Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 hits the ground running and rarely lets up, but the first moment that it really knocks the wind out of players’ lungs takes place at the end of Act One. If you’ve maintained even a cursory awareness of the GOTY-hoovering French melancholy simulator, you probably know what I’m talking about by now. But there was a more innocent time last year when we all had no idea what we were in for. Creating a moment that left everyone gobsmacked, said lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, was about more than just a single scene. It worked because of all that came before and, yes, after.
Clair Obscur spoilers follow.
Fresh off winning an Outstanding Achievement In Story distinction at last week’s DICE Awards in Las Vegas, Svedberg-Yen explained how the Clair Obscur team managed to make the death of Gustave – up until that point the player character – feel earned and emotionally resonant. This meant striking a delicate balance between foreshadowing and restraint so that players wouldn’t see it coming from a mile away.
"We wanted to make some meaningful moments so that when it came to the time of his death, you could feel the characters,” Svedberg-Yen told Aftermath. “So for instance, we have sort of a bookend where we have Gustave in his first encounter with Renoir on the Dark Shores when the whole team dies. Then we go through his arc and his travels, and now at the end, we come back to that moment. And now we can see Gustave in the second encounter, the change from that first instance. I think that was what we wanted to set up. So we were very intentional about the places in which we made certain moments, right?"
Gustave’s relationship with Maelle – short lived though it ended up being in actual game hours – was also key to making Gustave’s death land. “For those who come after” needed to be more than just a catchphrase.
"The conversations with Maelle, setting that up – those solo moments, those moments when we talk about 'For those who come after' and what that means,” said Svedberg-Yen. “We were very careful to have all of those so that when it came to this moment, we didn't necessarily give it away, but there are specific things that tie back. When [Gustave] says 'For those who come after' to Maelle [just before Renoir kills him], she says 'Run' because that calls back to their conversation when he's like 'If you see somebody, you'd better run' and she said 'I'm only running if you run.' So all of those things were sort of building to that point."
In Svedberg-Yen’s eyes, those story and character beats found their purpose pretty naturally; gameplay proved trickier.
"[Not spoiling] was more of a consideration on the gameplay side,” she said. “I noticed some players realizing that Gustave's skill tree is much smaller. We still made a broader skill tree that was locked, but it was still significantly smaller. I think maybe we needed to make it even bigger."
Fortunately, Clair Obscur’s then-burgeoning community was cool about it.
"I saw a Reddit thread [where someone was like] 'I think my game is blocked or buggy because I'm not unlocking any of Gustave's skills. What's going on? Do I need to reset?'” said Svedberg-Yen. “And people just all jumped in and said 'Don't worry. It's story locked. You'll get it. Act Two is amazing. Gustave becomes [overpowered]. You will not believe the skills you get.' Everybody kept it going, and they didn't spoil it for other people. ... It was at least several weeks before [Gustave’s death] became more widely known."
But there is an argument to be made that Gustave’s strongest moments come in Act Two, even if he’s not around to see them. While many games treat death with a carelessness that borders on cavalier, Clair Obscur gives its cast room to mourn, exhale, and adjust to their new shared reality – albeit only just a bit in what is still a time of immense peril.
"I didn't want it to just be 'OK, he's gone, and now we continue as if nothing has happened,'” said Svedberg-Yen. “But on the other hand, when you are in this life-and-death situation and there's a bigger mission, you have to go on, right? I imagine that this is probably true for a lot of folks who have been in difficult situations where you need to keep pushing on. So we wanted to bring up that contrast, where Lune is saying, 'We have to press on.' Because death is such a constant in this world, and yet, this death is different. Death is something we're used to, but each one is unique in the impact it has on us. ... So writing it, I really tried to think about each character – their relationship to Gustave and also their relationship to the mission – and how they think about death.”
Even in Clair Obscur’s world of near-constant grief, Svedberg-Yen wanted a sprig of closure to see the light of day. Ultimately, Maelle and the rest of the party find a place to bury Gustave’s prosthetic arm and reflect on who he was to them.
“To me, it was really important that we had the burial, that there was a little bit of closure,” she said. “Because it just felt intuitively wrong if we continued on without acknowledging that moment."
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Nathan Grayson
