Warning. There will be major spoilers for the Videogame Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 below.
Grief is love with extra anger, joy, laughter, tears and regret. It usually fades over time, or becomes softer and easier to manage. Sometimes it will rush back to you with a guilty slap to remind you that you are starting to move on and become ‘forgetful’. Sometimes it hides in drawers and cupboards, and in shops or beaches or park benches just to remind you that someone you knew is no longer here to share your time. People talk of a process as opposed to a simple emotion, and it is still one of these experiences that is singular to a person. Reactions to the passing of someone you knew is correct, regardless of how that may appear to other people. We leave people to their grief, because how can you ask how someone is feeling when you’re maybe not prepared for how they will answer? For many families, funerals and the associated seeds of grief drive us awkwardly back together to remind us that we share people through our lives, which is maybe why it is common now to call them celebrations of life as opposed to a funeral, as the secondary naming sounds so very depressing and final and involves facing death.
The representation of grief in art and entertainment is often just as personal, as how it effects the individual is normally associated with that person’s exposure to loss themselves. You could even argue that how the medium represents loss and grief is a good indicator of the experience of the creator. When it comes to videogames, the idea of loss has been represented in a number of different games, each with their own take. From the unsettling world of Silent Hill 2, to the eccentric house in What Remains of Edith Finch, to the representation of regret, anger and pain through the Last of Us part 2. All have their own valid way of showing that journey, sometimes to the extreme, but all are valid.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from Sandfall Interactive, is a turn based combat almost final fantasy inspired game. Quasi French in theme, it approaches grief in stealth mode and makes the point of taking small shots at you as you play, only showing its full hand when you are fully established in the world. It plays with you, offering the normal plot of a ‘force of evil’ that must be stopped before it destroys the known world. A group of instantly likeable and ultimately lovable characters who band together to travel across The Continent in the hope of defeating and stopping The Paintress, who every year paints a new number on a monolith causing those of that age to disappear in a wave of Chroma. These petal shaped particles drifting off to who knows where, while the residents of Lumiere have to get used to the fact that they have less and less time with their families and friends. One character mentions that time is so short and cruel that the best way to show they loved their children was to not have any children at all.
It is grief that binds the citizens of Lumiere together, and drives them to send Expedition after Expedition in the hope of taking down the Paintress once and for all, and end the ‘Gommage’ that is slowly killing everyone. You’re introduced to Gustave, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Robert Pattinson, and his semi adopted ward / (kind of daughter?) Maelle. Within the first half an hour the latest Gommage is happening and Gustave is there to watch his romance partner Sophie disappear before his eyes. It’s very much start of oh so many of rug pulls to come that help to build an empathetic connection to the characters. There’s the all too familiar beach landing, unexpected surprise attack on characters you neither know or care about. (that do deserve a slight eye roll.) The sole purpose of the opening landing is to reduce you down to only being Gustave as a single remaining member of the Expedition 33. The game then sets itself down the familiar track, follows beats and expectations that you would normally demand in a game of this type. Semi tutorials and a mild learning curve followed by your first test against a slightly tricky enemy, that you dodge and parry before claiming victory. Then Gustave stops. He’s just started and he’s already had enough. He’s lost his girlfriend and most of his team within the space of twenty four hours, and he reacts in one of the most realistic ways I’ve seen in a videogame. He doesn’t shout to the sky that he’ll seek revenge and beat The Paintress and continue on no matter what. He sits down and leans against a pile of solidified bodies of previous expeditions, and draws a gun and raises it to his head. Seemingly defeated before he begins, he’s only saved when another survivor Lune stops him before he pulls the trigger. The difference between the romance of stories and the harsh reality. What is the point in going on after so much loss?
The story gathers pace as you reunite team mates and as with similar RPGs, you start to make plans for the longer term for your characters. Then Expedition 33 commits what some would call a cardinal sin and kills off Gustave. You are made to stand and watch alongside Maelle, who has already lived a life in Lumiere feeling lost and unconnected, losing one of the few people she felt she had a solid relationship with. While I spent what I felt like little time with Gustave, I understood the feeling of being powerless in a situation where you knew there was nothing you could do. Inwardly you plot revenge, knowing as per the normal videogame trope, that you’ll face Gustave’s killer again in the future. You do of course. You’ll play the entire game through to the end, and then you’ll play the game again to catch all the pieces you missed the first time. The subject of the loss is at every level in this game and touches each of the characters that you play as. Its like one of those films where you are given the answer to the main question at the end, but the clues and subtle nods are peppered throughout the film. I could write for hours about the gameplay and graphics and outstanding battle mechanics, or the sublime and stunning music and this would end up like a book instead of a piece of writing. I’ll just tell you to play it instead as you’ll have one of the best experiences in this decade in terms of gaming. And all around the subject of loss.
