(for context on what this series is, please see my Day 1 post here: Redundancy Review: Day 1, “A New Beginning” – Rosalia Rambles)
Good morning the ones that came before and those who come after, welcome to Day 331-333 of Rosalia Rambles Redundancy Review.
First off, cause I have friends who have not got that far in Expedition 33:
This article is going to talk about the themes of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 in a fair amount of detail and this is your only spoiler warning before I start as all significant details are going to be unspoilered for the purposes of discussion. If you have not yet played Clair Obscur, please do, the TL;DR of this is that it is a modern masterpiece of a video game.
Right, now that I have probably shooed off a significant number of people – except Aaron, say hi to Aaron everyone – let us begin.
Dim dam talé lam vacarme
Redundancy Review begun
And Rosa shall ramble on
Dilim dili lili lam
So much to say this is just a “part one”
Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam
Dim-dim-dam-dada, dim-dim-da-dada, dim-da-lilam
I love the opening of this game. The opening view of the twisted spire of Lumière with the eponymous song playing in the background helps set the tone of a dark yet optimistic story, with each individual frame of the game being as beautiful as a painting, but with credit going to the phenomenal motion capture work of Maxence Cazorla for helping to make Gustave such a relatable character from the get go.
That said, Charlie Cox also deserves his flowers. His background in traditional acting means he delivers the majority of Gustave’s lines in a way an on-screen actor would in a natural conversational style, bringing a down–to-earth charm to the somewhat introverted inventor. He is only in a short segment of the game, but it is no surprise he was nominated alongside the monolithic talents of Ben Starr and Jennifer English for awards.
Side tangent, as much as Jennifer English deserves the world and so much more, I really wish Andy Serkis at least got a nod for his performance as both Painted Renoir and Real Renoir, the ability to portray the same character from two drastically different perspectives has not been celebrated enough, playing two different antagonist characters would be hard work for any seasoned actor, and he made it seem effortless.
Jen herself performs fantastically as Maelle, delivering a performance that balances the perfect mix of youth exuberance but with a weight of maturity behind it, reflecting a world in which children are forced to grow up way too fast thanks to the Gommage, Maelle carrying the weight of being orphaned multiple times before she even reached sixteen, but still wanting to join the Expedition to try save her home.
Oh yeah, should probably explain the Gommage, which is the main inciting incident of the game.
In the distance, visible from Lumière, there is a monolith where a lone figure sits motionless for the majority of the time. A number is painted upon it, with the number “34” being visible at the start of the game. The figure is referred to as “The Paintress”, and every year she will paint a new number onto the monolith, decreasing by one each time. When she does, everyone above that number in age will vanish into a cloud of petals, being “Gommaged”, leaving behind friends, family, and loved ones of all description.
How the various denizens of Lumière react to the Gommage is rather realistic, with everyone taking a different approach on how to spend their final minutes. Some accept their fate with dignity and decorum, staying strong for those around them. Some choose to “enjoy life”, spending their last moments in the comforting embrace of their partners. Finally, some do not react well at all, taking to drinking and slamming the efforts of the Expeditions as pointless busywork when the Gommage keeps happening.
This is the first main exposure to what is the main theme of the game as a whole: the cycle of grief.
When I first started playing, my partner refused to tell me anything about the game except that it was “a game about grief”. Right from the beginning, you see how Lumière is a city that has been utterly traumatised by a regular cycle of grief – death is a constant, reoccurring factor for them, to the point that traditions around the Gommage have been established with almost everyone going to the harbour to mark their final moments.
But there is also a beautiful moment hiding in plain sight that is beautiful foreshadowing to this overarching theme, which I wish I got a bloody screenshot of but the transcript will have to do:
Sophie: “Sometimes I feel sorry for her.”
Gustave: “Who, the Paintress?”
Sophie: “Look at her. She looks sad. Maybe she’s a prisoner too. Stuck in the same cycle as us.”
On the first playthrough, you may have no idea what Sophie is talking about. As far as the player knows, the Paintress is responsible for the Gommage, and her constant cycle of death is all that both the player and the characters know.
But then you finish Act II, and become witness to the fantastic, if a bit divisive, twist that everything you have played through is in a painted world, with a family stuck in their own twisted cycle of grief being the main antagonist forces behind what is happening within what is now known as “The Canvas”.
