Control · Fall 2026Page 73 of 100.THE REVIEW
A thin paintbrush adds fine detail to a painted landscape on a wooden panel.
A fine brush adds detail to a painted landscape. Clair Obscur is a game about painting and loss, and its every frame looks deliberately made by hand.The photograph is by Mohammed Soufy on Pexels.

Review

A French elegy that makes turn-based combat feel urgent again.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the debut role-playing game from Guillaume Broche and Sandfall Interactive, is a grieving, gorgeous argument that an old form still has something left to say.

Written by CONTROL

This article runs 417 words and takes about two minutes to read.

9out of 10
Game
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
By
Guillaume Broche
From
Sandfall Interactive / Kepler Interactive, 2025

Once a year, in the city of Lumière, a giant figure called the Paintress writes a number on a distant monolith, and everyone of that age or older turns to ash and petals. The number falls each year, and the city calls the ritual the Gommage. For 67 years the people of Lumière have sent expeditions across the sea to kill her, and none has come back. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 follows the newest one.

That premise is a machine for grief, and the game knows it. It opens with a farewell on a quay, and it keeps returning to the question of who gets to hold the brush, which is a question about control in the most literal sense. The world is drawn from Belle Époque France, with wrought iron, café chairs and ruined opera-house grandeur, and it is scored by Lorien Testard with a sweep that most studios would not dare to attempt. Charlie Cox, Jennifer English, Ben Starr and Andy Serkis lead a cast that plays the melodrama straight.

A hand dips a long paintbrush into paint on a cluttered studio table near a window.
A hand dips a long brush into paint on a crowded studio table. Sandfall Interactive’s debut treats an old form, turn-based combat, as a medium that still has something to say.The photograph is by Sabina Kallari on Pexels.
A hand holds a brush over a palette covered with thick daubs of mixed paint.
A brush mixes pigment on a worn palette. The game’s turns demand timing and attention, which makes an old, patient form feel urgent again.The photograph is by Viktor Kovács on Pexels.

The fight is a conversation

The combat is the argument. On your turn, Expedition 33 is a traditional menu-driven role-playing game of the kind Japanese studios perfected in the 1990s. On the enemy’s turn, it becomes something closer to a rhythm game: you dodge, jump or parry each blow in real time, and a clean parry earns a counterattack and resources for your next move. The old form’s great weakness was that half of every battle was spent watching. Here, half of every battle is spent reading an opponent’s body, and the tension never slackens.

The game is less assured away from the fight. There is no map within its areas, so its handsome ruins can become a maze of backtracking. The parry windows are unforgiving early on, and the balance gives way late, when clever builds let a party erase bosses in a single turn. The final act divides players, and it should, because it asks you to reconsider everything you were fighting for.

None of that dims the achievement. Sandfall’s core team numbered about 30 people, working with outside partners, and they made a game that swept The Game Awards in 2025, winning Game of the Year among nine awards. The victory was a useful rebuke to an industry that assumes ambition requires a thousand employees.

The verdict: Expedition 33 is a flawed, generous and deeply felt game that will change what you expect from the genre. Play it with the sound up.