This article contains potential spoilers for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
We can’t hide from death even though our culture can often be accused of trying to do so. Our dreams of trans-humanism, systematic acceptance of nursing homes, and transition to “celebrations of life” rather than funerals do offer some validity to that claim. However, we can overestimate the effect that any of these trends and tendencies have on obscuring our view of the Reaper and his trusty scythe.
For the simple and obvious fact is that we humans just can’t sweep death under the rug. There is no running from it in the end—and neither can we hide ourselves from it while we live. Naturally then, works of art will deal directly with this fact, no matter how death-shy our culture may seem.
In the spring of 2025, a small French video game company named Sandfall Interactive launched their first game. With its incredible cast of characters, stunning design and artwork, captivating story, and masterful soundtrack, it made quite a splash in the gaming world. It not only won “Game of the Year” at the 2025 Game Awards, but also set a record for most awards won. But perhaps nowhere did it stand out more than in its extended reflection on death and grief, and its willingness to leave players deeply moved and uncomfortable in the end.
Death is always brutal. Death is always violent. There is no glossing over this reality.
The game’s title, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, points to the duality of its themes. Similar to the Italian term chiaroscuro, the French term clair obscur—which literally translates to “light dark”—refers to works of art that utilize a strong contrast and interplay between light and darkness, creating an emotionally rich and dynamic visual. The light and darkness not only contrast each other, but also complement one another. The light shines brighter and the dark weighs heavier due precisely to the presence of their opposite extremes.
One of the game’s primary themes is grief. Each character of the main protagonist family portrays a different expression of coping with loss. Few of their expressions (if any) are healthy, but they’re all realistic. Midway through the story, one of the protagonists, Maelle, suffers an immense loss and becomes overwhelmed by the death that surrounds her team wherever they go. In a conversation with an immortal character named Verso, she laments death’s omnipresence:
Verso: “Hey, you holding up? We’re almost there.”
Maelle: “Holding up? Everywhere we go, just death, death, and more death. Everywhere we go, just death. I just—I don’t want to see that anymore.”
Verso: “Look Maelle, it—”
Maelle: “I thought you would understand. You said you spent your immortality burying the people around you. Doesn’t any of this bother you?”
Maelle knew she would be facing death. Though young, she was anything but naïve. She set out on Expedition 33 to fight deadly enemies (known as nevrons) in an effort to stop a cycle of death called the Gommage, which kills the world’s oldest citizens each year. With every passing year, the age limit has decreased by one, and now sits at 33.
Each year, the Gommage erases the oldest citizens, who gently dissolve into a wisp of flowers. It’s even celebrated with a festival and flowers, eerily echoing our celebrations of life. Maelle has witnessed this annual killing 16 times (assuming she was an observant infant). In one sense, she is used to death. But now, she is faced with a reality check.
Is she used to it? Can she, or anyone, ever be used to it? Having left the general comfort and safety of her city of Lumière, she is faced with these tough questions. Sure, the effect of death hasn’t changed, but the appearance of death has. As if all this time, the Reaper was wearing a colorful outfit and a friendly mask, only to now reveal himself as he really is: Death unmasked. Maelle discuss this change with her adoptive guardian Gustave:
Maelle: “Death out here’s not like death in Lumière, is it? I—uh, I thought I was used to losing people…But not—not like that—on the beach…that man…”
Gustave: “Yeah…yeah, I know…Nevrons, we were prepared for, but not…And now we finally found other survivors and it’s…You know that’s…that’s the insidious thing about the Gommage. It’s… predictable. Almost gentle. It makes Lumière complacent and accepting but…The Gommage is equally violent and death…Death is just as final.”
Once more, the Gommage echoes our culture’s attempt to pacify our hearts to the idea of death. But this is a failed expedition, if there ever was one. Death is always brutal. Death is always violent. There is no glossing over this reality.
Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, put it like this:
Death is indeed a fearful piece of brutality: there is no sense pretending otherwise. It is brutal not only as a physical event, but far more so psychically: a human being is torn away from us, and what remains is the icy stillness of death. There no longer exists any hope of the relationship, for all the bridges have been smashed at one blow. 1
If the nature of death is such, it is only natural that grief can be just as brutal. And this is what the end of Clair Obscur makes players confront. Players are faced with a sharp dichotomy of two cruel choices. The hope for escaping such a tragic end is beyond their control. Maelle is living in two worlds, the “real” world and a “fantasy” painted canvas world that is only maintained by a fragment of her late brother’s enslaved soul.
