Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Spiritfarer and Saying Goodbye
Before we start dear reader, two things. First, this piece contains story spoilers for Spiritfarer (through part 1) and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (through part 2), though I would almost say in a way that should make you more intrigued to play them, but YMMV as always. Second, I need to be clear - I really do not like personal essays all that much. I would usually go into reading a piece wanting to know about the experience, not you as the writer. That said, this is quite a self indulgent piece, as much about me getting these words down on a page, as it is about the focal point games. So I guess, I'm sorry. But, also, I'm not. I suppose I understand the impulse a little better now.
Part 1 - Spiritfarer, and The Role of Caregiver
On New Years Eve 2024, I broke down. For the first time in a long time, I could no longer contain the emotion. The turmoil of the last several years had reached fever pitch in me, and with the knowledge that this Christmas just gone was almost assuredly my Mum's last with us, the overwhelming grief just crushed me. She was still with us, but... but. She should have been still with us for another 30 years, not being taken by disease before she could see her 60th birthday.
My first week back at work for the year was... messy. Prescient, I suppose, as the Saturday morning after that first week, after a 3rd ambulance visit in as many weeks, I was told my Mum may have potentially weeks or days left to live, given her rapidly deteriorating condition, and would require 24 hour care. What followed was a whirlwind 50 days of staying with her nearly all day every day, then a couple of months of chemotherapy and care, a few weeks of somewhat OK time, then, the inevitable.
In that whirlwind of the initial weeks was a lot of hectic nights, heightened fear and other emotions, and a crash course in personal palliative care. While my Mum slept, family visits abated but still sleep would not come for me, I turned to my forever refuge in video games. Knowing that Spiritfarer was all about helping ferry restless spirits through to the afterlife, I'd deliberately left it aside to play “when the time was right" - if this time wasn't that, I don't know when would have been.
It hit about as you would expect, but in other ways shocked me quite unexpectedly. I have no doubt different individual stories hit harder for different people, depending on life experience. For me, Astrid, Gwen and Gustav were the most endearing. Stanley definitely was a heart breaker.
I was surprised at my reaction to how Atul’s journey ended - I was actually mad. For each of the characters, there's a big moment where you take them to the gate, they say some final words, a hug is shared, and then they depart. Atul, being someone who was there from essentially the beginning, breaks from this pattern - slipping out in the middle of the night to leave on his own. I get why he left, but it hurt that he didn’t let me help him through. He had said his goodbye in his way, but it caught me off guard. My lack of control in that situation stung, which was obviously the point. We don't choose when the final moment comes - not for ourselves, and certainly not for others.
Throughout the middle of the game in particular, I started to get a bit fatigued with the loop the game sets you in. You are constantly zig-zagging across the world, collecting this and that, visiting places just because, forever planting, refining, capturing and combining a menagerie of items and ingredients on timers that aren't long, but aren't always short either. Sometimes you feel the constant pull of needing to tick things off a never ending list; other times you are standing and waiting, with nothing to do until there is something to do. The tedium is draining, sometimes.
Caring for another person in the end stages is exactly like this. You need to make sure you have all the drugs and food and other supplies you need. There are constant changes that you need to react to with new solutions required each time, with the right thing sometimes only found through trial and error. And sometimes, all you can do is sit and wait, until the next meal, the next morphine dose, the next emergency. The tedium is draining, sometimes.
I'm often a completionist when it comes to checklist style games in particular, as it always gives me this feeling of fully being finished with an experience, where I feel comfortable putting it down, ready to move on. I didn't, or maybe couldn't, do that with Spiritfarer. I left Buck, Jackie and Daria behind, as I headed to the gate for the final crossing. I’m not sure if you can help all of them pass through - I suspected Jackie in particular maybe not, as it feels like she’s more there for you, not the other way around - but it felt thematically right to leave some things unfinished.
