Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Accessibility Spotlight

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the incredibly ambitious and highly-rated debut from French indie developer Sandfall Interactive, has officially arrived on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The team here at AbleToPlay grabbed our gear on day-1 and joined Expedition 33 to see how this innovative J'RPG (get it?) handles accessibility. With its stunning visuals, unique combat system, and immersive storytelling, we were eager to uncover how approachable this adventure would be.

Cinematic Storytelling

Before diving into the accessibility features, let's set the stage. Expedition 33's imaginative story explores a fantasy realm at the mercy of the Paintress, a ultra-powerful being who' been slowly thinning-out humanity every year for generations. Once a year, the residents of Lumière, a ravaged and crumbling vision of Paris – seemingly the last remaining city in the world – gather to potentially say goodbye forever. In the distance, the Paintress reveals a massive, glowing painted number; always one number lower than the year prior. Anyone that age gradually disappears and turns into dust, and the cycle of destruction begins anew.

Facing inveitable doom, the people of Lumière refuse to submit to the Paintress. Year after year, they send expeditions across treacherous seas to confront her in her own domain — with volunteers comprised of both fiery, idealistic hopefuls, as well as veteran warriors who choose to spend their remaining days in defiance rather than resignation. Though no expedition has yet returned victorious, this tradition endures, fueled by a desperate hope that one day, someone might break the cycle of death that hangs over them all. And that's where you, dear player, come in.

Dedicated Accessibility Menu

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 includes a dedicated accessibility menu, which is always a promising sign. Let's be totally up-front: there are a few things we hope to see in future updates – but those things aside, we were happy to see a relatively high baseline for accessibility, with the clear foundations in place to improve the game's accessibility over time.

Visual Accessibility

The game includes colorblind mode settings to help players with various forms of color vision deficiency. These settings can be found in the dedicated accessibility menu, making them easy to locate.

Camera controls are also customizable, with options to adjust camera shake and camera movement sensitivity. These settings can be particularly helpful for players who experience motion sickness or who find excessive camera movement disorienting during gameplay.

The UI is generally clear and informative, with a high contrast between text and backgrounds in most menus. However, it's worth noting that text size options appear to be somewhat limited, which could present challenges for players with limited vision.

Control Flexibility

One of the most noteworthy accessibility features is the automatic Quick-Time Event (QTE) setting. This option allows players to automate the timing-based button presses that occur during special attacks, making these powerful moves accessible to players who might struggle with rapid or precisely timed inputs.

However, it's important to note that parrying and dodging—crucial defensive mechanics in the game's combat system—cannot be set to automatic. These elements require fairly precise timing and could present a challenge for players with certain motor limitations. However, the game does offer three difficulty settings that adjust the timing windows for these mechanics, making them more forgiving on lower difficulties. The difficulty settings are:

1. Story: The easiest mode, featuring generous dodge and parry windows, reduced enemy damage, and generally more forgiving gameplay. This setting is ideal for players who prioritize the narrative experience or who need more time to react during combat.
2. Expeditioner: The standard difficulty that represents the developers' intended challenge level.
3. Expert: A more challenging mode with stricter timing windows and increased enemy damage.

Given the foundation for automated QTEs is already present in the game, we have hope that a future update makes this support more ubiquitous throughout the game's mechanics. Whenever that support arrives, we'll update this article – and the game's page on AbleToPlay – accordingly.

The control mapping system allows for customization, with separate menu options for keyboard, mouse, and controller inputs. This flexibility enables players to create a control scheme that better suits their individual needs and preferences, and various adaptive controllers and alternative input devices are supported.

Auditory Accessibility

For players with hearing loss, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sadly falls short of being fully accessible. While we’re grateful that the game offers subtitles at launch—a genuine step towards accessibility—it misses the mark in both the quality of those subtitles and in broader audio accessibility.

The game’s combat system heavily relies on audio cues for dodging and parrying, without any corresponding visual indicators. This presents a significant challenge for players who are Deaf or hard of hearing, even with the Quick Time Event (QTE) toggle enabled—which, regrettably, only applies to attacking, not to dodging or parrying—leaving a critical gap in accessibility.

The subtitles themselves, while present, are difficult to read. They appear as pure white text against a frosted background rather than a solid black one, and are oddly positioned halfway up the cutscene box, disrupting readability. The speaker indicators are italicized, adding to the visual strain. Players may also encounter lip-syncing inconsistencies—characters will speak while subtitles lag behind, or at times remain entirely blank.

Additionally, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lacks helpful audio context or captioned descriptions, such as [coughing] or [explosion in the distance], which are vital for players with hearing loss to fully understand and immerse themselves in the game's otherwise meticulously designed environments. These descriptions not only enhance comprehension but also ensure players aren't left confused or excluded from important narrative and environmental cues. And with a story packed full of unexpected surprises and nuance, communicating fine-grained details can be the difference between a twist making sense or not.

That said, the inclusion of any subtitles at all is a real and meaningful win for accessibility, and we view these audio shortcomings as fixable. We sincerely hope that Sandfall Interactive will consider addressing these issues in a future patch, as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a truly painterly experience that deserves to be enjoyed by an even wider audience.

Cognitive Accessibility

From a cognitive accessibility standpoint, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers a well-paced tutorial that introduces gameplay mechanics gradually. The game's objective tracking is clear, with visible markers indicating quest locations and targets.

The narrative, while dealing with complex themes of mortality and sacrifice, is presented in a straightforward, non-gratuitous manner that's easy to follow and enjoy. Characters are very distinct and memorable, which helps players keep track of who's who throughout the story. Especially for a game with an ensemble cast, and with notable characters and twists in the story to follow, we felt the game's pacing was successful at being inherently accessible by design.

The game does include some puzzle elements and strategic combat sections that require planning, but the varying difficulty options help make these aspects more manageable for players who might find complex problem-solving challenging. Furthermore, you can change the difficulty of the game at any time, meaning you can fine-tune your experience without lengthily loading screens or full reboots.

What Could Be Better?

First and foremost, we have to give massive credit to Sandfall Interactive. What they achieved with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as their studio's debut title is nothing short of miraculous, especially for a smaller development team, and we loved seeing that strong foundations for accessibility support were present on day-1.

So, what could take this incredible game even further?

Subtitle backgrounds could be improved for clarity. The game's visuals are already stunning – we wouldn't mind fully opaque black backgrounds and some text scaling options, to ensure the incredible dialogue can be enjoyed by more players who are Deaf, hard-of-hearing, or have limited vision.

We love the QTE automation for offensive moves, but wish this same super thoughtful consideration was offered for defensive moves like parries. Even if tucked away behind a setting, so as to not imply the functionality is optional by design, we'd love this support be provided for gamers with mobility needs.

The Expedition's Just Getting Started

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 represents an incredible first effort in accessibility from a debut studio. Its dedicated accessibility menu, difficulty options, and QTE automation demonstrate that Sandfall Interactive not only considered accessibility deeply throughout development, but also sought ways to innovate in providing assistive support to players.

The most important take-away for us is that the foundations are in place for the game to achieve accessibility greatness. Turn-based games have inherent accessibility advantages by design, and when combined with one of the best stories we've experienced in the last decade of gaming, we can't help but feel the game is one or two accessibility patches away from a comprehensive GOTY.

For RPG fans seeking a fresh experience with a unique combat system, an amazing story, and an all-star cast of voice actors, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers an adventure worth exploring.

As Sandfall Interactive continues to grow as a studio, we're hopeful they'll build upon this foundation and implement even more comprehensive accessibility features in future titles.

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