Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Left speechless after this gaming experience. It now sits comfortably in top 5 games of all time for me. Everything falls into place, the art design, the soundtrack, the gameplay, the storytelling, the voice acting, and finally, the worldbuilding. It's exceptional in every regard. It's a story of grief, of losing people perpetually in an unforgiving world. Of completely hopeless expeditions to try and change something, not knowing if expeditions before yours succeeded in accomplishing anything. You simply do it "for those who come after". The clock is ticking. The game is, in a word, beautiful. Every area is packed to the brim with details, little trinkets you can find, and enemies to beat. I had to stop every few minutes and just admire the artwork. It is ridiculously lush with art that bring the world to life. Monsters are creative, diverse, have tricky but fair attack patterns, weaknesses you can exploit. It's not "open world" in the same sense as you'd think from other games like Skyrim, it's a lot more linear but in a way that leaves room for exploration. The world begins quite small, then widens, then widens more, then massively widens. It's so elegantly crafted. Even having finished the game now, there are reasons to return to it and continue, with challenges and extra bits of story dotted throughout the map. It's clearly inspired by JRPGs, with turn-based combat that adds QTEs to time parries / dodges to add a skill ceiling. So if JRPGs are or aren't your thing, you either must or mustn't play this. It was a bit of a challenge playing it on cloud gaming with a keyboard instead of a controller, as any stutters would get me killed. The level scaling was excellent, every fight feeling challenging (on hard) but rarely impossible, unless you literally were not meant to do it yet. Minor critiques would be very mild jankiness in the late game, not totally knowing what to do because of missing task trackers. Not an issue during the majority of the game. Also the characters, while I did grow attached to them, and they behaved surprisingly consistently, even referring to dialogue choices you made once or twice along the way, were not particularly memorable. They were nice, but not "I'll remember them forever" nice. I also changed the audio to French for a moment to see the difference (since the game is made by a French team and based in fictional France) but the voice actors in English are clearly in a league of their own, including Andy Serkis, so I switched back. Learning this was made by a team of 30, with a guy who was a developer at Ubisoft and left to pursue more creative freedom, is astounding. It feels massive, rich, diverse, way beyond the scope of the team, really amazing. This would be my game of the year, but since I haven't gamed in ages and my backlog is enormous, I can't yet say. I'll likely continue with Kingdom Come Deliverance II, the first one being another of my top 5 games, so I have high hopes.