Comedy is essential to Clair Obscur Expedition 33’s success

Clair Obscur Expedition 33 can be quite a funny game, with both sharply written witticisms and good-old slapstick humor for good measure. It’s a refreshingly playful approach and doubtless helped the title hoover up so many Game of the Year awards. 

Rather than undercutting Sandfall Interactive’s masterpiece, the jokes are essential to how the game functions. Expedition 33 is a grim meditation on death, grief, and letting go. It’s powerful stuff, but it’s damn heavy. Without an intermingling of comedy and tragedy to take the edge off, Expedition 33 simply wouldn’t be as good.

✓ VideoGamer Summary

• Though it might be better known for its depressing and complicated side, Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is much stronger for its use of humor.
• Expedition 33 uses comedy to cut through the tension of the story, meaning it never becomes too overwhelming for players.
• Humor is also used to bring players closer to Clair Obscur’s characters, giving them texture and making them more likable.
• Expedition 33’s world is set up to highlight the balance between comedy and tragedy, with the backdrop and its NPCs creating a farcical world for all this heartbreak.

Having enough of condolences

Even the small jokes do an excellent job of rounding out our characters. Happy-go-lucky Gustave and brooding antihero Verso, in particular, both use humor as a coping mechanism. 

Gustave’s recurring habit of throwing rocks to pass the time adds an endearing, sardonic quality to Charlie Cox’s performance. Meanwhile, Verso can literally bisect his own body stage-magician style to keep spirits up at camp with a bit of “Verso magic.”

These bright moments endear players to the characters, as well as allowing their connections to each other to feel more believable. If everything were rugged determination to continue forward or wallowing in sadness, these characters wouldn’t be as believable. 

Gallows humor is essential to see how they react to the tragedy around them and give them texture.

This even applies in reverse to the giant marshmallow of a mythica ally that is Esquie, or the furry fighter Monoco. Both are introduced as comic relief characters, able to bring a more goofy non-human perspective to events, but never quite escaping the tragedies that surround Expedition 33’s story. 

As funny as the banter between Monoco and Verso is, it’s still tempered down to a bittersweetness by the story, never too saccharine to take the player out of the experience. Expedition 33 doesn’t overrely on humor – it strikes a fine balance. 

Farcical backdrops

Expedition 33’s watercolor world is full of strange and wonderful creatures that counterpoint the sense of indifferent cruelty that underpins Gustave and pals’ reality. 

The Gestrals are a highlight. These manikin-bodied creatures with ridiculous paintbrush hair, with exaggerated French garble when they try to speak, love to brawl and view the world with a charming childlike wonder. 

Their existence is a farce. Some are shopkeepers, whom you have to fight to see their best stock; others place terribly difficult mini-games in your way for cosmetic prizes. They are most of the friendly NPCs you encounter, but they are so unbothered by the fractured state of the world.

This extends to certain combat setpieces, too. Mimes are optional encounters, whose reward is only to give you silly haircuts or stereotypical French outfits, but their fights are terribly challenging. 

They give similar vibes to certain enemies from Elden Ring, such as the Silver Sphere, which is just a giant ball that can chase you in a frighteningly ridiculous fashion. The mimes fulfil a similar role, an intentionally silly enemy made comically dangerous. They relieve tension as they highlight the game world, yet reinforce the friction between the silly and the serious.

Laughing in the face of death

Where Clair Obscur fully embraces gallows humor is in the logs that the previous Expeditions left behind. They will sometimes contain lore tidbits, such as Expedition 70 giving an explanation for the various climbable surfaces, or just tell tragic stories, such as Expedition 56’s struggles with loss.

Others, however, lean a little more into just laughing at death, as you find the various ridiculous ways that previous Expeditions come to an end. 

Expedition 66 died from eating poisoned mushrooms, Expedition 52 died after a supposedly ‘friendly’ match with Gestrals, and Expedition 37 simply decided to give up on the mission to play the Gestral’s mini-games.

Best of them all is Expedition 60, a group who abandoned their uniforms, and fought further than anybody just with the use of their ‘mighty muscles’, brute forcing their way rather than trying to muddle their way through. 

These logs try to give a lighter side to the sheer amount of bodies that start piling up, and seem to want to think about how ridiculous and spontaneous death can be.  

Like the other comedy in Expedition 33, its effect is ultimately bittersweet. Light and dark come together, a move which not only makes the narrative a far smoother ride, but also reinforces the central theme of duality that runs through the entire game.

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