Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has hit the gaming world by storm. This fantastical turn-based RPG racked up critical acclaim on its way to being one of the most highly-rated turn-based games in recent years. First impressions suggest an impressive graphical effort too, packing great art and ray tracing… but with the often heavy Unreal Engine 5 at its core, exactly how well does Expedition 33 stick the landing on current-gen consoles?
Expedition 33 is often very beautiful. It does a particularly great job of presenting new and interesting environments for the player to explore. Some of these are more conventional: the game opens in a crowded 19th-century city, for instance. But the game trends towards more and more fantastical locales as it progresses, including coralline environments that are underwater in every sense but literally, and crimson forests populated by mechanical wooden dolls. Each area is visually distinct, with key visual signatures that keep it memorable.
Key to Expedition 33’s environmental rendering is the trifecta of key Unreal Engine 5 rendering features: Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps. Lumen GI helps to provide a good sense of indirect diffuse lighting, something it generally achieves – despite some variability in quality. Environments are generally captured in sufficient detail and look handsome, but some smaller-scale elements can feel unattached from their environments. Some of these quibbles might have been resolved with the triangle-based hardware Lumen, but here we’re just seeing its SDF-based software variety.
The game’s reflections also get the Lumen treatment, though most of the game’s areas are rough and foliage-covered, and therefore don’t receive much of a boost from the technique. On smooth surfaces though, you can kind of make out the blobby SDF geometry representations. Generally the game keeps its reflections a little more diffused, so these limitations aren’t very noticeable.