I recently picked up and started playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’ve been really enjoying it so far. It’s the French-est thing I’ve ever seen or experienced, which is novel to me. Like, it’s aggressively French. The Eiffel Tower, mimes, French curse words, berets… Add some sexually aggressive men and some wine and you’d basically be in Paris. The visuals are beautiful. The combat system is the most engaging turn-based system I’ve played since The Legend of Dragoon. The story, at least from what I’ve seen so far, is incredibly interesting. I do find myself a bit frustrated every time I pick up the controller, however.
I’ll be the first to admit, I’m no expert navigator. I use my GPS to get around pretty much everywhere outside of the few places I frequent in my area. I disassociate and pretend to pay attention to directions that are given to me like they aren’t basically in a foreign language. I do my best to learn routes and landmarks and I get by okay. However in video games I typically don’t have that problem. Typically if there’s a free roam element to games there is an accompanying mini map or map screen that allows you to set waypoints to follow. It has become so ubiquitous that I now rarely even think about it. I just press the menu button, find my destination, and go. So when I’m playing this fun new game which has themes of adventure and exploration, I feel a little frustrated when I roam around areas and get completely lost.
All that Expedition 33 gives you for navigation is a compass. You are told a general direction to head and sent off to figure it out. In the overworld you’re given a map to look at, albeit rather devoid of details. Why is this a problem? I like to complete games. It’s my thing. It’s hard to complete an open world game when you can get easily turned around and have very little idea of which paths that you’ve already explored. Worse than that, though, is that I feel punished for checking out cool features in levels. If I spend a bit of time looking at something neat I can end up turned around entirely. I’m almost lucky in that regard, though.
I’m convinced my wife would circle her own ass until she collapsed into a black hole if the GPS satellites all went offline one day. She’s an intelligent, talented, wonderful woman, but she couldn’t navigate her way down a one way street. Take a person like her and plop her into a game like this and it would turn her off of it immediately. A lack of a navigation system almost becomes an accessibility feature at that point. And honestly I think we have hit a point where a proper map system should be expected in modern game design, like the mostly homogenized twin joystick control system for FPSs on console. It’s outdated to expect people to memorize your maps when you can make it 1000 times easier on them to give them the ability to navigate in your game world when it’s larger than a certain size. I’ve dealt with the days of mapping levels and worlds by drawing on paper in real life. I don’t want to go back to it.
I’m still enjoying Expedition 33, but I’d like it a hell of a lot more if I didn’t get lost every few minutes while I try to fully explore the levels. I enjoy the game and despite it’s flaws and peculiarities that come with being a smaller game company. It feels a lot like a game made by an ex-Ubisoft team because it is. And Ubisoft isn’t exactly known for perfection. I’ll enjoy what I have. I’ll just be a whiny baby about it until I finish the game off and nobody can stop me.
Ethan Rodgers
