessendre family, staying inside a Canvas for too long is dangerous for painters. Still, Aline doesn’t seem to care, allowing herself to slip further and further away from nothingness, which seems preferable to living in a world without her son. With Renoir actively trying to erase the Canvas, Aline knows her time in the Canvas is limited, and yet she fights tooth and nail to immortalize the memory of her son.
Aline is so deep in denial that, prior to the events of the game, she created Painted copies of her family to cope with the loss so that she could live with this fully conscious facsimile of her family instead of the one she left behind in her reality.
Anger — Clea
The next stage of grief is anger; this includes lashing out at those around them to seek some kind of soothing balm for their pain.
“Why me?” they might ask. “Why is this happening to me?” The purpose of anger during the grieving process is to seek some form of catharsis, and Clea does just that by devoting herself to the war effort against her family’s enemies.
The oldest daughter of the Dessendre family, Clea is a gifted Paintress and is implied to have skills to match her mother. She is self-assured, calculating, and most of all, cold. But above her prickly and frigid exterior lies a fiery and passionate soul who cares about doing everything in her power to help her family.
Most notably, Clea’s anger is shown through her unrelenting crusade against the Writers’ Guild, who were supposedly responsible for setting fire to the Dessendre residence and ultimately Verso’s death.
Not only that, but Clea is the creator of all the Nevrons that we encounter in Verso’s Canvas, which are hostile, aggressive monsters that kill to prevent the stream of Chroma from returning to its natural cycle.
And Clea makes sense as the representation of anger. She’s not cold, as we’re initially led to believe—she loved Verso, and was described to have once played in the Canvas with him, sharing a meaningful bond with the now-miserable Francois, who no longer sings because of her absence.
Verso’s death galvanized her in her one-woman war against the Writers, as she cares only about taking over the void of leadership her parents left behind, doing whatever is necessary to get the job done.
Through dialogue in cutscenes, we can tell that Clea has grown resentful of the heavy burden that has been thrust upon her, and even some resentment towards her family, most of all Alicia, whom she still blames for Verso’s death.
Clea’s portrayal throughout the story shows that anger, though it can be channeled for productive ends, can’t really soothe the real trauma that bubbles underneath.
Bargaining — Alicia
Bargaining is the stage at which we feel helpless and out of control in our reality, so we try to find alternatives by fruitlessly negotiating with “what if” scenarios while trying to delay what we know deep down is inevitable.
Also known to us as Maelle, Alicia is the youngest of the Dessendre children. Because of the Writers’ attack that killed Verso, Alicia is left scarred and mute, suffering from a debilitating disability that she believes has robbed her of all agency and joy in life.
Not only that, but she feels tremendous guilt for Verso’s death. Pair her out-of-the-Canvas life with her inside version, and she has lost two lifetimes’ worth of loved ones, most notably Gustave, at the end of Act 1.
Alicia best represents bargaining through her behavior after she regains her memories and Paintress abilities, which have bestowed her the power to reshape the Canvas in her image and un-Gommage those who were lost.
Throughout her interactions with Renoir in Act 3, Alicia consistently negotiates with him that she’s different from her mother, that she can stay in the Canvas, and that Verso’s Canvas means too much to her for her to let go.
It’s textbook bargaining, and Alicia even continues to negotiate with Renoir, saying that she just needs «a little longer» in the Canvas, though in her desperate state and intense emotions, it’s hard to tell whether she intends to follow through.
Alicia’s bargaining does work in the short term as Renoir eventually relents, but as he and (Painted) Verso have previously pointed out, it only delays the inevitable. Like Aline, if she refuses to leave the Canvas in fear that Renoir will destroy it, Alicia will eventually succumb and die from prolonged exposure.
In the final moments of the game, you’re forced to choose between Verso and Maelle—one wants to release the real Verso’s soul from the Canvas and erase the world so that the Dessendres can move on, while the other wishes to preserve the Canvas and bring everyone back with her divine Paintress powers.
If you choose Maelle and win, then you get what at first feels like a good ending. All is right in the Canvas—Gustave is back, and everybody who was Gommaged is brought back. Maelle finally gets her happy ending with her Painted family.
But it’s a corrupted ending, as the final cutscene shows that Maelle is asserting her control over the narrative as its new god, repeating the cycle that Aline had perpetuated, most likely falling deeper and deeper into her lust for power and control. While both endings screw someone over in the end, Maelle’s ending is undeniably the most messed up,
Bargaining is an attempt to regain control of a situation we feel powerless in. When we grieve, we plead to the powers that be to change the outcome to soothe our pain. But it is itself unsustainable, as the constant “what if” questions and desire to regain control of a desired outcome will never happen.
