The Meanings and Questions of the Endings of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
Hot debate over the endings of the new game have me thinking all kinds of things. Spoilers be here!
In case you aren’t a video game player, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a new turn-based RPG from French indie developer Sandfall Interactive. It’s getting rave reviews, including a 93 critic score and an unheard-of 9.7 user rating score on Metacritic1. It’s quickly become one of my top five favorite games of all time. The music is unbelievable, the story is tight and engaging, the combat is fun, the world is beautiful, and the characters grabbed me right from the beginning. This game is truly a piece of art to experience, if you haven’t yet.
However, the endings have sparked some heated debate online. I’m going to get into spoilers, so if you plan on playing the game, I strongly suggest you wait to read this until after you have completed the game. Truly, it is best experienced the first time without knowing what’s going to happen.
If you’ve already played the whole game, or you never plan on playing it and just want to listen to me talk through storytelling choices for a while, read on!
A Quick Story Rundown
This section is for those who haven’t played the game, or the wild people who are playing it but haven’t finished yet, who want to know what happens. If you’ve already played and know everything, feel free to skip this section. I’m keeping this to only the lore you really need to know for the endings.
In a fantasy world based on Belle Époque France, a mysterious figure called The Paintress wakes once a year to paint a new number, counting down from 100, on a tower called the Monolith. The number is visible to the people of Lumiére, an island city equivalent of Paris. Each year, when the Paintress ticks down the number, the people of that age die in a ritual called the Gommage.
Each year, Lumiére sends out a group of fighters and scientists whose job is to reach the Paintress and stop her from painting another year. These expeditions are named after the year on the Monolith when they set out.
You, the player, take control of the eponymous Expedition 33.
Here are your expeditioners:
Gustave, an inventor and swordsman who is your main character through Act I
Maelle, a sixteen-year-old fencer who grew up an orphan in Lumiére, but was taken in by Gustave, who acts as both father and brother figures
Lune, a dedicated scientist and powerful magic-user who is mysterious at first but shows herself to be sensitive, kind, and cautious.
Sciel, a farmer-turned-teacher who wields a double-headed scythe, has gone through difficult times, and takes life as it comes.
There were more expeditioners than this, but they all die right at the beginning of their journey, when they run into a strange man named Renoir. Our party of four escape separately and eventually find each other, only to be torn apart when Renoir finds them again and kills Gustave. End of Act 1. Surprise, Maelle is actually the main character!
In Act 2, Gustave is replaced by another stranger, Verso. Verso knows a lot about this world. He’s from Expedition 00—the first expedition—the same as Renoir, and is functionally immortal. He knows a lot about Renoir, too. And he seems to recognize Maelle. As you progress through the game, you find out that Renoir, Verso, the Paintress, and Maelle all have something in common—they are family. At least, in a way.
Because here is the crux of the story: you are in a world within a world. Lumiére and the Continent and all the fantastical things you’ve seen and done so far live inside a canvas, once painted by the real Verso, in a world where people called “Painters” have the ability to paint worlds and go inside them.
Real Verso died in a fire; this canvas you’re in houses the last piece of his soul. The Paintress, who you find out was not painting the deaths of the people of Lumiére but warning them of their ends, is Verso’s mother Aline, using his canvas as a respite from the grief of losing her son. Verso’s father, the real Renoir, has been trying to destroy the canvas to help his wife escape her grief. Verso’s older sister, Clea, is waging a war outside the canvas against the people who set the fire that sent her family into a spiral.
And Maelle is actually the real Verso’s younger sister, Alicia, sent into the canvas by Clea to end the conflict between Aline and Renoir.
Following? I know it’s a lot.
To recap: There is a “real” world and a canvas world. The real world belongs to the Dessendre family: Renoir, Aline, Clea, Verso, and Alicia. Verso died in a fire set by the family’s enemies. Aline escaped into his fantasy world to ease her grief, and Renoir has been battling to force her out and destroy Verso’s painting, allowing Verso’s soul to rest. Clea, trying to end the conflict between her father and mother, sends Alicia in to help Renoir.
The canvas world belongs to the people of Lumiére and the fantastical creatures of the continent. For them, a great cataclysm tore their world apart 67 years ago, and they have spent all this time sending expeditions to the continent to defeat the Paintress (Aline) and save everyone. Little do they know, Aline is the one protecting them from the actual threat, Renoir.
The Verso who joins your party is not the real Verso—he is a version painted by Aline, the Paintress, but he is aware that he is painted, and he knows of the world outside the canvas. He knows a piece of the soul of his real self is trapped inside the painting and can never rest as long as Aline keeps Renoir from destroying the painting.