The Paintress does not want to go through with the Gommage. With each passing year, her available supply of Chroma – the source of a painter’s power, diminishes thanks to the actions of the real Renoir, who is trying to force the Paintress out of the Canvas because she is his wife, choosing to stay in a fantasy world with a painted copy of her dead son at serious detriment to her own physical health.
Grief is ultimately what drives all characters forward in this game. Each of them have their own complex motivations as to why they move forward, but each initial Expedition member has their own flavour of grief pushing them forward:
- Gustave lost Sophie, his lost love who he only managed to reconcile with before she died
- Maelle lost both her original parents and her foster parents, leaving her only with Gustave as her adoptive brother
- Lune lost her parents on a previous expedition, and hopes to find out what happened to them as part of Expedition 33
- Sciel lost her husband Pieree, and subsequently lost her unborn child during her suicide attempt driven by the previous grief
In spite of their grief though, they move forward, regardless of the consequences.
I have already used one set of arc words as the title of this article, but there is another set there are equally important to the story of Clair Obscur:
They are just “Tomorrow Comes” but I have this Sciel screenshot saved so I am going to use it because this is another instance of something becoming way more tragic on a second playthrough – specifically that Sciel tried to kill herself via drowning in the ocean, giving her a fear of water moving forward.
Even when grief feels overwhelming, even when it feels like the world is collapsing in on yourself, even when you lose your job for the second time within a year meaning you start experiencing regular crashouts that disrupt your writing schedule and general routine: Tomorrow Comes. There will always be another dawn after the dark, and even when things feel overwhelming, there is a comfort in knowing that a tomorrow will always come. Struggles may remain for a long period of time, but it is a blessing to be guaranteed a tomorrow in the face of adversity.
But, I made the title of this article “For Those Who Come After”, and as such, I should probably talk about what those arc words mean within the game, and what they mean to me.
It is actually a shortened version of a longer line, which forms part of the oath Expeditioners take before embarking, something which Sandfall Interactive has not posted in full when I really wish they would. The full line is:
“Learn from the ones who came before, and lay the trail for those who come after.”
Within the game, this takes the form of all the expeditions that embarked before Expedition 33. You will be able to find their journals scattered around the game world which tell how they met their end whilst also informing you of how to navigate whatever danger they succumbed to… or in some cases, you find the journal after navigating the danger making you exclaim “well that would have been helpful five minutes ago”, but each Expedition before yours has laid the trail in some way, either through the grapple points or climbing handles, or dealing with an obnoxiously large threat long before you appeared.
The Expedition is also a sign of hope for Lumiere, even as cynicism grows within the populace over the effectiveness of the effort as a whole, it shows that there are still those who are willing to navigate into a hostile world in an effort to try secure a better future for those who remain in Lumiere. Gustave specifically thinks of his apprentices, uttering these very words each time he finishes a journal entry:
What do these words mean to me though? How do I take these arc words and apply them to my day-to-day experiences?
Well, I have talked about it at some length in the past, but my goal as an artist is to act as inspiration for younger LGBTQ+ folk who have their own worries, concerns, or serious amounts of anxiety about living in a world that is very often hostile to them.
I try my best to learn the history of LGBT rights as a whole, who laid the trail for people like me today and started to build a world where we can all be accepted, and I use that to inspire myself to try to do the same for others in whatever way I can.
This is especially true for living in the UK, a country where trans rights are completely ignored by the ruling party at best, and at worst there are those who actively want to remove us from the public perception whilst simultaneously destroying our access to the life-saving healthcare we need.
Even as economic conditions become worse and political forces start to work against me, I refuse to back down.
I will not abandon my home.
I will not leave behind those like me.
I will do what I can to change things for the better for people like me, even if I do not live to see what this world will look like.
My art may not ever make enough money for me to live off, and it may not even reach the vast majority of people.
But if I can inspire even one person to take the plunge and see how good their life could be when they choose to be themselves, then I can be proud that I did something good.
For Those Who Come After.
Plus I just had to write about Expedition 33 on Day 333 of the Redundancy Review. Even if this is not my full final write up on the game, and believe me I have a lot more to say I just do not have the screenshots or time to back it up right now, this serves as a good prologue to discussing the game at length – something that is still a goal of mine for this.
That will cover everything for today. Thank you for reading today’s edition of the Redundancy Review. Wherever you are, I hope the weekend will treat you well and you can take some time to relax. Partake in things that make you happy, or work to improve the space around you.
Whatever you do, I know you will smash it.
Rosalia Rambles 