Life is like that, I think. You don’t get to do everything you want to do. The world continues on - people will continue to grow and change, art will still be made, there is going to be things you would have liked to experience that you will not be around for. It felt… melancholic, but accepting? I don’t fully know.
That feeling has borne out to be a hard truth. Through the chemo, my Mum binged the entirety of the Karate Kid show on Netflix. I don't know if she knew that it was even a thing, but every time I see ads for the Karate Kid: Legends movie, I can't help but think about how she probably would have really enjoyed it, yet will never get the chance to see it.
When I got the call from my Mum at 1:57am on the Tuesday morning after Mothers Day, I think I knew. The following days in hospital, then the week at home for the final stages of care, are seared into my memory thanks to going over so many parts of it over, and over. The inability for the hospital to get pain and nausea under control. The rapid breakdown of ability to communicate. The last physical act Mum performed being briefly lifting her left arm up to hug me. The tear forming in Mum’s eye after I'd poured my heart out to her, despite her having not been conscious for 2 days, confirming in my heart that she'd heard me, just hours before she passed.
Interlude - Loddlenaut, A Mortician's Tale, and The End
The time between the passing and the funeral are... somewhat more fuzzy. More family. More organizing, but for different things this time. More questions, reflections, emotions.
The days were exhausting. After a few days of the end, Loddlenaut was designed to be a pure, simple, low stakes brief escape. Cleaning up a small world, getting a few upgrades, a light story about corporate failure in a natural environment. All was great until I hit the end, and I had to leave. It was done, it was final. I'd had the experience. There was no more. There will be no more.
The night before the funeral might seem like a particularly odd time to play A Mortician's Tale. It was surprisingly grounding, however, thanks to it's death positive and informative experience. A Mortician's Tale is extremely respectful of a person in their passing as well as their families, and with Mum being cremated, it kind of filled in a logic gap for me in the how behind it all. Understanding something gives me something to hold onto, a fact based approach that feels... safe, comforting. These two experiences - as well as what came before, and what comes after - are going to be forever tied to this time, but I'm glad they were there when I needed them.
Part 2 - Clair Obscur Expedition 33, and What Comes After
I didn't know how I would feel, when the time came. Turns out, you can't predict it. No matter how much you think you know, how much you plan or research, or how much people tell you, the absolute emotional overwhelm is unlike anything else.
I felt… disconcertingly calm, in the moment. I had watched my Mum suffer for so long, and now? There was nothing. No struggling to breath. No pain. Just... silence.
Even knowing the premise, it is surprising just how much Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is explicitly about death and grief. Across its main story threads, the weaving in of each of the party members personal stories, and even the main battle mechanics, dealing with death is pervasive across Lumière and The Continent.
Sophie's Gomage, while obviously intended to evoke an emotional reaction and give you a driving force behind wanting to see Gustave and the others succeed, was where the first tears fell for me. I don't know if I would have noticed it had I not been thinking so explicitly about death for the past 6 months, but the nuance with which Sandfall Interactive convey meaning in its character moments starts incredibly strong from this opening prologue. Sophie is at peace with what is to come, and has accepted her end. But. In those final moments, when she looks at Gustave, a whole world of emotion flashes across her face. Shock. Remorse. Regret. Fear.
There were a lot of times in my Mums life when she didn't want to be here anymore. There were times when she had had enough. Enough of the pain and the nausea and the pills and the forever restless sleep. But, she also wanted to be around, for as long as she could, for her children. The human experience is full of contradiction, I guess.
In Mums final hospital visit, when she had a moment of clarity between the vomiting and sleeping, she looked at me, and I knew she knew what was coming. She said to me, "I'm not scared... but I'm scared."
You can do everything you can to prepare for the end. Yet, in that one, fleeting moment, the unknown and unknowable truly swallows you whole.
Death follows the story of Clair Obscur at every turn. After an initial horrific landing on The Continent and a harrowing lonely experience for Gustave, Act 1 allows us to take a breath. We spend some time being distracted with Gestrals and Esquie, only for the act's finale to rip our hearts open once more.