Maelle—actually Alicia—also wants to save the painting. In the painted world, she suffers none of the disfigurement of the deadly fire, she has her brother back, and she has the beloved family, like Gustave, that she made growing up a second time inside the canvas.
Now, let’s talk about the endings.
The Endings
Expedition 33 has two possible endings, and unlike a lot of games where your decisions throughout the game affect which ending you get, here you get to choose between them right at the end.2
You defeat both the Paintress and Renoir, forcing them both out of the canvas. Maelle, though, is still there, and has her own Painter power. She wants to stay. She wants to live out the life she has inside the painted world, because she is physically whole and has people there that she loves. She promises Renoir, her father, that she’ll leave eventually, but Renoir knows she’s lying, and Verso says so explicitly. And, for her to stay, Verso’s soul will have to continue painting.
Verso and Maelle face each other in a fight over the fate of the canvas.
Verso’s Ending: If you choose Verso, you will fight Maelle, defeat her, and force her out of the canvas. You allow the piece of real-Verso’s soul to stop painting. Both Versos and the painted world are destroyed, including all the people inside, and Maelle/Alicia returns to the world outside the canvas to be with her family and finally deal with their grief over Verso’s death.
Maelle’s Ending: If you choose Maelle, you will fight and defeat Verso, forcing his real-self’s soul to continue painting, and keeping painted Verso alive. Maelle revives Lumiére, Gustave, and everyone else who has died. They gather to watch Verso play piano in concert, and everything seems happy—but it becomes clear that Verso is trapped, and Maelle is his jailer. The Dessendre cycle of grief continues.
The Debate
Describing them here, the choice between endings seems cut and dried, but I’ve described them in a very high-level way, without getting into all the details and emotions that come up when you actually spend 60 hours playing a video game.
You spend all of Acts 1 and 2 with the people of the canvas world. Gustave, Maelle, Lune, Sciel, Esquie3, Monoco, painted Verso. They feel just as real—maybe more real—than the Dessendres, who are sprinkled throughout Acts 1 and 2 but whose plight you don’t fully understand until Act 3. You have done all this work to save the lives and futures of these people you care deeply about.
And now, at the end, the game is telling you Verso’s ending is the correct one? You’re supposed to let the painting go?
I had a hell of a time choosing between Maelle and Verso when I was in the moment. I didn’t know how the endings would turn out. I could see two paths for both endings to take. I could see Maelle leaving the painting and never recovering from her depression, her father’s attempts to force her to heal backfiring in a way that attempts like that often do in the real world. My hopeful side could see the painting as a form of therapy, when used correctly, allowing the family members to heal as they are gradually weaned off its use.
I thought about the ethical ramifications of condemning the people of the painting to oblivion. What made them any less real than the Dessendres? Don’t they also deserve a chance to live? Some portion of the player base believes that no, they aren’t people, so the decision is easy.
The more I sit with this story, the more I think that both sides of the debate are more extreme than the creators wanted us to go. I don’t know the true intent of Sandfall Interactive, but this debate between reality, personhood, and the moral and ethical implications of the endings had me thinking about the video “Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor” by Dan Olson on the Folding Ideas YouTube channel.
In the video, Dan tackles those “Ending Explained” videos you’ll see for movies and TV shows that look only at the surface level implications of the physical events that happen in media, and ignore the symbolism and meaning of them even when the symbolism IS the story. It’s a great video that I think about all the time.
People are taking the physical reality of the characters too far. I think there is something in the game about the characters of the canvas world being “real” and having real lives, dreams, emotions, and will. The Dessendres, after all, could be inside their own painted world. There could be an infinite matryoshka doll of worlds. There could, there could, there could. We could talk about possibilities all day. There is an interesting thought experiment in that, but it has little relevance to what’s actually presented in the game.
What does it mean that it was better that Maelle/Alicia was forced to leave the painting and confront her grief? What does the Dessendre’s use of the painting say? Why does it matter that both Maelle and we, the player, felt such grief over the death of painted characters like Gustave? I said I can’t know the intent of Sandfall with Expedition 33, but this is what I took from it:
This game is about how we cannot live forever in the comfort of our fictions. We must, at some point, face reality.
I’m a writer and artist. I’ve been writing and drawing since I was very young. I know how we use art, both our own and others’, to explore fantastical worlds, to go somewhere or experience something we never have or never can, and to comfort ourselves when real life is distressing. I know how experiencing the artwork of a deceased loved one can feel like having a piece of them back.