Expedition 33 doesn’t just touch on grief, you discover the foundations of the entire world are built around the acceptance of loss of loved ones. You discover the motivations and reasons are complicated and not as straightforward as we’re first led to believe. The Paintress isn’t the one that is causing the Gommage, but is a grieving mother trying to cling on to the last threads of what remains of her deceased son Verso. He was tragically killed in a fire that was caused by his sister Alicia in the real world. An event that left her horribly scarred and unable to talk. Unable to accept her sons death, Aline wields her power as a painter to recreate her family inside the canvas that Verso used to play in as a child. We find out that creating a canvas leaves part of your soul in the painting. Aline is clearly clinging on to some way keeping her son alive in his painted form but instilling him with immortality, ensure he will never die while in the canvas, but at the same time, enslaving the last of his real self to paint forever. As you approach the monolith for the first time, you notice that this isn’t some kind of deity looking for a final battle, but someone sobbing, sitting on the ground, arms wrapped around their legs and slowly counting down to the time where she will lose the battle against her husband Renoir and the entire world’s population will be wiped out. She is stuck in the realisation that eventually she will have to let go and accept that she has truly lost her son, while resenting her daughter Alicia for being partly responsible for the fire in the first place and further struggling that Alicia survived. It is easier for her to live in a world of make believe than face the truth her son is dead. Her obsession is no longer effecting her own life but the lives of hundreds of other people.
Aline’s version of her husband Renoir is fully supportive of her continuing the existence in the canvas, but her actual husband is of the completely opposite stance. He is trapped beneath the monolith where Aline sits, and we find out that he was The Curator, who was helping the team to upgrade their weapons and skills and even helps them to create the Barrier Breaker, Maelle’s sword that is used to destroy the protective barrier around Aline. When you speak to him, it is apparent that the loss of Verso and the intervening 67 years* have caused him and Aline to drift apart to the point that Renoir sees his wife as a stranger to him. It was the real Renoir that caused The Fracture of Lumiere in the first place when he tried to destroy the canvas on seeing how Aline’s grief was effecting her so profoundly. *(we don’t actually know how time works within the canvas and if there is some kind of time time dilation, as Clea makes the point that she is currently engaged in a real life war with The Writers, which seems to be an ongoing event throughout the game.) When Aline is near defeat, she uses the last of her power to try to protect and heal the team, knowing that they will have to face the real Renoir. Aline is then expelled from the canvas by Maelle, back to face her reality.
Renoir’s solution to make his wife move on is to erase Verso’s canvas, which in turn will stop her from visiting Lumiere and staying there with her son, even if it is slowly killing her. Its akin a one parent refusing to move anything in their deceased child’s bedroom, clinging onto the last memories that they have of them. They feel that disturbing their possessions will somehow dishonour their memory. It’s actually not uncommon for parents of a deceased child to separate or divorce, as acceptance of passing is something that is individual, even in families. Renoir hopes that by releasing himself and Aline, somehow they can start to move on with their lives and face their actual reality together. Though judging by his own words in the game, I think he wants to just move on himself and feels his life with Aline might not be salvageable.
We have Clea, who buries her own feelings by taking the a cold practical route to dealing with the loss of her brother. She’s approaching the situation that real life is still happening, and the Painters are in a war with The Writers, and it is pretty clear that she is feeling like she is carrying the real life burdens for the entire family while her mother and father ‘squabble’. She’s facing the situation of being the sibling that was neither scarred or died in the Writer’s attack and therefore is expected to get on with it regardless of her own emotional state. Her power to paint over others creations meant that she quite literally glossed over the family Aline created in Verso’s canvas and tried to make everyone aware of the truth. Ignored and left with the responsibilities she decides to aid the real Renoir by making her painted self create the Nevrons, who on killing expedition members lock the Chroma or Life Essence in the members petrified bodies, preventing Aline from gaining that power back. She’s draining her mother of power, to allow her father to destroy the canvas. I guess like any child whose sibling passed away, she just wants her parents back in her life again, needing them to be present and here instead of day dreaming of a passed life. In a flashback we see this reality. Clea planning to send Alicia into the canvas while we witness Renoir and Aline lost, catatonic and useless to the real world around them, focussing on the battle in Verso’s world.
Which takes us to Verso, who’s name literally means ‘changed’ or can be used to describe the ‘other side of an image or painting’. Verso is a facsimile, a copy of the Verso that died in a fire started in the Dessendre family home by the mysterious ‘Writers’. The canvas that Lumiere exists in is the canvas that Verso would play in as a younger child with his sister Clea, and as I previous stated, contains a living part of Verso’s soul, and therefore the reason why Aline decided to take residence in there, creating versions of her family, Verso, Clea, Renoir and even the scarred Alicia. Verso is quite literally the memories of his deceased self, who only finds out his true nature when he was part of Expedition 0, and upon reaching the monument was informed by Clea of his creation. Verso exists as a living monument, a creation that you find out is living their own life and experiences as time has gone on, even falling love at some point. While Aline confesses in a journal that she is heart broken that her son won’t experience life, she also ends up fighting against the copy of Verso, who after existing for so long as an immortal in the canvas, desires a ending to his existence. He wants to stop what remains of the real Verso from painting and release his soul to rest. He is directly suffering through the grief of his creator and sees first hand the suffering that she is causing for the rest of Lumiere and understands that his sacrifice and that of the canvas is worth it, if it allows the family to move on.
