Our Painted Worlds
Some stories are difficult to write about. Not in that there isn't anything to say, but in that what was said in the story was enough on its own. It's difficult to dissect satisfaction.
After I rolled credits on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (known furthermore as "Clair Obscur"), I had a very long list of thoughts, but that was entirely because of its exquisite execution. These were nebulous takeaways, at first, coalescing only when I started voicing them to my partner while staring up at the ceiling past midnight and wondering on the nature of fiction. Why do we feel the pull to create? What becomes of our art when we die? Is it better to live a life reliant on fiction, or one buoyed by hope for reality? Where is the middle ground? When loss arrives at our doorstep, do we spurn it or greet it?
These thoughts were posed enticingly above me the day after I finished the game, while I did chores, while I bent to water my house plants. The soundtrack would spin on in my headphones, and I'd listen – eyes closed, tapping out those delicate few notes of "Lumiere." I was surprised to see that I wasn't as emotionally exhausted by the narrative as I had been with, say, Final Fantasy XV. Certainly, Clair Obscur was a tragedy, but I had chosen the ending that I felt most suited my interpretation of the game's underlying narrative. I was content. When it came down to that final choice between Maelle and Verso, when we are left to decide the fate of a painted world, I didn't hesitate.
Reality might be cruel, but it is not bereft of hope.
And so, coldly, confidently, with the callousness of a fickle artist, I unpainted it all.
An Open Canvas
They say when you write, you must, at some point, kill your darlings. This is a phrase that has been co-opted into the larger writer's zeitgeist – one that shifts meaning at the boundary-testing strokes of creatives. Does it mean you rid your narrative of unnecessary content, exposition, passages, and sentences? Does it mean that, with the single press of a button, an entire chapter might vanish? Does it mean something a little more concrete? Does it mean you literally kill your characters, for the story's sake, or because they don't belong anymore?
We massage this meta-narrative of what it means to be created and create continually, trying to pin down what happens behind the curtains of our mind. It is an intricate relationship that artists have with their art, and we tend to dismiss, explore, and agonize over it. From the pervasive archetype of the nigh-immortal Sherlock Holmes to a personally crafted Dungeons and Dragons campaign character, all of us are full of worlds, and those stories and characters, once set on the page, outlive their originators.
Clair Obscur exudes the elegance of a mourned painting half-finished; an artist's canvas shifted to a corner after the death of its creator. Claire Obscur itself is a fully realized story. Still, it crafts its world with half-imagined sporadism, making it appear a fallen dream, a languishing past, a far place that is crumbling under the weight of its irrelevancy. There is an inherent tragedy in that lack of finality, and we see it when we first leave behind the Expedition's devastating losses on the beach at the opening of the story. We enter the open world format and think: what is this place? What story is this world telling? Why is all of this here? It feels so wonderful, and yet so peculiarly random.
...this is a child's world, broken by adults.
Good writers weave with purpose and subtlety, delicately hinting instead of dousing audiences with forthright exposition. Breadcrumbing, I like to call it. This soft placement of clues and indicators lacks full context. The context will come, but first, here: walk into the forest, into the open maw of the story, and pick things up one piece at a time. We see this sort of drip-feed method throughout Clair Obscur, with clues as to what might come next, but never a full picture until much later. This gives us room to be curious – who is that mysterious woman, and why is the Paintress so unreachable? – that pulls the tension taut through the first half of the game.
In Clair Obscur, we are part of a small core group: Sciel and Lune, Gustave and Maelle, and eventually Verso, Monoco, and Esquie, exploring this world with all of them. We find out later that it is all a fabricated world, very literally a painting, and that the brushstrokes of others have disfigured it, turning the canvas into a battleground. The Verso we play as, and the family members he encounters, are but crafted shades of their real counterparts; based on them, but not them.
