Conclusion

The game's name "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" needs a bit of an explanation I think, because it's more complicated than what we usually get. The term Clair-Obscur, which translates to light-dark in English, stands for a classic art technique that uses strong contrasts between light and shadow to create depth and emotion. This part of the name is like "The Elder Scrolls" or "Assassin's Creed"—the series name. "Expedition 33" doesn't mean that you missed 32 games, it's the title of the game—you're part of the 33rd expedition—the ones before you have failed, giving you a chance to break the cycle.

Set in a dreamlike, surreal version of a decaying world, Expedition 33 puts you in the role of Gustave and a group of rebels fighting against a mysterious force known as the Paintress. Each year, she paints a number—and every person marked by that number disappears from existence. The group's mission: stop the count before it reaches them. The story leans heavily into existential questions, identity, memory, and the inevitability of death, but wraps them in a vivid and emotionally charged RPG experience.

While there are some branching dialogue moments and character customization options, the game's core narrative is tightly focused, emphasizing story progression over open-world exploration. Think more Final Fantasy X than Elden Ring in terms of structure. The visual design is one of its standout features—more like a painting than a photorealistic world, influenced by classical art movements and stylized animation.

The game is being developed by Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive. Sandfall is a relatively new studio, made up of former Ubisoft developers who worked on major AAA franchises. Clair Obscur represents a departure from those blockbuster formulas, aiming instead for a more personal and artistically-driven experience. As a publisher, Kepler Interactive has been focused on empowering studios with creative control, and Expedition 33 fits neatly into that vision.

I really like the gameplay, bringing together elements from JRPGs, souls-like, turn-based with QTEs, deck building like Final Fantasy VII, sprinkled with some puzzles and exploration on top. For me, so far, this is the best RPG of 2025.

Graphics
Built on Unreal Engine 5, graphics looks excellent, characters are well-animated especially in cut-scenes. What is SUPER distracting though is that they're applying some sort of sharpening filter on the image, which makes it look terrible, like upscaled with sharpening, plus loss of detail, halos, ghosting and bleeds around everything. I've turned off all the settings that are visually distracting, and I still hate this post-effect filter. If you imagine the game without it, it must look stunning—the environments are extremely well crafted, the designers did an impressive job building a surreal world that's still believable in its own way. There are various biomes that keep things interesting, and objects are modeled with high polygon counts. The artists did a good job combining lighting and shadows to contribute to a highly atmospheric experience—all without ray tracing.

Shader Stutter and Accessibility
Since this is an Unreal Engine game, some shader issues are expected, but I really didn't notice much. There is no "compiling shaders" screen on startup, and not in the game either. When you load a savegame, the game will compile shaders, maybe 30 seconds, hidden in the normal "loading time." There's a little bit of traversal stutter, especially when you move through an area for the first time, but it wasn't super distracting for me. While there are some souls-like elements, the game is very reasonable with its difficulty, just some evade/parry timings take a bit of time to learn. You may adjust the difficulty at any time, QTEs can be set to auto-complete, camera shake can be disabled and there are various options for colorblind people.

Upscaling & Ray Tracing
Expedition 33 does not support ray tracing, but it uses Lumen for reflections and global illumination, and Nanite for high-detail geometry. In terms of upscalers you get support for NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS, but AMD FSR is not available. As a workaround you can enable XeSS, which works on AMD, too, it's still unexpected that this isn't supported. The situation with frame generation is even worse—no support for FrameGen at all, very strange. The game studio is a small team of like 30 people, so their resources were limited, no doubt.

Hardware Requirements
Hardware requirements are quite high, but not as crazy as some other recent titles, especially for UE5. In order to reach 60 FPS at 1080p, maximum settings, you need a RTX 4070, RX 7800 XT or RX 6900 XT. Got a 1440p monitor? Then things will be harder, you need a RTX 5080 and faster, or RX 7900 XTX. At 4K, only the mighty RTX 5090 can achieve over 60 FPS, but the RTX 4090 is kinda close, reaching 57.4 FPS. With "quality" upscaling, all high-end cards can reach 60 FPS at 4K. As always we opted for our own custom test scene, which is located in a typical outdoor area. Depending on the location, the game can sometimes be a bit CPU-limited, especially with weaker CPUs.

Quite unexpectedly, some Blackwell GPUs kept crashing during map loading. It doesn't look like a memory issue, because both 8 GB and 16 GB models are affected. What does help sometimes is loading the game at low settings/low resolution and once loaded, restore the desired settings.

AMD results are very interesting, too, especially at low resolution, they are performing extremely well, the 7900 XTX matching the RTX 4080 is rare. Maybe it has to do with the shader-based Lumen fallback, which is perhaps running differently on AMD. With the ugly filter that the game is currently using it's very hard to verify visual differences, I couldn't spot any. We tested the public Steam version, which seems to fix several issues over the press build. We also used the latest game ready drivers from all three GPU vendors, which all support Expedition 33.

VRAM
VRAM usage isn't a big problem, the game is well optimized for the right allocations at the respective resolutions. Just 6 GB will be enough for lowest settings, 8 or 10 GB for maximum settings as long as you don't run 4K, and there is no Frame Generation, which could eat some additional VRAM.