I wonder if Aline’s grief effects the entirety of Lumiere, as few characters escape its influence and touch within the canvas. We have Sciel, who loses a husband to a tragic accident rather than the Gommage, cutting their time together sadly shorter than it should have been, and upon trying to take her life and failing, she also loses the baby that she was expecting. The world of Lumiere is sad enough for timetabled loss, but to have fate play a nasty trick, is devastating indeed. There is Lune, who is living her parents life rather than her own, and even though they had passed during their own expedition, she feels obliged to continue their legacy. Even at the expense of her own particular path. There are subtle hints given of her love of music over her study of the Expeditions and you get the feeling that she has sacrificed her own talents and denied the world her own joy to keep an unspoken promise. A promise that is revealed to a self created obligation she has decided off her own back, rather than one that was expressly wished by her now dead parents.
Finally we have Monoco, with his penchant for violence and his obsession with feet and fighting and scraps and battles with enemies. A self confessed best friend of Verso, and father figure to little Noco, a gestral trader who used to mentor Monoco before he died and became reborn, losing a piece of his memories. Noco seems to make a habit of dying and every time it happens, he is reborn, remembering less and less of who he was and the relationship he had with Monoco. Monoco happily calls him his son and in a delightful use of a hidden area in the Dessendre Mansion, you discover that Monoco and Noco were the names of Verso’s pet dogs. Verso had a habit of naming his dogs the same when they died, which mimics what happens in the canvas. Verso hopes that giving his new pet the same names, that they’ll have the same characters as their namesakes, when the truth is unfortunately different. Verso also plays a part in helping each of the characters to understand their own individual situation and grief and one of the main mechanics of the game is charging you with growing the relationships between Verso and the individuals to help them grow in power. He is the pivotal character to changing the entire landscape for the group and as it turns out, the entire story.
Maelle’s story is slightly different that it is not necessarily formed by grief, but definitely influenced by it. Made an orphan from a young age, she has never really felt like she fit in Lumiere, moving form job to job and only really finding stability recently under the support and help of Gustave. On the Expedition after his tragic death, we start to see glimpses that Maelle is possibly not who she appears to be and might be closely connected to the Dessendre family through a series of dreams she experiences. The truth is unveiled more in Old Lumiere, where Maelle meets Alicia for the first time and it is fairly clear that they are one in the same. Alicia being the copy of Maelle created in the canvas by her mother, which begs the question, why Aline didn’t paint away the terrible scars and injuries that Alicia gained in the fire that killed Verso? Was she subconsciously punishing Alicia by creating her so she be reminded of what happened and the mistakes that Alicia made? Maelle eventually recovers her memories, and realises that she is the real life Alicia, sent into the canvas by Clea to try to provide assistance to her father to remove Aline from the canvas. At that point Aline is still powerful enough to influence Alicia, and removes her memories, sending her to her parents where she is called Maelle.
Where other character’s arcs revolve around the acceptance of their situation, Maelle’s journey centres around the question of power over fate. What would you do if you could control the world you exist in so those you cared about would never leave leave your side? As Maelle discovers who she really is and her powers as a painter, there are subtle changes in how she deals with certain situations. She becomes driven to stop Renoir from destroying the canvas and world that she grew up in. On finding out that her reality is make believe, she would prefer to stay in that made up world as Maelle, than out of the canvas as Alicia and even asks that she is called Maelle by other characters. When you all you know is a certain kind of existence that you have emotional ties to, then is that existence that you care about. It is a world that Maelle is happy to influence and change and as you head towards the closing acts, her actions show a slightly different side, probably the real character of Alicia is starting to show. It is demonstrated when she faces the copy Alicia towards the end of the game in a duel, and on winning, grants a wish to wipe Alicia from the canvas. This hugely upsets Verso, who will never see his canvas sister again and for the first time plants the seed for Verso to consider allowing Renoir to stop the soul Verso painting and destroy Lumiere and The Continent. Verso has lived through so much loss in his time that he wants to put a stop to any more unnecessary pain. Maelle’s fear is about being alone, and losing everything that she considers to be part of her world. It is the fear of having to deal with loss, from her friends and companions to her own identity, as out of the canvas she will need to live with the scars and memories of the death of her brother. In the canvas she has the power to bring everyone back and rebuild Lumiere, including those who have Gommaged, at the risk of being corrupted and drained by staying in the canvas.
It is the final question Expedition 33 asks, and again it is one where the decision will be dependent on the player and their own experiences. Normally these kind of decisions are obvious and logical and completely correct. Which would be fine if the process of grief and loss and longing were obvious and logical and completely correct. I’ve seen debates for both sides of the decision that you are made to make. Neither are right or wrong but both are very very human. Sandfall Interactivehas take a difficult, emotive and personal subject matter and applied it to a canvas, and in my eyes, what they have created is a masterpiece in Modern gaming and story telling.
