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You should play this game, regardless of how much time I spend dwelling on its mistakes in this review. Despite the … uh … let’s go with unwieldy name (“Clair Obscur” just means “light dark” in French, which is not better) this is a smart, tremendously well put-together game with a great story and impressive game mechanics that stumbles in an equally impressive fashion at the end. It’s turn-based, which is normally a sign for me to stay far away from a game, but it manages to throw in a few mechanics that depend on timing and skill anyway– your characters can parry or dodge attacks and there are a couple of other special attacks that you can avoid in specific ways as well. Dodge everything and you won’t take any damage; parrying successfully can lead to automatic counter-attacks. If people haven’t started doing no-damage or even no-attack runs on this game yet, they will be soon.

But the most impressive thing about Expedition 33 is its story, and I’m not telling you a damn thing about it other than the game is set in a vaguely post-apocalyptic France, except it’s not, and even the reason it’s not really set in post-apocalyptic France is a whopper of a spoiler, so I’m not going to say anything about it. Usually when a game is set specifically in a non-English-speaking culture I’ll do the audio in that language, but there are a couple of big names in the English voice acting team and I’d recommend you stick with that.

There were at least two times in this game where story developments knocked me flat on my ass. Prior to playing this, the most jaw-dropping moment I’d ever encountered in a video game’s story was the “would you kindly” moment in Bioshock, which came out in 2007. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, find something that can play Bioshock and get on that. Right now.)

At any rate, the Bioshock moment held a record for 18 years. The first moment in Expedition 33 held its record until the second moment. The game’s story is going to rip your heart out and stomp on it, more than once. Be prepared for that.

On a technical level, it’s one of the best-looking games I’ve ever played, particularly in its renditions of the game’s people. Everyone looks great, and the facial expressions especially are masterfully done. There’s a moment in the final battle where I think the game really wants you to notice someone having second thoughts without drawing direct attention to it, and it’s just incredibly well-done. The characters are memorable, and Esquie, who is a giant sentient balloon-thing who basically acts as transportation for your group, is probably the most adorable character I’ve ever seen in a video game before.

Here’s the problem, though: The game has three acts, and the story is effectively over at the end of Act 2. All you have to do at that point is go beat the main boss, and the game tells you exactly where to go to find that person. You are probably already leveled up enough to be able to get the job done, too. But there is a huge amount of content left– you’re no more than 50% of the way through the available locations and the handful of collection objectives the game has cannot be completed before the end of Act 2. The problem is, with no story left to get you to go anywhere, you’re either just grinding until you get bored or kind of flailing about because suddenly most of the “new” areas are way too tough for you. And that’s a damn shame. I ended up beating the game because I didn’t want to play anymore, and that’s not how this game should have ended. On top of that, because of the amount of extra stuff I’d done and some fiddling with optimizing my characters, when I finally got to the final boss I beat the shit out of him because he was scaled to be able to fight him right after completing Act 2. The climactic battle of this great game was over in no time because I was so overpowered– and had I maxed out my character’s available levels (I wasn’t even close) it would have been so much worse. I hadn’t even found the best available weapons for two of my five, and the ones I had weren’t fully leveled up. I never even found the materials necessary to hit max level on weapons, and beating the boss before that happens is nuts.

The pacing in this game is really unforgivable, and it’s amazing to me that no one caught it in play testing. All they would have had to do is move some of the major story beats back a bit, or given Esquie the ability to fly earlier in the game– he gets it automatically at the end of Act 2, but again, if you want, the game is effectively over at that point. And it’s a damn shame to be thinking that a game is a shoo-in for Game of the Year for the first two acts and then beat it because you’re bored five or six hours later.

So yeah: mostly successful, and hugely successful at what it’s good at, but with that one huge caveat you should be aware of. Play it anyway.

The TL;DR version: perfectly cromulent.

The slightly longer version: The Last Faith is a mix of my two favorite genres, as a Soulslike and a Metroidvania, of much the same ilk as Blasphemous and Blasphemous II, with which it also shares a weirdly religious background, a relatively incomprehensible story, and pixelated art design. And, to be completely honest, I could end this review right here by saying that if you liked Blasphemous II, you should pick this up, and expect a game that is about 85% as good. Which is a compliment! Both of those were good games. This is not quite as good– it’s easier, for starters, and it’s a little too fond of instadeath spikes in obnoxious locations (although part of that was my fault, for not figuring out a way across an obstacle in a really annoying place) and the graphics aren’t as good. Your inventory can be really rough, for example:

Okay, a few of those are obviously guns, but if I told you that the item that’s highlighted is a grenade launcher, more or less, would you have any idea? Can you tell that the item next to it is a bow? What about the one above that? Or the one to the left of what is pretty clearly a minigun?

The spell icons aren’t super clear either, and this isn’t the worst example of the inventory screen, but you get the idea. I don’t complain about graphics often, but even for something with retro graphics this game can be pretty muddy. Combat is excellent and the variety of weapons available is pretty good– superior to both Blasphemous games, so long as we’re making comparisons, although I never really got into the guns very much and I’m not convinced a gun build is really viable since bullets are limited. Control is snappy and sharp, though, especially on some of the later bosses where dodging a barrage of lightning bolts is going to depend on near-pixel-perfect positioning (say that four times fast) and without good controls that would have been hellaciously annoying and frankly a little unfair. Fair is a critical component of a good Soulslike, of course: if you can find lots of videos of people beating a boss without being hit when you can’t get a quarter of the way through its health bar without getting melted, chances are it’s a pretty good Soulslike. Soulslikes love bosses who are hard until you figure them out and then become trivial. This game does that quite well.

One slightly less fortunate aspect of Soulslikes that it brings with it is super obscure side quests, unfortunately, including one that I wasn’t able to finish because it just abruptly became unavailable on me. I was two achievements away from Platinum on this game; one of them was for that side quest and another was for fifty parries, a mechanic I never used, as this is very much a dodge-and-jump game and if I was standing still and close enough to parry something that was attacking me I was doing it wrong. I’m probably not going to do another playthrough just to collect those two trophies and the Platinum. I might, you never know, but probably not.

But yeah– we’ll call it an 8/10, easily, and at $24.99 for full price for about a 25-30 hour game depending on your skill level and willingness to do some farming (progression was pretty quick one way or another, although I don’t think I actually lost any … uh … nycrux, whatever that is, to deaths during the game, and if you’re dying a lot YMMV) you’re getting pretty good value for your money if you like these genres. I finished the game at 98% completion before hitting the final boss and I assume that last 2% is probably related to the quest I missed as I’m pretty damn sure I hit the whole map.

Check it out.