THOUGHTS: On 'Clair Obscur: Expedition 33' and Cynicism Overriding Meaning in Pop Culture, by Adam Lehrer

I played a video game everyone seems to love, I think I liked it too but it also represents something I hate...

I played that Clair Obscur role playing game that everyone is talking about and, for the most part, thought it was pretty amazing (though it should be said everything semi creative gets seen with rose tinted glasses due to the fact that the 2010s irreparably destroyed art across all disciplines: art, literature, high brow, TV, games, low brow, none of it’ll ever be quite the same.)

I’m sure very few others on here played this so I know I’m basically pissing in the wind, but hear me out. Everything about this game makes you want to cheer for it: it looks like art, it’s bold, it’s not stupid and doesn’t assume you the player is fucking stupid. It’s clear the designers wanted to make something special and meaningful, and they did.

The problem, however, is it is likely that the devs didn’t quite understand the meanings and ramifications of their own work. Clair Obscur’s ending is abysmal. It doesn’t fit its own story story. The feeling of reaching the ending of this video game is something akin to reading the entire Bible and then the last paragraph of the Bible tells you that God is not actually real and you are stupid to believe in him or follow the word of Christ. Whether the game’s designers merely misinterpreted their own story or are callously trying to remove the potentialities in interpretations of the game’s players is unknown, but it’s a big fucking let down.

Without getting too deep in the weeds, I’ll try to summarize the game’s narrative. So, in the game you’re in this “painted” world, a living painting or, if you will, a virtual reality (the game is an obvious parallel for how seductive and dangerously compelling games are) and you realize about 3/4 of the way through the gameplay that all the characters in the game are actually the creations of the game’s antagonists. Those villains are a family of “artist sorcerers” that have the power to turn their paintings into vivid alternate realities, or virtual realities, that they can actually transport themselves to and live within. Living in the virtual reality, however, takes a toll on their physical bodies outside in the real world and no doubt you’ll be forced to think about how healthy or unhealthy your own gaming activities are when playing Clair Obscur. Yes, this family of painters is, in a fit of rather obvious symbolism, actually a family of video game creators. Like I said, the metaphor for gaming and escapism isn’t subtle here. The trouble begins when this family loses their oldest son in a fire, in the real world. The mother, stricken with grief, applies her own edits to her late son’s childhood canvas and creates an entire world of living beings within the canvas, including painted versions of her own family that are doomed to live there. She then decides to live in the painting as a means of staying close to her son’s soul, avoiding her grief in the outside world. The characters created by the “paintress” are then subject to the rules of her painted world. The story begins on the day of the “gommage”, when the grief stricken mother, now permanently stuck in this virtual reality, erases all the people she painted above a certain age. The age in the game is 33, and all the 34-year-olds are quite literally erased from the canvas as their loved ones mourn their ashes. These people of course have no idea that their world is false, it’s just the world they inhabit. It’s tragic, and starts the “expedition” of surviving painted characters who venture off to meet their maker, ask her why she does this to them, and potentially stop her.

The idea that this world and its characters are “fake”, however, is betrayed by the fact that you just spent 20 hours with the game assuring you that they are very real characters with very real motivations. If anything, your sympathies during the game are with the painted characters, not the grief stricken “real” characters who seem like engineers completely unwilling to honor the responsibility that comes with the creation of life. They are like parents who have abandoned their own children.

The game then ends by giving the player a choice. You can preserve the painted reality, but this is obviously the “bad” or noncanonical ending that you weren’t supposed to choose and the final cut scene makes that clear. Or you can choose the “good” ending: no less than the complete exterminating of the faux world and everyone in it so you can free the “real” family of wizard painters from the false reality so they can face what they’ve used that false reality to avoid: their grief.

Now, Clair Obscur was made by French people, which I think partly summarizes why it doesn’t work and why the deeper and more universal themes that the story alludes to are left so dismally unaddressed. The game is burdened by a rigid French intellectualism and palpable atheism that reels in its themes and reduces them to a cynical sneer. It’s like the Frencie designers couldn’t help themselves but thumb their noses at the player who chooses to live in this false reality (games) rather than face the “reality” of the world (an oh so French Freudian misery.) Despite such a beautiful, layered and even disturbing story that it just demanded you spend many hours with, the entire metaphor for this VIDEO GAME is this: that video games are rotting your brain and making you incapable of dealing with reality. It’s not that the sentiment is false, it’s just an obvious sanctimonious redundancy that barely warrants mentioning. The most radical video game in years reduced to a Black Mirror episode.

And even worse, while playing it I already had conceptualized my own thematic understanding of the story that I got attached to and was then swiftly and brutally rejected for a narrative conclusion that deliberately overlooks the entire story that preceded it. This family of painters, because they created this reality, are the GODS of this reality. The game had an in built theological interpretation that its makers didn’t see. The narrative suggests a crisis of faith of sorts, asking questions like, “Perhaps god created this world because he was sad, or bored, and because he could?” Or, “if God created us, are we even real to him?” Or, “Does God really love us? Are we really made in his image?” Or, “If God is our creator, he can also destroy us, but would he?” The game is like a twisted avant-garde theological treatise as stylish pop culture product that is then ruined by its artists’ failures to analyze the ramifications of their own product.

This is a game that could have gone way beyond its medium and become a cultural product of immense and universal thematic depth. Perhaps it’s because the French creators are too atheist to see the spiritual meanings of their own work, or perhaps they got over fixated on their own interpretation. I don’t know, but it’s a let down after investing my time in such a thing (we’re all too busy for this shit.)

I’m ranting because Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is emblematic of what I see wrong with all culture, even good culture. Clair Obscur is objectively good, I guess, great even. Its art direction, world building, and character building are as good as gaming gets. But all of that is betrayed by a nihilistic plot twist that ultimately condemns the player for caring at all about these “fictional” characters that they—as in the game’s designers and in the “painters” that created the world in the plot—created. The “good” choice at the game’s conclusion is the annihilation of all of these characters to free the “real” people from their pain. That isn’t just an insult to the players’ over-investment in the virtual reality and the AI personas in that reality, it’s a flat under-estimation of the power of fiction that allows us to see reality from fresh perspectives. Why spend so much time depicting these characters as having such realistic motivations and personalities only to make you feel like an idiot for struggling with the decision to see them all pushed forth into oblivion? It’s like the game doesn’t just suggest that video games are a bad, escapist waste of time, but that art is all together.

Even when we are treated to good art, the art of today can never go past something as banal and passé as yet another postmodern work of genre deconstruction. Or even another work of repetitive cultural critique. Or yet another work of cynicism that targets its own audience as part of the “problem” that it’s looking to indict. The world isn’t meaningless, we’re just not capturing its true meanings. Artists can’t get passed their banal grievances and negative observations to embrace something….. Bigger. More substantial.

So, why create a video game that seems to suggest a universalist excavation of the dilemma of being human only to backtrack and say, “Looking for this kind of experience in a game is stupid, a waste of time, and avoidant of the real world.” The video game industry is excited about Clair Obscur’s success at the moment, and with good reason. It’s been a while since something so radical sold so well. But with time, I assume other writers will better assess the failures of its narrative, and see that it is also a game replete with contempt for its audience in a very different way than say, Ubisoft is with the release of all those pieces of Assassin’s Creed crud they put out.