And it’s not just the performances, although the performances (including the facial acting and animation) are very good. (Especially as the game winds its way through its stunningly confident prologue chapter, slowly revealing the mystery of why all these very pretty, very young French people seem so hideously sad.) I was also struck by the rhythm of the opening conversation between Cox’s Gustave and his young ward Maelle, the two of them talking over and interrupting each other in ways that felt more like natural speech than the stilted “I say my line, now you say your line” manner of so much video game dialogue. Editing is a deeply underrated skill in the world of games, and Sandfall clearly gets it in a way that even big-money studios that drop stacks of cash on big-name actors often don’t.
And Clair Obscur needs that boost as it busts out of the gate, giving everything a grounding of human recognizability as it slowly spools out its high-concept premise: An ongoing apocalypse in which everyone over a certain age is suddenly, magically killed, with the lethal number dropping every year. It could be the stuff of pulpy melodrama, as Gustave reunites with his lover Sophie on the day she’s set to have her “Gommage.” But the game’s writing, and its performances, dovetail so nicely that the whole mad concept becomes entirely believable. (Sandfall is also careful to capture the inevitable culture that arises from this society-altering threat, from the webs of foster families and orphanages that spawn as whole generations of children are orphaned, to the ways those who are about to die pile their furniture on the street so that survivors can take their pick.) Cox is especially mesmerizing as Gustave, as the character forces himself to adopt a series of fragile, brave faces in the face of a grief that is no less painful for having been perfectly predictable.
I’m not that far into Clair Obscur, having only just recently cleared its first major boss fight, about four hours in. But I’ve already gotten the sense that it’s a game that might be frontloading a big portion of its impact, with that incredibly dense and detailed prologue giving way to much quieter, less focused exploration once the titular Expedition actually begins. This could be a fatal flaw. I’ve played plenty of games where their first chapters—i.e., the bits that get completed first, and demoed a million times as devs do the work of convincing people that what they’ve made works—were clearly polished to perfection, only to have later acts feel like an afterthought. But it’s here where the commitment to emotionally mature storytelling, to using actors and animators and editors to create characters who actually feel like people, pays huge dividends. Even if the game loses some of its early complexity once you’re actually running around and beating up Geometry Monsters every few minutes (and as the cast gets, uh, reduced in the opening minutes of its first full chapter), the memory and weight of those opening minutes lingers. “Why does what I’m doing matter?” is one of those big narrative hurdles any game story writer has to tackle. Few games have answered it as definitively as Clair Obscur does in those first few scenes, and understanding that effectively staging and recording those moments, not just as bits of a game, but as dramatic scenes, is a huge reason for that success.
