I should be up front. I did not enjoy playing Clair Obscur. If you did, you probably don’t want to read this. I should also say that I don’t think my experience trumps anyone else’s. It’s just my experience. You may have loved this game, and that’s great. I respect that. I’m offering a counterpoint.
I played Clair Obscure as an experiment of sorts. I do that sometimes, play even when I don’t enjoy the games I play. In part I do this because I’m a game developer and I need to keep informed about the games out there that are likely to be referenced – Clair Obscur is probably not one of them, though. I also play because I don’t believe in criticising a piece of media unless you have an insight into how it plays or how it reads.
A curious phenomenon that exists in games is the tendency on the developer’s side to seemingly deliberately hiding or making progression and information inaccessible to the player. I’ve had many discussions with people around Silksong where they say they get stuck or are unable to keep playing because it’s just too hard. I haven’t played Silksong myself, but I see the same tendency in Clair Obscur. Some of the content is hidden. Other parts of it are ridiculously difficult, both to find and to complete. I spent a lot of time trying to figure the game out, to the point that everything from Act II and onwards was played with a wiki as backup. This relates to the first paragraph. Playing games I don’t enjoy wastes my time. Clair Obscur was a huge time sink and so I resorted to wikis and guides to get through it within a reasonable amount of time. To give you an idea of where I am with the game – I have almost completed it from an achievements point of view, I have completed the entire story (I chose Verso, for those of you who know), and I’ve done all the additional content, all the chromatics etc. I have not completed the Gestral beaches because even my patience comes to an end on occasion.
As you may imagine, I have completionist tendencies and that’s probably the only reason I didn’t uninstall it immediately.
When I started out the game it took me a long time to understand what the world was, what the story was, who I was supposed to play. I had no idea. I didn’t know what was expected of me, I didn’t know what the background was, I absolutely hated that the voice actors were SO talented and yet the dialogue mainly consisted of ellipses and grunts and it took forever to button through them. It also took me a few hours before I noticed the ”auto progress” button for the dialogue, meaning I was swearing like a sailor when having to press ”continue” on ”…” after ”…”.
Clair Obscur paints with a very heavy brush. It’s almost a pastiche of itself in that it is trying so hard to make me feel something for a person I don’t know at all. Starting out, and continuing along, I had a really hard time not constantly rolling my eyes at the melodrama. Yeah, I get it. People die. Gustave was in love with a person who died and who didn’t want to have his kids (this is provided I understood this properly). I totally sympathise with Sophie by the way. Not having kids in the context of the canvas seems to be a very rational decision. So basically Clair Obscur does what so many other games do – using a woman as an excuse to go adventure. Sort of. Well, she’s a backdrop in any case and completely forgettable. Sorry Sophie, but you were.
The only difference between this story and other game stories is that it’s wrapped in a piano soundtrack and has tragic heroes. Oh. And the mimes.
In my first try I missed just about everything. I just went straight to the harbor, watched Sophie turn into flower petals and set out. And then I quit playing for a while because it was such a drama queen of a game that it made my teeth ache. The game is pretty much shoving EMOTIONS in my face, but the only thing that’s happening is that I’m unwilling to invest in those emotions.
My second try – after completing Avowed which turned out to be much more interesting – I investigated everything. And realised that I’d missed just about everything including some of the most malplaced combat tutorials in the history of tutorials. Fortunately, the mindblowingly bad tutorials in Lumiére were followed by better tutorials later in the game – where they actually made sense – but the whole first act was just weird and disorienting. The mimes did not help.
Neither did not knowing what was useful at the expedition start. I had no idea what would be useful purchases for my tokens and I had no idea how to get them. That I did get them I ascribe to stubbornness and completionst tendencies. In general, not knowing what to do or how to do it is a common theme in Clair Obscur. Obscur is really a good name for it.
First off, some areas of the game are so dark, I have no idea where I’m going But it’s not just the dark that obscures my progression. Oftentimes I don’t know where to go, there are no real pathfinding guides and transportation takes forever. In addition to that it is really difficult to find my way through levels even if the levels themselves aren’t that complicated. backtracking takes forever and I have to do a LOT of backtracking. Fast travel – if you can call it that – isn’t unlocked until late in the game. Everything about this game is cumbersome. Traveling the game world is slow and awkward. The UIs are convoluted and hard to understand. Even the save file ordering makes it difficult to load the right game.
I’m going to assume that this is a PC first game, because of the way the menu screens were structured and the flows in the menu screens. I’m also going to assume that no one held the combat designers back from making a complicated system of pictos and luminas that also had to be combined with skills and equipment in such a way that equipping the wrong thing might nerf some characters to the point of uselessness. I don’t think I should have to create an excel sheet with stats to be able to play efficiently but I was very close to doing so. I did it for the first Mass Effect because that system was also confusing as hell but that was a long time ago and in addition, Mass Effect at least did the story right (for me).
There’s almost no help to be had in Clair Obscur. When I first landed in the world view (where there is a map) I had no idea that it was a new mode of movement and play. I just sat there, for minutes, wondering if the game had locked. It was a completely different FoV and different lighting, and there were no HUD indicators at all. I had to look it up to understand what to do.
In addition, I had to set the camera sensitivity to almost nothing, because the movement made me feel ill. The audio is unbalanced. The HUD wants to cosplay Persona 5 (which in turn has been cosplayed) but not in a good way. There’s too much information in too small a space and sometimes I get the feeling that ”much information” has been used as a guideline rather than ”understandable”.
There’s also the issue that characters in the game sometimes hide the UI, or even worse, that the camera is placed in such a way that I as a player can’t see what is happening on screen in moments when I really need to see what is happening on screen.
The combat in this game is repetitive and – quite frankly – boring. It’s time consuming both to get into a fight and to complete a fight, especially if I fail. Some enemies are so bad at telegraphing attacks that I find myself sitting and counting as the attack starts just to be able to block in the right place. It turned out to be surprisingly efficient for some of the chromatic enemies, because they give me absolutely nothing. It was also hard to figure some of the enemies out, which is also time consuming. At the end of the game, I didn’t even experiment, because I assumed that the solution would be something I’d never think of myself and I didn’t want to waste time finding it out. Which brings me back to the issue with characters hiding the UI on screen. Losing because of Monoco hiding the enemy behind his hairy self is – in a word – frustrating.
The things I did like with the game are few and far between. I liked the voice acting, in particular Jennifer English and Ben Starr. I liked Charlie Cox as well but at most he was humming and hawing. Or not saying anything, Andy Serkis was excellent, as he so often is, but he didn’t get much space in the game. I liked the interaction between Esquie and Verso because Esquie is just a huge teddy bear and everyone needs a hug now and then. I also liked the tutorials later in the game, because they were on point and they actually taught you how to play.
Overall though, it was not my cup of tea. Or baguette, as it were.
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