It's through act 2 that we see a group of people go through the very real, lengthy and difficult grieving process of losing their friend and adopted family member. As we're passing through the Forgotten Battlefield, Maelle's breakdown strikes at a deep, unshakeable truth of all this. How are we supposed to deal with all of this death? To have someone with us, who was such a stark part of our lives, just... gone?
The tragedy behind Sciel’s unbearable loss, Monoco’s throughline with Noco, even Lune’s retreat into the seeking of truth and knowledge, are all borne from the constant enveloping of an ever present constant in all our lives.
Finally, we reach the monolith, and with it the Paintress.
I have spent my entire adult life doing what I could to care for my mother. Whether it was trying to help her see a way through a mental health struggle, help with getting places and encouragement to do things, or more recently going through every step of the process from initial scans all the way up to being by her beside in the final hours, I was my Mums constant. Even when our relationship was complicated by rifts between us, I did everything I could.
Verso's relationship with his mother is... complex. Being an indestructible shadow recreation of a real son solely for the purpose of alleviating grief sure comes with a lot of baggage, but even through all of that, Verso's sole aim in life when we meet him is to defeat the Paintress. Not because of the pain she has caused, though. It's to save her. From herself.
I didn't really know how to deal with my mums first suicide attempt. I would say it was “because I was only 18", but I don't know how I would deal with that type of thing even today, to be honest. But from every moment onwards from that first stay in our hospital's psychiatric ward, I felt that responsibility. That need to protect her as best I could from the worst of it. Verso wasn't alone in failing at that sometimes, over the years. But that path needed to be followed, through the the very end.
This will come as no surprise, but video games have fit just about every emotional slot I've needed in my life. A place to relax and disconnect, or to spend time with friends. A place to find profound stories that shake my core and guide my worldview. And yes, as an escape. But also, importantly, to work through complex thoughts and emotions. Sometimes, life is just difficult to deal with.
Once the ending(s) of Clair Obscur come around and the full picture of the story has come into focus, we've come to acknowledge the dangers in Aline's approach to escapism. Renoir is heavily flawed in his logic and methods, but trying to pull his wife back to reality is a noble one. The danger of escapism comes when you fall too deep in, and lose your sense of reality in the process.
Much digital ink - particularly across the game's main reddit - has been spilt debating which of the two endings is "good" and which is "bad". Choosing Verso means closure of a sort and a path forward to healing, however this comes at the cost of genocide. Maelle's ending on the other hand saves an entire world of people from collapsing, however her family and self remain fractured, doomed to an end of deterioration and hiding from hard truth.
These endings are framed as absolutist in their views - individualist VS collectivist approaches to what futures are possible. Of course in reality, there are many other possibilities - Verso can learn to heal, move on and find happiness in a new life, and Maelle could leave and return to the painting at any time. But this is the story we have, with only these options available to us.
I see both endings as both the good and the bad endings. They have aspects that speak to us as the audience, with differing messages, and warnings, depending on the path that we choose. On a logical level, I could not make Verso's choice. The suffering of a few people - even gods - does not justify the destruction of an entire world full of thinking, feeling, living beings. Emotionally however, I yearn for his position - a release from the struggle, to have finished with the grief and pain.
But that's not what life is, not for us. We must take the lessons of the story as a whole, both endings included. Dealing with grief is necessary. But, grief can't come at the cost of life. We all face hardship, pain, and loss. It is OK to disengage, for a while - but not forever. I scoured every corner of The Continent - defeated every adversary, collected every item, obtained every trophy - but, for now at least, I am resisting the urge to start a new game plus and do it all again. To do so would be against what this experience has been telling me for the last 80 hours of game time.
You can not remain absorbed in art forever, lest your real self become a shell that will simply wither and die. It is important to face reality in all its ugliness, deal with the hardest things you will ever endure, and move forward.
Tomorrow Comes.