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The Star
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
A spectacular RPG has balletic combat and powerful twists
Narrative games mostly cater to the desire for victory or a flattering resolution, rarely placing the accent on an undigested loss. That is why Life Is Strange, The Beginner's Guide and The Last Of Us series have etched themselves deep into my memory. I can now add Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a stunning debut title whose story moves from a grandiose save-the-world premise to a smaller drama about a grieving family, to the list of video games that have left me emotionally shaken when I've reached the credits. Clair Obscur draws inspiration from Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy in addition to the viciously challenging Souls series, but it leavens those influences with a proud Gallic sensibility. (Fair warning: The irascible mimes in this game, by French developer Sandfall Interactive, are no joke.) In debonair fashion, Clair Obscur opens with Gustave, dressed in an elegant suit, standing in a rooftop garden and gazing toward a distant shore. There stands a monolith emblazoned with '34'. As Gustave throws a rock in its direction, his air of defiance slides into one of resignation. A 33-year-old woman dear to him is about to die. And he wants to bring her a rose. Flowers are arrayed everywhere throughout the Paris-like city of Lumière, where 33-year-olds are wearing floral necklaces on occasion of their Gommage, an annual ritual when a mysterious figure known as the Paintress will write the number on the monolith that triggers their disappearance. Gustave, 16-year-old orphan Maelle and a team of volunteers embark on an expedition to kill the Paintress and free the city from the ritual that causes people to evaporate and leave behind a swirling cluster of red petals in their wake. They are following in the footsteps of dozens of similar expeditions. But not long after leaving Lumière, Expedition 33 comes to near ruin when it encounters a cane-wielding gray-haired man and the army of monsters, known as Nevrons, at his disposal. Clair Obscur's art direction, voice acting and sumptuous score establish a fascinating world, and some of the game's fantasy aspects are cleverly undermined as the spirit of enchantment – the expedition's pursuit of an unambiguous goal – gives way to something messier, morally compromised and tragic. The end of each of the game's three acts arrives with escalating force. Though the twist at the end of Act 1 made me think of a key narrative manoeuvre in Game Of Thrones, I was fairly blindsided by the game's finale, so much so that I had tears in my eyes. Let's just say that there is a moment, in the ending I chose, where one of my favourite characters looks at her erstwhile companion and then slumps to the ground. The disappointment on her face may be the most haunting look I've seen on a video game character since the ripple of emotions played out on Ellie's face at the end of The Last Of Us Part I. Clair Obscur grew out of a prototype by Guillaume Broche, who taught himself to use Unreal Engine while working as a narrative lead at Ubisoft. He was interested in making a game with turn-based combat that explored the passage of time and teamed up with Tom Guillermin, a programmer at Ubisoft, to create an hourlong slice of gameplay. Incredibly, Broche met Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who ended up becoming Clair Obscur's lead writer, through a vocal sample that she submitted through Reddit when he was searching for voice actors for his prototype. After Broche, Guillermin and François Meurisse founded Sandfall in 2020, setting up its headquarters in Montpellier, the team decided to scrap the original scenario of what was then called We Lost. Broche, Sandfall's creative director, was now interested in a story based around a monolith on which a number clocks down and causes people to disappear. The idea for structuring the game around expeditions came from a French fantasy novel, La Horde du Contrevent, which tells the story of groups of people setting out to discover the origins of a mysterious wind. 'We liked the idea of expeditions trying to overcome previously failed expeditions and finding their remains, their journals, their past stories,' Meurisse, Sandfall's producer, told me. Clair Obscur is a hard game in which it is best to not get hit. By listening for audio cues and looking for visual tells, players can evade or counter an enemy's attacks by precisely hitting the correct button. As someone not particularly drawn to games structured around turn-based combat, I was unexpectedly taken with the vigorous fighting mechanics that feature real-time elements. The timing window for dodging is more generous than that for parrying, but some attacks can only be parried. Even on the easiest difficulty level, it's important to come to grips with these mechanics. And it's fitting that Maelle and other characters often invoke the notion of a dance when they strike up a fight. When things go well, fights unfold like a piece of choreography. Each of the six characters whom players end up controlling has a different fighting style. Characters can equip up to six skills from their corresponding skill trees in addition to three 'pictos', or stat buffs, that can be used interchangeably between characters. After winning four battles with a particular picto equipped, any party member can also make use of that ability – for example, incurring twice the amount of burn damage when using a fire-based attack – provided they have enough 'lumina points.' If all of this sounds like it can lead to some heady decisions over character builds, that's absolutely correct. Away from the game, I found myself daydreaming about how best to gear up my party to tackle some of the more daunting boss fights. For the 54 hours that it took me to see Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 through to the end, it ably held my attention. Its world-building, character arcs and challenging gameplay are executed with no shortage of finesse. Expect this one to be a serious contender for game of the year. – ©2025 The New York Times Company (Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was reviewed on a PlayStation 5 Pro. It is also available on the PC and Xbox Series X|S.) This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Wanderstop review: why I found Ivy Road's de-stressing tea-making game surprisingly intricate
