Before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which has been the talk of the town since launching on April 25, creative director Guillaume Broche was working on a precursor known as We Lost. While technically different projects, this title is still fitting of Clair Obscur’s overall mood. As its protagonists set out from Lumière to try to prevent the godlike Paintress from wiping humanity from existence, the palpable fear among Expedition 33 is that their hard work will, like the voyages before them, simply be a suicidal stepping stone on the path of future generations’ success.
(This piece contains spoilers for Clair Obscur’s journal entries, and some vague late-game spoilers for the end of Act II.)
Not only is this sense of impending failure baked into the mission’s motto, “We lay the trail for those who come after,” but it’s also part of why expeditions keep a journal to leave behind for subsequent expeditions. The average player will stumble upon several of these journals while playing Clair Obscur, each one full of stories describing the actions taken by previous expeditions and, sometimes, the dangers that ultimately defeated them. Not every journal provides useful information: Expedition 36’s entry, for instance, is a beautiful albeit strategically useless poem, while Expedition 47’s merely describes the self-styled “Drunken Brigade’s” theories on maintaining inebriation during battle. But the majority drive home the fact that Expedition 33’s success is predicated not only on their own skills but also the progress made by their predecessors.