Whether we like it or not, what’s happened has happened, and the past cannot be outdone. The Canvas was doomed the moment Aline and Renoir fractured its world. This world died with Verso, and everything Alicia and Aline did to preserve it was all to delay the inevitable and corrupt the memory of Verso.
Depression — (Painted) Verso
Once we realize that there’s nothing we can do to rewind time and return things as they once were, despair settles in and takes hold of us, transforming into a depressive state that lingers like a dark cloud of smog.
Created as part of the Painted copy of Aline’s family, Painted Verso lives a depressing life of immortality. Since the Fracture and the first Expeditions, Verso has witnessed the slow but gradual degradation of the Canvas and the stability of the Dessendre family. His life, by all accounts, is filled with undying, unending misery.
Throughout his life before the story, Painted Verso has aimlessly wandered the land beside Esquie and Monoco, struggling to make any human connections.
Verso only joins the Expeditions because of their mutual goal to banish Aline, though his motivations come from his desire for eternal rest.
We don’t find this out until much later, but Painted Verso’s ultimate goal is to end his suffering by any means necessary, even if it means destroying the Canvas in which he exists.
He has lied to his friends about the truth of the Canvas just so they could help him with his prolonged suicide, and his emotions and actions are impulsive whenever the opportunity to die presents itself.
Painted Verso is shown to have a low sense of self-preservation and believes himself to be a pale imitation of the real Verso. He’s lived a life filled with misery and pain like the copy of a dead man he has never met, nor will he ever meet. Verso is nothing less than suicidal, and he wants to be free from his suffering, pleading for Alicia/Maelle to unpaint him.
Acceptance — Renoir
Acceptance is the final stage of grief, one in which we finally come to terms with our reality and no longer deny what has happened. Most who have reached this stage direct their focus towards cherishing the memories of the late loved one and moving forward in their healing journey with the loved ones who remain.
Renoir represents Acceptance. While he is introduced initially as a villain and has some amazingly badass boss fights, the Renoir that we’ve come to fear is the Painted Renoir, who was shaped ultimately by the grieving Aline. The real Renoir was the Curator, who had been helping Expedition 33 on their journey since early Act 1.
The entire conflict that plagues the Canvas revolves around Renoir’s attempts (with Clea’s help) to drag Aline out of the Canvas so that he can get rid of it, all in the hopes that this would deprive her of something to cling onto so that they can all move on as a family and heal together.
Of course, this has put him not just in conflict with Aline, but eventually with Alicia.
We see him as a villain only because we’ve grown to love the inhabitants of the Canvas, and because of this, Renoir’s actions feel like the genocide of an entire Canvas, but «life keeps forcing cruel choices. We do what we must.» He only wants to free his wife from the grief that eats away at her.
It’s rare to find a decent antagonist with whom you agree, and Renoir is one of them. From his perspective, he has watched his wife wither and die from her long stint in the Canvas while his eldest daughter wages a one-woman war and his youngest is merely a ghost of her former self. Nobody sane would allow their family to continue crumbling in that manner.
If saving his family means making them hate him by destroying the last piece of Verso’s soul, then he is willing to make that sacrifice.
Among the grieving Dessendre family, Renoir is the only one who is level-headed enough to see that his family needs to stand together to heal, and they cannot do that if Aline and Alicia are too busy burying their heads in the proverbial sand.
Closing Remarks
Expedition 33 is a game made with love, and its deeply personal narrative is perhaps one of the best the community has seen in recent years, exploring the very relatable and inevitable human experience of dealing with loss.
Sandfall Interactive knows just how important it is for them to form an emotional connection between the narrative and the player, and Expedition 33’s meditation on loss resonates with just about anybody.
Grief is an essential aspect of human experience; it is the price we pay for love, and it is important to remember the motto that Expeditioners repeat ad infinitum: «When one falls, we continue.»
We’ve seen the strife that grief has wrought on the Dessendre family and the Canvas. No matter who we are, we are all affected by the void of those we’ve lost. While those like Aline and Alicia may choose to refuse to face their pain through escapism, we can see the destruction it can bring not just to themselves, but to those around them if they don’t properly process their trauma.
In time, it is only through properly processing the pain with adequate support that we can truly heal from grief. In Renoir’s words, the best we can do in the face of grief is «hold onto each other.» As the white Benisseur in the Red Woods says, «Grief is not a burden to be carried alone.»
I’m reminded of a moment at the beginning of the game between Gustave and Sophie before her gommage. Gustave says somberly, «I’m not fine,» to which Sophie responds, «You will be.»
Grieving is natural, and while the healing journey may last a lifetime, you will be okay as long as you have people (like Esquie) who will be there for your «wheeeeees!!!» as well as your «whoooooos…»
