Introduction

"Clair Obscur: Expedition 33" is a turn-based RPG developed by Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive. Set in a visually distinct, surreal world, the game follows Gustave and his group as they journey to stop the Paintress, a being who erases people from existence in numerical order. The narrative explores themes of fate, resistance, and identity through a blend of exploration, character progression, and stylized combat.



Kepler Interactive, the game's publisher, is a co-owned publishing collective that includes several independent studios. Sandfall Interactive, based in France, was founded by former Ubisoft developers, bringing experience from titles such as Assassin's Creed and Tom Clancy's The Division into a new creative direction focused on original IP and artistic storytelling.

The PC version of Expedition 33 supports unlocked framerates, ultrawide resolutions, and adjustable graphics settings. It is built with Unreal Engine 5 and includes upscaling via NVIDIA DLSS and Intel XeSS, but does not offer AMD FSR support. Frame generation features are not included, and the game does not implement ray tracing.

This review will evaluate the performance of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 across a wide range of contemporary graphics cards, compare image quality settings, and analyze the game's VRAM usage to provide insight into the hardware requirements needed for an optimal experience.

Screenshots

All screenshots were taken at the Epic settings profile with distracting effects disabled and DLAA enabled. The gallery can be navigated with the cursor keys.

Graphics Settings

• The available performance presets are "low," "medium," "high," and "epic"
• Upscalers available are TSR, DLSS and XeSS, no FSR
• There is no support for frame generation
• The FPS limit can be set to 30, 60, 120 or Unlimited, there is no hidden FPS cap
• V-Sync can be disabled completely
• The Window mode options are "fullscreen," "windowed" and "borderless"
• Motion blur, film grain, chromatic aberration and vignette can be turned off, which helps, but there's still some weird sharpening effect that's very distracting and that can't be disabled
• In addition to that, there's a good amount of additional options to fine-tune the performance.