When Gabriel told me that he hadn’t skipped a single cutscene in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I sat bolt upright. Well, I slouched less – let’s say that. But when he told me he was walking around and initiating dialogue with random NPCs, just to stretch it out like so many Caramellos, that’s when I did the thing I said I had done initially. This is how I came to be ensorcelled by some of the Frenchest horseshit I’ve ever been exposed to in my life.
There are actually mad spoilers in the offing out there, guides and sites just straight up ruining shit, so for that and other reasons I would suggest you just engage directly with the game which I understand is a bizarre and sorcerous concept. People have said that something is the Dark Souls of Something Else so many times that now we know to immediately attack and exile that person from our lands, but Dark Souls is just one of the modern exemplars it throws into the pot – turn based combat goosed by brutal Souls-like timings is wild and the speedruns here are going to be off the chain. It grabs some Gloomhaven, too, with its caster class and its ambient elemental charges she uses like a currency. All this richness is plugged into menu based combat that is always waiting for you to break the system over your knee and release whatever devils throng and writhe within.
I could say a million things, but then you wouldn’t be able to have what I had. One of my most tawdry and overused rhetorical constructs is that Going Home isn’t as impossible as they say, but it does require people making the game with a kind of conscious wonder. If I were to say the game were wonderful, I suppose I mean it in the regular way, but also that it is literally full of wonder. The people behind this thing were on some weird, impossible quest just like the people in it. I’m just so glad it’s real.
I already thought this from Baldur’s Gate 3, but then I just thought it anyway, so I can’t honestly say it’s not just some obsession of mine that I’m always trying to make fit whatever moment or argument I’m in. It’s been sad watching Square Enix chase a mainstream audience by diluting their foundational, world-class expertise in what might be called JRPG with these various adventures and excursions into brawlers or real-time stuff when they should have held the tiller and sailed right into the storm. It’s always easy to spend somebody else’s money. But the world has never been more ready for their mastery than it is now.
(CW)TB out.