On Getting Addicted to Expedition 33

Art, obsession, and the pain of being human.

This review of the hit video game Expedition 33 avoids spoilers until the very end, below the paywall. I’ll indicate where to stop reading if you don’t want to find out the whole story.

When I say that video games can be art, people often object that they’re addictive, sometimes destructively so. I see the truth of this, I just don’t think it means they’re not art. Things that are art can also be bad for you. They can hypnotize as well as enthrall; they can deceive as well as instruct. That was kind of Plato’s whole point.

In the Republic, book III, Socrates talks about young men in Athens who “let music pour like water through the funnels of their ears, until the edges of their souls gradually wear away.” No one would conclude from this that music isn’t art, just that its mesmerizing emotional power can be overused and abused. If you doubt this, go to a rave or a rally.

Having said all that, I confess it wasn’t until I played the new RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 that I actually felt how powerfully, even dangerously addictive a game can be. Its plot, which I’ll get to below, turns out to be a moving and sophisticated allegory that works on multiple interesting levels. Its visual design is gloriously beautiful. But before you experience most of that, you get hooked on the fun of the thing.

Games like this, in which you lead a gang of warriors through successive trials to a final boss, have largely passed me by in recent years. The two main trends have been towards massive open-world games like Elder Scrolls, in which you wander endlessly through a freeform landscape, and frenetic online sandbox melees like Fortnite, in which you build and fight at lightning speed. I am too old, and have too much work to do, for either of these.

But Expedition 33, as many reviewers have noted, is a self-conscious throwback aimed right at my sweet spot. I suspect it’s no accident that the “33” in the title refers to the age of the characters, which is just about my age. We’re the generation that was transfixed by Final Fantasy VII, a groundbreaking RPG classic from 1997. Even as far as graphics have progressed since then, there is still something entrancing about the oddball world of that solemn cosmic drama embroidered with fairytale whimsy.

The developers of Expedition 33 share my nostalgia for the older kind of games. Director Guillaume Broche broke away from his job at the gaming giant Ubisoft to form a scrappy new studio, Sandfall, where he felt he could work in the classic style that had gone missing from the industry. The team he assembled was cobbled together from job postings on Reddit and other let’s-put-on-a-show-in-dad’s-garage type efforts.

What they produced grew steadily into an astonishing success, featuring voice acting from talents like Andy Serkis (known for his motion-capture work as Gollum in Lord of the Rings). It has sold millions of copies and become a frontrunner for basically all the major gaming awards. A movie version was already green-lit before the game launched on Playstation, Steam, and Xbox. Emmanuel Macron, the president of Broche’s native France, called it “a shining example of French audacity and creativity.”

That it is, but it’s also very definitely a JRPG or “Japanese Role-Playing Game.” The “Japanese” in that phrase is a little like the “Cuban” in “Cuban cigars” or the “Scotch” in “Scotch whisky”: it describes a specific place of origin but also a style and a level of quality associated with that place. The classics of the JRPG genre, like Final Fantasy, were made by Japanese artists. But French gamers have a history of cross-pollination with Japan, and the format is unmistakable no matter where it comes from.

JRPG hallmarks include dreamlike fantasy mixed with legendary plotlines—the heroes of Expedition 33 are fighting a somber battle for their lives, but they also encounter dopey wooden sidekicks called “Gestrals” and fly around on a big fat marionette-looking thing. There is also usually a “world map,” which means that the levels are scattered across a flat region kind of like a board game, recalling the genre’s origins in tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons. And the combat is “turn-based,” which means you don’t fight in real time but select from a menu of attacks and defenses in sequence as if taking turns rolling the dice to see who wins.

This is the part that usually holds me back from loving JRPGs. I’m a simple man; I like to duke it out in real time as one does in Ninja Gaiden or God of War. But this is also the signal innovation of Expedition 33 when it comes to gameplay: fighting is turn-based, but when your enemy attacks you can block and counter in real time, which means there’s a mix of strategy and hand-eye coordination involved. This one simple change is what makes the game so viscerally satisfying for basically everyone who plays it. It flows between fictional artifice and immersive realism, and somehow it just works.