The characters called Gestrals are reminiscent of wooden poseable figures, the kind used for gestural drawings, and I read somewhere that this,was a pronunciation likely butchered by a child Verso, into "Gestral." Esquie is based on a plush doll, and the Gestral Monoco shares a name with one of the Dessendre family dogs. Maelle, who has an odd connection to the world, is revealed to be the real youngest sister of this family, who has been wholeheartedly "absorbed" by the painting. These hints aren't exactly subtle on a second playthrough, but because we lack context for what, exactly, the Gestrals are our first time around, or why these odd figures visit Maelle in her dreams, we assume it's just part of this odd, strange, fantasy land. But after the big reveal, we realize that no, this is a child's world, broken by adults.
Given that revelation, I found myself wondering if even our human characters, such as Sciel and Lune, weren't inspired by some off-screen relations or friends of the Dessendres; if Gustave, initially poised as Maelle's pseudo-brother figure, isn't merely a stand-in for her real lost brother; if any of the characters that we encountered in the canvas actually had a heart of their own, or if they were merely pieces of other things drawn from reality and stitched into semi-sentience. There are implications for the lore that contradict this interpretation, presenting them as fully aware beings, but in my mind, there was just this: the pen and the hand, drawing out that thin string of inspiration to place as life on the page.
Clair Obscur's larger lore asks a bigger question of players: Is this world that we've occupied for the past forty hours truly alive? Once the revelation came that Alicia, or Maelle, was essentially lost in the fictional world her late brother Verso had made, that had been bastardized by her mourning mother, her pragmatic older sister, her loving father – I knew this story was more than a fight against fate, it was a fight for truth.
Art and the Artist
At the beginning of the game, we are thrown into a story about defeating an enemy known as the Paintress, who, each year, paints a number. People of that age die, or "Gommage", which is essentially death by dissolution. This year, the Paintress paints 33. It is a countdown, inevitable, and so we join our team in a fight against this monstrosity because we witness, as Gustave, the death of a lover in the opening act. We hear stories of lost parents, friends, and families. We are introduced to a world teetering on the edge of madness, broken by something called "the Fracture."
We embody the soldiers of this society, looking out at that ever-distant island where the Paintress lies, curled, with head buried. Is she sad? Is she lost? Is she truly evil? Tomorrow comes, our team says. We continue. In the end, tomorrow certainly comes, but in its aftermath, we are left to grapple not with the fixing of the world, but with how the grief-stricken navigate the abyssal mire of mourning.
Art is an exercise in introspection that, like a diary, functions to sate the artist rather than the audience.
Clair Obscur provides us with a complicated picture of life and loss. We are left to explore a world – a canvas – slowly dying. Regardless of the aftermath of our final battle, we can start right back where we were before it, booting up the game after the credits roll to play again. After all, there's more to see, more of the world's portals to enter, more enemies to beat. But now we know what it is, and what it costs. While we're able to break from that reality as a player and view it more literally as a game, the underlying darkness is apparent in the fact that our lingering here is a slow suicide. In this world's real world, remaining in a painting for too long is a process that slowly kills, so by losing themselves to a false world, the Dessendre's are losing themselves in the real one.
Because of this, there were times I saw myself more in our antagonists than in our heroes. In Alicia's desperation for solace, I couldn't help but see her giving up.
This canvas was a playground for the Dessendre siblings – namely Clea and Verso – and we see this in the way the painted world's characters talk about missing those days of idyllic childhood whimsy. But these were crafted beings, made for them to enjoy. Verso's death as an adult is what makes his canvas suddenly that much more precious. It is what remains of his story, his ideas, his soul. His mother is the first to act on her grief by drawing herself into the world and painting a false Verso, a fake son upon whom she can impose her real love. They become, effectively, puppeteers.
But this is something all artists do. Some pursue their art to a malefic caliber, and thus the image of the lone, masochistic creator, fettered to the whims of muses, pervades the minds of the masses. Verso's canvas is a dream comic, though, consisting of haphazard ideas thrown this way and that, further augmented by his parents' and sister's own inclusions. But it began as a vision. Art is an exercise in introspection that, like a diary, functions to sate the artist rather than the audience. Being that this is Verso's childhood world, we can assume it is a child's attempt to learn to wonder and imagine. It makes the family's warring over it feel like a perversion.