In the painted world, she and her mother seek refuge and escape from the grief of her brother’s death by clinging to a “painted” but still-living version of him. But that version of her brother longs to protect his sister by destroying the canvas world so that Maelle will not cling to this fantasy life to which she is so understandably drawn.
No matter which option and ending the player chooses, there will be grief, pain, loss, and death. Even the ending that enables a resurrection of some beloved characters comes at the expense of Maelle’s life in the real world, the loss of her brother’s freedom, and the slow, inescapable fading of the canvas world. Death simply cannot be defeated in either world.
The grief in both scenarios is almost impossible to bear. And in that grief, we taste the lament that C.S. Lewis expressed in A Grief of Observed:
I look up at the night sky. Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?
Yes Lewis. Yes, it is. The sheer unnaturalness of human death astounds us. The visceral pain and shock and grief that we experience is appropriate. The anger, the refusal to accept, and the insatiable desire to hold on are a natural response. As Tim Keller observed:
To say, “Oh, death is just natural,” is to harden and perhaps kill a part of your heart’s hope that makes you human. We know deep down that we are not like trees. We are not like grass. We were created to last. We don’t want to be ephemeral, to be inconsequential. We don’t want to just be a wave upon the sand. The deepest desires of our hearts are for love that lasts. 2
This desire ought not to be ignored. In fact, it ought to be awakened. Clair Obscur helps us do just that. For all within the game is not obscur. It is not all darkness. The gameplay, the stunning artwork, the captivatingly creative sub-creation and world-building, the award-winning classical soundtrack, the deeply relatable characters, the high virtues displayed and encouraged—these are all utterly beautiful. This is a playable work of art, philosophy, and storytelling. Literary gaming, if you will. Not all video games are created equal.
The ending’s tragedy is heightened by the story’s beauty and goodness, and is that not a reflection of every human life? No matter how much pain, grief, sadness, failure, or loss we experience, there is, by the nature of what we are, as Keller put it, “an irreducible glory and significance about every single human being.” 3 This is the tragedy of death, and its horror. The light of human life only heightens the darkness of death.
In a way, that is exactly where Clair Obscur leaves us. Ultimately, even if “escape” is chosen, it is costly and fleeting. The light of Clair Obscur’s two worlds is found in the goodness and beauty of their characters, but not in hope. Hope, at best, is an illusion. It simply is not powerful enough to ever defeat the great enemy of death. Hence, the story is a tragedy. And tragedies have a way of lingering with us as few other stories can. Once more, this stems in part from an “ought-not-ness.” The story shouldn’t have ended like this. We simply can’t escape that feeling, even if we loved the ending from a literary perspective, because deep down, we know that our stories shouldn’t end like that.
But that is where the light of Christ shines through with illumination powerful enough to overwhelm even the deep darkness of death itself. The defeat of death by Jesus Christ is a victory of such splendor and grandeur and glory that we simply cannot overstate it. The depth of the grief found in loss is conquered only by the hope found in the victory at the Cross.
Thus, Paul writes:
But when this perishable will have put on the imperishable, and this mortal will have put on immortality, then will come about the saying that is written, “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law; but thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (I Corinthians 15:55-57, NASB 1995)
We can grieve. In fact, we should. There is indeed an imperishable to come, but for now, we are bound within the perishable. Thus, grief is a proper response to death and loss. Nevertheless, there is a cycle of death that has been broken. There is a great enemy who has been defeated. There is a tomb that is empty and a resurrection that will last.
Therefore, for those who believe in Christ, there is the possibility to not only grieve, but to grieve with hope (I Thessalonians 4:13). For tomorrow will come. The sun will rise again. This world may be fading, but even now, a new creation is being made. That is the story of Christianity, and works of art like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 are signposts pointing us towards that great reality.
- C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections (New York: Vintage, 1965), 314; Quoted in: Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, (New York, NY: Viking, 2016), 163 ↩︎
- Timothy Keller, On Death, (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2020), 42 ↩︎
- Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical, (New York, NY: Viking, 2016), 139 ↩︎
