Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Review (Sunwind)
✅ Played on Steam Deck OLED
🧠 Story & World
The narrative centers around a bizarre and haunting curse: every year, a mysterious entity called “The Paintress” erases everyone who has reached the age of 33. To stop her, a group of handpicked warriors - the 33rd Expedition - sets out on what seems like a doomed mission to end the cycle.
🕹️ Gameplay & Combat Mechanics
At first glance, it’s classic turn-based RPG stuff. But there’s a twist:
Timing-Based Actions: Attacks and defenses involve real-time button presses. You can perfectly parry, dodge, or enhance your attacks if you nail the timing.
I've been playing this on the Steam Deck OLED, and while the game itself is a beautiful mix of surreal visuals and reactive turn-based combat, performance out of the box isn’t ideal - especially on handheld.
The game locks itself to 30 FPS and hides most advanced settings when it detects the Deck. But here’s the good news: you can unlock full settings and fine-tune the experience for smooth gameplay.
⚙️ Quick tip: Add "steamdeck=0 %command%" to your Steam launch options to get access to full graphics settings like TSR, XCSS, and post-processing. Game-changing difference.
After testing several configurations, here’s what worked best for me:
✅ TSR: Low
✅ 30 FPS Cap
✅ Shadows/Post-Processing: Low
✅ Textures/Anti-Aliasing: Medium
❌ Turn OFF film grain, motion blur, chromatic aberration
With that setup, I got a stable 30 FPS in most areas and about 2 hours and 20 minutes of battery life. Combat (which relies heavily on timing) feels much better with stable frame pacing.
💬 If you want a full breakdown with performance comparisons and visual examples, I made a detailed video here:
🎥 https://youtu.be/kuQ4pAahCto
Overall, with a little tweaking, this game is very playable on Deck - and I imagine future patches will improve it even more.