At the end of the game, represented by a child's ever-painting, is the last remaining vestige of Verso's soul, and we are met with a moral dilemma of great stakes: erase the world to end the family's pointless fighting, or let it remain, forever tainted by the death of its creator.
By letting the "real" Verso stop painting, the game allows the "false" Verso to also die. By dropping the brush, we cede that interior world to oblivion.
Truth and Grief
Upon finishing, I read many reflections on forums about how Verso's ending was a cruel absolution of an entire world, and that the lives of those in Lumiere and the wider painted world were true and factual lives. On one hand, yes, they are. But at the bird's eye of approach, when looking merely at metaphorical contexts, no, they aren't. And even if they are, the idea of starving life to feed fantasy feels anathema to the game's entire second half. Fiction is a mirror, a window, but beyond that fractured pane is a world.
This shift of narrative focus reminded me of Nier: Automata's great mid-game rug-pull. In Nier, oddly enough, I was more tortured by the clawing of these little androids towards their humanity. In Clair Obscur, I was at peace with the end choice I made as Verso, even given the utterly disparate look that Sciel gives to him upon her final Gommage at the end of their world, because it feels like a final acceptance of grief.
It's in her hand, reaching out to his, dusting away to flowers, that I was struck by an awareness of the fact that I, like Verso, have also killed my ghosts. Sciel might not seem a ghost – she has feelings, a family, a beloved late husband – but many characters contain those same multitudes. Sciel is, in Dessendres'he context of our world, a manufactured character created for the game. The overwhelming emotion – perhaps selfishly – wasn't pity, but that untraceable feeling of letting go. For people who rely on fiction, who have sutured their wounds with it, bled through its gauze, used it to cope with terrible things, a relinquishment of that safety is akin to a death in itself.
Clair Obscur's larger lore implications prioritize interpretations that the painter's powers give their worlds sentience, and that they function like gods of their own self-contained little canvases. But there are times when we're navigating the world and encounter an entrance to the Dessendre manor – often as a door sitting cock-eyed – and we can enter it to see a recreation of what we can assume is the Dessendres' real home. These are glimpses of the real world, reminders of what's on the other side of the canvas, of who's holding the brush.
Remember the kitchen? Remember our rooms? We used to play here. Clea's room is filled with paintings of Nevrons, the monsters we encounter in the world, reminding us that they were once only ink and idea. The story has very quickly, at this point, become a meditation on denial. If Verso is alive in the painting, then the real world's truth of his death doesn't matter. Their ghosts will always occupy the chair beside us, even in the emptiness of it. When we mourn, we listen to the voicemails of those we've lost, perhaps even saving them in real-time, knowing how precious they'll one day be. Slowly, in small ways, often without even knowing it, we try to inoculate ourselves against the inevitable death of those we love.
Clair Obscur doesn't grapple, necessarily, with the paean of artistry itself, because it is far more a story of this grief. It explores the death of an artist and a family's desperation to keep him alive. It explores a girl's struggle to find meaning in a life that has robbed her of hope. It's this struggle in the canvas world, one she co-opts from her companions, that becomes the vital journey. It is the beacon of her hope.
Clair Obscur pulls at grief like taffy, relishing the sentiment and layered emotions that are born of it. But it's much more than that; it interrogates how we cope with our suffering. In Alicia, we see this most evidently, as she was scarred so severely by the fire that ended her brother's life that she cannot speak. It's why she loses herself easily to the whims of their shared fantasy, because it is the easier pill. She even voices this at one point; isn't it better here, where all can be somewhat controlled? Where we might fight a great monster, slay dragons, sing songs?
In this, I am reminded again of another story that deals with the imminence of death: Patrick Ness's A Monster Calls.In the story of A Monster Calls, we follow a child named Conner whose mother is undergoing treatment for an aggressive form of cancer, as he lives through a series of stories at night that slyly coax him through his fears. It is a pre-grief movement, suspending the audience in that space between life and death, forever hovering in that moment before the letting go. Connor's desperation – and denial – impact his real life. And we witness a cruel real life: bullies, a detached grandmother, an absent father. In Conner, we see a child clinging to fantasy, filled with quiet rage for the things beyond his control.