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Wanderstop details Publisher Annapurna Interactive Developer Ivy Road Release date 11 March 2025 Format PC (reviewed), PS5 Platform Unreal Engine What do you do when you've met with personal failure? Do you mope in despair, try to talk about it with someone, dust yourself off and put all your energy into getting back on the saddle? Or maybe before any of that, you just put the kettle on first. That is to some extent what Wanderstop is built around. Centred on celebrated arena fighter Alta who one day loses her undefeated streak, her quest to find a mysterious master who can train her back to her best leads her to waking up in a forest clearing, the site of a tea shop run by a gentle giant named Boro. Unable to leave this clearing without quickly collapsing from exhaustion again, and lacking the strength to even pick up her own sword, her goal instead is to rest. But knowing that to do nothing would have you feeling excruciatingly restless, she decides to grudgingly help run the titular tea shop, trying to make the most of it. Wanderstop is a cosy game where the protagonist doesn't want to be there, the kind of narrative twist you would expect from the creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner's Guide. But in between its story beats, it's also arguably quite conventional as it commits to the bit of being a cosy game. (For more background, read my interview with the Wanderstop dev.) Wanderstop will feel familiar to other cosy management sim games that have grown in popularity in recent years. Running the tea shop involves taking requests from the quirky customers who randomly also find their way into this clearing. But the actual tea-making process is quite deliberate in its many intricate steps. You have to collect enough tea leaves with a basket then wait for them to dry, while you'll also learn to plant multicoloured seeds in different patterns that result in hybrid plants that grow different fruits that can be used to flavour the tea. Once you have the ingredients, you have to operate the large tea machine in the centre of the shop itself, which you can conveniently navigate with a ladder that swivels around it. That involves heating the water just right by manually stoking the fire with bellows, before tossing in your ingredients, and then pouring the results into a clean cup. A lot of busywork just to make a brew, and yet it's all the care that goes into these small interactions that makes the process feel rewarding in its own way, especially as you watch different ingredients change the colour of the tea. You'll even realise that there's a right timing to ensure you pour just the right amount without any of it spilling over. It's not all just about tea-making, as you also have tools to keep the clearing tidy, from trimming weeds to cleaning dirt piles with a broom. Over time, you may also notice other elements, such as the strange mushrooms you can pluck and use to modify your plants or pulpy action novellas that come through the mailbox you can happily leaf through. You might even want to decorate the shop by taking pictures with a camera and framing them, or fill the pots with plants. But they're all simply suggestions rather than objectives you have to tick off, though will undoubtedly play into the psychology of trophy hunters. Perhaps due its cosy trappings of taking your time, Wanderstop's story is also a slow brew that requires patience to develop, especially when compared with writer and director Davey Wreden's previous games, which had much shorter playtimes and therefore never outstayed their welcome. Without going into spoilers, as you fulfil your customers' requests, something strange happens that means all your hard work will routinely reset as a new cycle begins, also changing the clearing's colour palettes as well as the customers you encounter. In between these cycles, narration and illustrations also piece out the internal conflict Alta is experiencing. Wreden had already spoken explicitly about how the game has a personal story based on his own feelings of burnout that comes from obsession and perfectionism, and knowing that, those parallels with Alta's struggles are pretty direct. But I also found myself relating to her impatience, questioning why I'm making all these teas for people, some of whom you borderline have to force into making a request for tea, when it's also impermanent and inconsequential before the story moves onto its next beat. Perhaps I'm just in denial of my own sense of encroaching burnout, with the need to always be on, searching for the next game to cover, the next work assignment, the next pay cheque. In other words, Wanderstop is a game I needed to play to get myself to slow down, but it's also better to describe it as meditative medicine rather than a must-play you can't put down. While it may drip-feed its story for longer than necessary and doesn't really go out of its way to subvert the cosy game, those who are looking for a way to relax will find comfort in the intricate and charming processes of making tea to pass the time. What do you think of Wanderstop and it's art direction? Let us know in the comments below.
