Expedition 33 Is The Next Baldur’s Gate 3

Sandfall Interactive’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an absolute marvel. By taking inspiration from myriad RPG classics and French Baroque artistry, it crafts an experience that is deep in its mechanics, nuanced in its storytelling, and eager to ask harsh but meaningful questions that stay with you long after the answers have been given. It’s the best game I’ve played this year and one that will stay with me for a long time.

But as I played through its harrowingly gorgeous campaign and grew close to its characters, I was reminded again and again of another recent classic: Baldur’s Gate 3. The two have much in common in that they come from small developers while unfurling intimate tales across a much grander world. You come to care immensely for small, layered casts fighting for the same goal while going through their own trials and tribulations. But it’s not just the characters and narrative that make them similar, but also how they both take genres that once seemed to be catering to niche audiences and transform them for broad appeal.

Jennifer English also playing one of the main characters in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is mostly a coincidence. Maelle and Shadowheart are both fantastic characters, though.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Sets A New Benchmark For Turn-Based RPGs

Ever since it was first revealed, Expedition 33 has been compared positively to the likes of Persona and Final Fantasy. It features a turn-based battle system and mechanics that feel pulled straight from a PS2 JRPG, while throughout the campaign you naturally grow close with a small cast of characters who retain their own playful personalities in spite of the bleak circumstances they find themselves in. You can catch up with them at camp, glean nuggets of motivation from dialogue on the field map, and learn to find a reason to endure, even on a suicide mission against the Paintress.

Expedition 33 is also paced like many other classic JRPGs with a gradual sense of narrative progression as new gameplay mechanics and modes of exploration are given to the player.

I genuinely believe this could set a new benchmark for classic turn-based RPGs — just like Baldur’s Gate 3 did with its own genre — introducing millions of people to a journey that isn’t compounded by anime melodrama and eccentric world building, but a grounded yet beautiful experience that isn’t afraid to go places both harrowingly dark and refreshingly light.

As someone who grew up playing countless games in the genre, it was strange feeling so at-home with Expedition 33 while simultaneously being blown away by everything new it brought to the table. There are moments, characters, and story beats within it that we are going to touch on for years to come, and each one of them is earned.

While Expedition 33 isn’t the sort of game where you are going to end up romancing each of your companions or crafting your own bespoke protagonist, that doesn’t prevent it from being any less meaningful. Each line of dialogue is deliberately curated, while scenes across the narrative are presented in a way where light and darkness are two sides of the same rusted coin.

Even as you try to fight back against impossible odds, there is much comfort to be found in the arms of people who care, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Expedition 33 kickstarts a fandom who cares about Verso and Maelle as much as Baldur’s Gate 3 fans do Karlach and Shadowheart.

Camp Is Where The Heart Is In Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Much like Larian’s masterpiece, Expedition 33 has you returning to a camp whenever you deem necessary while exploring the overworld, and it becomes a frequent pitstop for major story developments. Except this one is shrouded in a layer of perpetual darkness, with the likes of Verso, Schiel, Maelle, and Esquie crowded around a dwindling campfire wanting to voice their anxieties to anyone who will listen. As Gustave or Verso, it is your job to spend a bit of time with them, unpacking their insecurities and finding out the little things they love in this life, mere months and days before the Paintress takes them away.

You might be deep in the midst of a suicide mission, but that doesn’t mean these people aren’t human. They need to laugh, cry, blow off steam, and spend time with those they care about in order to keep on going. Like Baldur’s Gate 3, there are many moments of beauty in smaller interactions.

Romancing isn’t strictly a thing here, but there are moments where characters look for no-strings-attached nights of passion to let off some steam. Not that I can blame them.

Moments that will take on their own life outside the game as players take their favourite characters and the limited development the canon narrative gives them before turning them into something more. Expedition 33 deserves to experience this level of popularity, and with Sandfall Interactive executing upon its vision so masterfully, I believe it has what it takes. It isn’t going to endure like Baldur’s Gate 3, but as a relatively linear adventure possessing a definitive beginning, middle, and end, it was never going to.

But it could very well be a torchbearer for a genre that for a long time has belonged to niche audiences and a select few franchises, showing exactly what it is capable of when a passionate team takes it and turns the experience into something profoundly innovative and emotionally captivating. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the next Baldur’s Gate 3 because it is capable of changing not only the genre it calls home, but the entire medium if we let it.