And I also know that no matter how much you love that fictional world, no matter how much comfort it brings you, it is finite. Living for it alone turns you into a husk of a person. You sacrifice all sense of self for the ability to live inside a world you can control entirely, with characters who you love, who will always love you back. This is Maelle in the Maelle ending: lost to the painting, everyone in it subjected to her will, whether or not they know it, whether or not she exercises it on them. This place, this fiction, is hers now. Its original creator, Verso, is trapped forever, forced to hold the foundation of this world together to sate her desires.
We feel that the people of Lumiére are real because the game has convinced us they are real, because this is an excellent piece of fiction. Aline, the Paintress who created them, was very good at what she did. We love Esquie and Monoco and the gestrals because they are cute and fun, the invention of child Verso. But in the theme and symbolism presented by the game, they are representative of comforting fictions.
In the end, we are supposed to be thankful for the time we had with them, then let them go.
Did the Game Pull This Off?
I don’t think a good portion of players will come to the same conclusion I did. The same way most people didn’t read into the symbolism of Annihilation, I don’t think they will look far past the surface of the events of Expedition 33, or they will get caught up in philosophical or hypothetical conversations about whether the people of the canvas are “real” and deserve to live.
I also don’t think people are wrong if they don’t come to the same conclusion as me. You’re free to interpret art as you like, and in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t that important.
I know the endings felt abrupt for some people, and the possible outcomes not clearly stated, and I agree that I had a hard time choosing who to side with because I did not know what would happen. I worried I was going to make the wrong choice. I loved the characters of the canvas and wanted them to be alive and happy. And it can be frustrating and scary not knowing if the choice you made is the “right” one. But I also think that the obfuscation was part of what made the choice so difficult. It felt like a choice in real life. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be before you make it.
And at the same time, the game let us be both Verso and Maelle. We were shown both sides of the conflict, and given pretty compelling evidence for both. Verso’s is the “good” ending in that it is the ending that completes the arc of the story in an overall positive light. Maelle’s is the “bad” because it completes the arc in a negative light. Clair obscur, recto verso. They’re both valid, and the question of the sentience of the people in the canvas is irrelevant.
To Conclude
I remember the prevalence of theory videos I used to see online, usually for big franchise films like Marvel and Star Wars.4 People explaining what little details in trailers meant, drawing connections, theorizing what we’d see in the next big movie. There were videos of people having fun thinking about which characters from which stories were the most powerful, or what a single line implicated for the fate of the story universe.
For a while these were fun. It’s fun to theorize! It’s fun to talk to other fans! It’s fun to see the Easter eggs creators put into movies and shows.
Then it got obnoxious. Symbolism became literal. Every detail had to be scrutinized for what came next, instead of thinking about what it meant in the moment. Plot holes and bad writing surely meant something in the larger scheme of the franchise, and fans would be rewarded for sticking with it. And to a large degree, I think those movies wanted us to do that.
It’s not bad when a story is mostly literal. And none of these movies were bad for being that. But I lament a world where we’re trained to ignore symbolism in stories, or to shy away from thinking deeply about the underlying message. Where we get distracted by logistics and forget to see the meaning.5
I loved Expedition 33. I’m so glad so many other people loved it, too. I hope it wins Game of the Year, because it deserves it. I hope it opens the doors for more games that are so clearly an artistic vision, while also being fun, tuned, and engaging. The more games we get like that, the more we will get to talk about such excellent symbolism, and open new doors for people to understand and interpret the stories they encounter.
Sources:
Metacritic review for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: https://www.metacritic.com/game/clair-obscur-expedition-33/
IGN Review for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: https://www.ign.com/articles/clair-obscur-expedition-33-review
Dan Olson’s (Folding Ideas) video “Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URo66iLNEZw
IGN also gave is a 9, but ugh, IGN. You gave Tears of the Kingdom a 10 but Expedition 33 only a 9? I know rating systems aren’t perfect and I know my opinion on BotW and TotK is unusual, but we don’t have to simp ALL the time for a just kind of okay Zelda game, kwim? I can’t put a footnote in the footnotes, but if any of my readers nerd rage over me saying BotW/TotK are mediocre Zelda games, please know your anger feeds me.
I really liked this. The entire plot of this game hinges on its mystery and its characters, and it never feels like the creators made you stop and grind for XP or look up guides to get the “right” ending. You can enjoy a smooth ride from start to finish.
WHEEEEEEEEEEEEE WHOOOOOOOOOOOO
Do people still make these? I’ve exorcized them from my YouTube feed, god bless.
And trust me, I love getting distracted by logistics. I’m autistic as hell. If your logistics are complete nonsense, I don’t want your symbolism. Where did the First Order get all its resources?? Did Somehow, Palpatine Returned create them with his Sith Mind Powers(tm)??