Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a brilliant RPG with one wrinkle—the endgame scaling its touch skewiff. It’s not bad, don’t misunderstand me: It’s just that if you’re a completionist like me, you likely hit Act 3 and roamed around the overworld, ticking off all of your checklists, only to loop back to the final boss and flatten it like an artist with a bottle of turpentine, a paint roller, and a grudge.
The game’s lead game designer Michel Nohra confesses that they might’ve gone a little astray, there, per an interview with Edge magazine for Issue 419 (thanks, Gamesradar): “The only thing I regret is not making it clearer that if you want the intended difficulty for the boss, you have to go beat it now.”
See, while it’s a safe assumption that Clair Obscur lets you keep playing after the credits roll, it’s also a safe assumption that you’re meant to do a little exploring first—more than that, Nohra explains, most players keep the final boss as a motivating carrot on the end of a stick:
“So it was a surprise for us [that] people were doing every single thing there is to do in the game before going to the final dungeon. We’re happy about that, but we didn’t see it coming.” It’s a humility that’s echoed elsewhere in the interview—mostly, Sandfall’s trying to make sure it keeps perspective after making one of last year’s unexpected award-sweeping hits.
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