Grief, for them, is extended indefinitely because they refuse to face it.
His fear of grief is framed as a monster – it is a destructive, terrible force. It is fuel to the fire of great cruelties. But it is also a certainty, and so the monster becomes a lesson, an accompaniment through life, both to fear and to forfeit fear to. Clair Obscur grapples with a similar vision of loss, but it is one in which our characters can choose to exist in a fantasy. Connor doesn't have this same outlet, and while he never leaves behind his stories in a spiritual sense, he knows he cannot be coddled by tall tales.
In the ending of Maelle's choosing, where she salvages the painted world and remains in it, where she forces Verso to conduct a symphony and coldly hushes his agonized pleas for release, we end on the shock-horror image of her eyes dripping paint – a stark reminder that all is not right in this world of perfect endings.
A Life to Dream
It was in their father, Renoir, that I found my peculiarly kindred spirit. He is all blunt love, desperate to pull his daughter from the clutches of their man-made grief. His wife, Aline, is already falling into its false visions, chasing the ghost of their son to a place he'll never exist. Grief, for them, is extended indefinitely because they refuse to face it. It arrives at the doorstep, and they simply shut the door. Clea, the eldest sister, is the cold, pragmatic presence that pervades the canvas. Not necessarily a villain, but an annoyance. A voice calling for dinner when you're in the middle of a really good book. Wake up! She seems to scream. This painted world isn't ours anymore. One day it will crumble, and so will you. You aren't Atlas, dear sister. You are Sisyphus, and you must let go of the boulder.
Grief is a lonely path, even when experienced as a family, because each branch holds a different weight of leaves. Can we use our fantasies to buoy our reality, to create a sanctuary, or will the lure of their lullaby capture us entirely? When we rely less on painted worlds, do we lose a part of them in us? When there is no child to play in the sandbox, what happens to its castles?
In the final image of the game, if you chose to side with Verso, the painted world's characters wave a final goodbye to Alicia, after a formal funeral held for the real Verso, where the Dessendre family, now in their own world, gather before his grave. Alicia – or Maelle, who she'll always carry with her – looks on alone at the fading friends and family she had made in the canvas world. It is with the final wave that I saw a waving off of my own childhood, a goodbye to the stories that had raised me. Always there still, in pieces, in me, but no longer the crutch, the retreat, the turning away.
Life is cruel, unfair, and strange, but it is why we create. Love, after all, forms the backbone for the entirety of Clair Obscur's runtime. Love is the game's aperture. It is the scaffolding of everything else, and love is a product of the world's realities. In the Verso ending, that grief becomes a bitter hope. It is a slow dissolution of mourning, and in it we glimpse an Alicia who, even for all her struggles, can live a life worth painting again, because of the lessons she's learned in and beyond that canvas.
To create is a compulsion, that sweet song of the muses ever-calling, and sometimes we sit before a canvas and lose ourselves to the song. Especially when things feel awful, or we are struggling, or hurt, or in mourning, it is a place of release, and it can be wielded properly to that end. But it can also be a rejection of reality. We paint truths we can face, rather than the ones we need to.
I am reminded of Sirene, that beautiful island of cloth and sand and song, that we reach later in the game. It is based on Aline, their mother, and beckons us in a way reminiscent of a siren. Come, partake only in beauty, not blood, because here it does not exist. The final boss of that level dances in its center and is visible in peeks as you traverse the map there, an ocean away, and then a stone's throw, as you drift further into the fathoms. It is a reminder of that lullaby of safety, like a mother's song, in which we might spend our whole lives longing again for the cradle. And so, blades out, we end its dance.
Eventually – fingers hurting, eyes dry – we set down our brushes, gaze out the window, and open the door. It's bright outside. A breeze rushes in, on it laughter from a farther room. The work is unfinished. Perhaps, in a way, it always will be.
But ah, yes, I nearly forgot – I still have plants to water.