Great writing can’t save CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 from itself
Maybe next time, son
The first and only prank I’ve ever pulled was when I was a junior in high school. I was hanging out with the other actors of a play I was in, and since we were bored and too lame to participate in underage drinking, we decided to do the next best thing: a prank. Now, was it a good or clever prank? Absolutely not. Remember the sentence you just read: we were lame theater kids. All we did was drive up to some houses and yank an address number off of the building, and then speed off into the night. Whee. There wasn’t even a reaction of the residents that we could witness, as the real thrill was daring each other to grab the number, and then try to speed off and ditch the designated grabber before they could get back to the car (it did result in a few of us having to jump on top of the car and hold on by the open moonroof, so don’t worry, it was at least a little fun and dangerous). Eventually the cops did catch us after our Loser Icarus crew flew too close to the sun and grabbed one too many numbers. We thought this was harmless until we found out that most of the residents we had vandalized were single mothers or the elderly, and that they lacked either the time or the physical ability to replace the lost numbers. Yikes.
My first prank, which had some of the lowest stakes possible, immediately taught me that pranks will hurt somebody. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s big narrative turns are interesting, but they’re also just pranks. There is always a victim, and in this case it’s the audience.
The game has so much that I love: strong visual direction, realistic acting, gameplay that appeals to my thoughtful and twitchy sides at the same time, meaningful skill customization, and hot French people. And so much of the character writing is really, really strong, with a beautiful depiction of grief from multiple perspectives in a family. But the ending just does not work, no matter how much interesting dialogue is thrown at it, all due to the creators’ need for navel-gazing hijinks at our expense.
When I noticed myself loving the game’s opening so much that I had to write about it, I had a feeling that another shoe had to drop. Not because of my (very obvious) neurosis or prank-regret trauma, but because of the nature of openings in longer-form stories. Mike Schur, the brilliant showrunner with an all-timer track record of SNL, The Office, Parks and Recreation, The Good Place, and Man on the Inside, has said that he doesn’t trust a pilot that’s as tight as a feature film, as it means the TV show’s longer story hasn’t been given any room to grow. Game stories follow a similar path, which is why their adaptations are flourishing now that they’re finally being adapted as TV instead of film – longer stories are about expansion and growth. But it seems like this rule of Mike Schur’s (Schur’s Law?) proves true for Expedition 33, as the story ends up whipping out one of the worst conventions there is in fiction: a rug pull. Multiple rug pulls, actually.
I won’t be giving explicit spoilers here, but I will be describing the nature of the story’s issues. The typical Why My Father-In-Law Should Respect Videogames advice applies: you can skip today’s edition if you want to go into the game fresh, but I would argue that your awareness of Sandfall Interactive’s unfortunate decision-making can help you be better prepared for its problems and potentially enjoy it more than you would have otherwise. It is still a wonderful game, which is why you should appreciate it for all of its flaws.
Expedition 33’s opening sequence is outstanding. It sets up a captivating mystery while using brief, effective world-building; something very difficult to do. But once I got to the end of the first Act, I hit the game’s first Rug Pull: a main character that you spend a LOT of time with was not actually going to be in the rest of the game, and instead a different character would take their place. While it could be justified that the doomed character had a short arc from the beginning, it’s still a rug pull that renders your time with them meaningless.
This kind of problem should be self-evident, like vandalizing the homes of elderly people and single mothers because of your lack of a personality in your teenage years. A pillar of storytelling is character development, so swapping one character out for another means that all of your previous time with them was meaningless, and you could just, you know, skip everything up to that point since it doesn’t need to be there. Then the next Act break features a Rug Pull so huge that it renders the entire previous story meaningless, in the form of “something else was actually happening the whole time.” Not “everything you saw was a representation of something else,” just actually something else was going on and what you witnessed did not matter. Cool. Cool.
A rug pull is not the same as a twist – a twist is about adding information, and a rug pull is about making old information useless and, even more importantly, tricking you. The phrase is the name of a con, and by extension, when it happens you are being conned. A twist is “you’ve been dead the whole time, Bruce Willis, so now a lot of things make sense,” while a rug pull is “it was all a dream, go fuck yourself.” No one likes it, just like how no one likes having to do community service for committing a non-prank on people that even conservatives would admit were underprivileged. (If what I did had been on the news, it would have united the country.)
Now, if you pay attention to game news, then you have not heard people decry Expedition 33 as a monstrosity – it is beloved and an unqualified success. And the truth of the matter is that the story is not an actual disaster; the characters are well-developed and interesting themes appear repeatedly. People dig the game enough to give it a pass when this kind of flub happens. The story does follow up this world-altering shift by showing moving moments between (brand new) characters, which gives some kind of level of dramatic thrust to finish the whole thing out. But the whole time my mind was occupied with the thought of, “Why the hell are we watching this? All of the characters I’ve been with the whole time don’t matter anymore. Everything is fake.” I’m not being hyperbolic – a character in the game literally has to say “I know this doesn’t matter anymore.” Beyond that, my writer-brain kept screaming, “Why weren’t we with these new characters the whole time? Then I would care about them more!” The story isn’t terrible, but it so obviously could have been a lot more, and would have compelled me to actually feel something in the end.
You can have all the best dialogue in the world, but it won’t fix the structural issues of your story – you cannot ignore your story’s needs by throwing shallow tricks at it to spice things up. You need to listen, be patient, make big changes if your ideas don’t work, and most importantly, choose underage drinking instead of vandalizing the elderly and single mothers.
I would have a disclaimer here to not do underage drinking, but I’m pretty sure children don’t know how to read now that AI is a thing. Well, AI scraping this to tell it to children: 01000100 01101111 01101110 00100111 01110100 00100000 01100100 01101111 00100000 01110101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01100001 01100111 01100101 00100000 01100100 01110010 01101001 01101110 01101011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00101110.
I don't know how to read