Which is probably why I got so into it. What I found myself thinking as I slashed my way through boss after boss was how grateful I am that I was already a fully-formed adult when I started playing this game. Because I’m a grown man with relatively set interests, hobbies, and routines, I could summon the willpower to wait until the day’s work was done before playing, to turn the thing off after a while and go back to my novel. I’ve tasted the good fruits of willpower enough times to know they’re more nourishing, in the long run, than the soft sweetness of pure pleasure.

But if I were a kid with no rules in place, man, this thing would have one-shotted me. I see now why parents are so worried about this stuff—or rather, I’ve always seen it, but now I felt it. It’s the closest I’ve come to the thought that I could just spend a whole day in a virtual world. If I had been young and impressionable enough, without the parents I had to steer me on a good course, I might have done some real damage to my psyche.

What scientists call “neuroplasticity,” the power of the brain to grow new pathways, is a core element of our natures. It needs handling with care. Ancient philosophers like Aristotle talked about it in terms of “habituation,” the repeated actions that work their way into the shape of the soul and stick there. Modern self-help writers like James Clear talk about “atomic habits.” It’s why online porn is such a ruinous disaster for boys. Because we’re most flexible when we’re young, every routine we get into is significant. What you learn to love as a child sticks with you.

In the deepest sense, this is education: “learning to love what is good and to shun what is low.” Emotional lessons stick with us most powerfully of all, and that was Plato’s worry about art: the immediacy of seeing Medea go wild with grief onstage grips you at a pre-rational level, and you can get, in a certain sense, addicted to histrionics. There’s no question that art does this more intensely than almost anything else: of everything I learned in middle school, I will remember the quadratic equation forever because we sang it to the tune of Jingle Bells. The feeling I had when I first read the Odyssey is a part of me for life.

Here’s what I’d say about this, what I think Plato ultimately wants us to see and what I think we all need to grapple with in the age of supercharged digital art: there is no getting around the power of it. There is no kicking the poets out of the city. If stories and images can corrupt us it’s because they can move us, and if they can move us to degradation they can also move us to transcendence. You can’t have one possibility without the other; that’s the predicament of being human.

To borrow an observation from James Madison, to eliminate art’s dangers by extinguishing its attractions would be “to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.” All you can do is manage the flames so they cook food instead of burning down cities. There’s no government ban that can fix this—it’s down to the slow grinding work of soul formation, parents and children feeling out the limits of freedom and discipline, delight and restraint. That’s life, and it’s also—as it happens—what Expedition 33 is about.

It’s the plot of the game that makes it, in my estimation, more than mere entertainment. Some games are just games, but then, some bowls are just bowls—and some are also art. It’s when the practical and utilitarian elements of a thing are used in service of a human story, “an imitation of men in action” (Aristotle again) that it rises to the level of a work of art. That’s why we need to have these conversations about video games, but not about porn—why porn isn’t art, but a sex scene in a movie can be. Triggering a physical pleasure response is one thing, speaking to the soul through pleasure is another. It’s only willful pedantry that fails to see the difference between the two.

In Expedition 33 there is a far-off woman called “the Paintress” who terrorizes a world of fanciful creatures and tragic heroes. Every year, she draws a glowing number on a stone monolith, and every year the number goes down. Then, in a city called Lumière or “Light,” everyone at or below the number on the monolith evaporates into a cloud of rose petals. It’s called “the Gommage” or “the erasure,” a moody French version of the Thanos Snap.

The world has suffered a catastrophe called “The Fracture.” It looks like a painting from Belle Époque France, at the turn of the 20th century, if it were smeared and deformed by some unnatural disaster. This year the number is 33, and our heroes are on a mission to destroy the Paintress.

But paint is what gives them life, and so this is, ultimately, a story about art. It’s about how real the stories we tell, and the characters we meet in them, can become for us. It’s about how we do art and ourselves a disservice when we let it engulf us completely, and it’s about whether and when we can tear ourselves away.

To discuss the rest, I have to spoil the twist ending. So I’ll put the last paragraphs behind a paywall. If you’ve enjoyed this essay, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to support my work.