Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - We Played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: March 3, 2025

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What's up everybody? Welcome to the kind of funny games cast for Monday, March 3rd, 2025. I want to host Greg Miller alongside the Hispanic heartthrob, Texas tree, Latino heat, clicking heads and ripping them to shreds. The globe trotting headshot and three point shooting root and toot and sick at home from Twitch.com. Andy Cortez. Hello, Greg. Hello, hello blessing. Hello, Barrett. Great to see you all. Can you say how to the audience? Hello, audience. How are you all doing? I'm more worried about you, Andy.

How are you doing? You've been giving me the updates. You had to leave. You know, you left work early last week, but you still came through and you clicked heads on the Monster Hunter stream with me and Mike for 12 hours.

We love you for that. Thank you so much. But then it was up and down all weekend. I sent you a great Instagram message from the farmer's market, and I didn't get a response there. That's I know you're sick. So I just wanted to make sure you're okay.

Well, I mean, I also kind of wanted to save it for content. I saw I haven't even opened that message. I'm feeling great. It's a good one. It's a good one. I will lie. You know what I mean?

Should I play it right now? Sure. Play it right now, everybody knows that I'm always thinking of my employees. Of course. And so when I'm at the farmer's market, if somebody's jamming on a banjo, I got to let Andy know, man. I got to let Andy know. Greg said me a TikTok about 645.

Andy, Andy, back of the farmer's market. A lot of people talking about you, Nuzzlocking. I'm just thinking about lip locking. Not with you. Not with you. Not with you.

that'd be wrong. Leave him alone. You're wrong, right? Right. I was proud of it. Ask you for a lot of permission there. Yeah, Forms 30 under 30, a.k.a.

New York Game Awards nominated, aka Perry Poppy. It's blessing Eddie O. Ye Jr. But here's my problem with you. Yeah, I sent you at TikTok last week. I'm thinking of you at 645 in the morning. Why no response? I texted it to you.

What's messed up as I was awake? I saw I come in And you sent me a text like I think like 10 minutes later That was like I don't care That is before 7 a.m. I'm sending you this to you and Roger You need to see this.

Well it's like you know I'm a dad mode So I'm awake I'm not thinking about it And so I said that And then I like 645 I'm like I shouldn't be texting my employees TikToks I don't want to set the precedent Of like I'm going to respond to your 645 AM text

That's fair That's a great call That's a great call Yeah I meant to text you back It was a good TikTok I did like it good, thank you. Yeah. Every so often it'll go around the old social media meme rigumeral

thing or whatever, maybe a wholesome thing of like some CEOs like sign off on their emails. They'll send emails like 9.30 at night. And it's one of those things are like, by the way, I know this is outside of work hours, but this is what works for me. Respond when it works for you. And so there is, I hope that's implied, especially when I, because I'll do it where I try to schedule slacks to everybody,

but I'll do the thing where I send a slack Saturday, like two, I hope they're not looking at this going like they got her fun. I'm also not texting anybody back at 645. Oh, that's fine. No, no, no, no, no. I don't take it personally. Do you do the schedule slack thing like Andy does where he says, hey, this is Andy from the past and you're Barrett from the future. Here's these four assets. I have to set the, I have to set the sort of scene whenever I do then.

Greg, I want to bring up like how much fun I had fun playing Monster Hunter with you all. Me too, man. And how much I wanted to continue that fun on Saturday. Yeah. And then it really hit me on Saturday. day. Oh boy. It was like, I slept for like legitimately probably over 20 hours. God damn, dude. Of like, wait, I woke up at 9 a.m. went back to bed, woke up probably around 7 p.m. Went back to bed, woke up Sunday morning. It was just like out of it, man. It was a bad time.

But it was a good time too. I appreciate you want to talk so much about Expedition 33 that you powered through today to come in and hang out with us. Yeah, I love it. Well, we're going to get into that and more because this is the kind of funny game. cast each and every weekday on a variety of platforms. We run you through the biggest topics in video games, whether it be's previews, reviews, or conversations we need to have. If you like that, you should be watching us live on YouTube.com slash kind of funny games, Twitch.com slash kind of funny games, or listening on podcast services around the globe.

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That's a lot of content. Wow. Wow. If you got no bucks tossed away, no big deal. Of course, you can watch a lot. Like I said,

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kind of funny games daily all about rock star acquiring a brand new studio and blessie he is sick he's not faking it everybody uh after that of course you're after this you're going to get alien three as part of alien versus predator in review and after that you're getting a stream of mike and nick in the afternoon. If you're kind of funny, remember my Gregway is in the process of going up.

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Greg Miller's live show in Chicago and better help. We'll tell you about that later. And even more importantly, Greg, even more importantly, what's happening this Friday? I don't know, what's happening this Friday. Nick Gluck, episode two. Let it go. It's a whole new world we live in, baby.

Pokemon, Joto. It's a new world. That doesn't get old. I love that. I love that. It's happening. Everybody get ready for it. And so it's Johnny Ace this time going through. Is that what's happening? It's Johnny Aceh. It's the Ace Man Cummeth.

Yeah. Oh, there it is. Look, you're showing the sprites right there. Ace Man cometh, everybody. Get ready. That's right, everybody. We loved the NuzzLock so much last year. We are back to do a brand new one starting on Friday with a big marathon stream of the boys doing Nick's new NuzzLock. Come out, support that. That will only be on Twitch.tv.tv.com funny games for it right now. Of course, that's where the marathon streams play best, which is what. as we said, Friday's marathon stream was only on Twitch, but it will be uploaded to

YouTube.com slash kind of funny games this week. That's the Monster Hunter one that Andy was a part of that he gave his health for, that he gave his health for. And bless, I'm just saying, it's never too late to jump in with us. We're out there having a great time killing monsters. Come on. I mean, I would like to. All he needs is a little push.

I know he wants to. I do want, I mean, Barrett knows, right? It's just the thing of it was too many games. I was playing a pair of obscure, Expedition 33. What a bad name. There's also... Just calling Expedition 303. We got used to metaphor refauntation.

Yeah, we did. You're right, you're right, you're right. You know, I was also playing redacted with Barrett. Yeah. No, we'd say split fiction. I was playing split fiction. Yeah. I got a lot to talk about.

I got a lot of I've been doing. The hits don't stop here. That's what we do on the games cast. We cover topics of the show. Tots, tots, tots, tots, dots, tots, touch, touch. We all have been playing Claire Obscure Expedition 33. If you are unfamiliar, Steam describes it like this. lead the members of Expedition 33

on their quest to destroy the paintress so that she can never paint death again explore a world of wonders inspired by Belle Opeake, France and battle unique enemies in this turn-based RPG with real-time mechanics. The dev is Sandfall Interactive and the publisher is Kepler Interactive. We have been watching this one for quite some time

since the original debut trailers and everything else. We have had this gorgeous thing from Sanfall, gorgeous demo from Sandfall. And we were able to just, jump in to a whole bunch of hours of it. Barrett, you're on the ones and twos, of course, as you always are. But you played this whole thing, right? I played an hour and a half because, yeah, I was also dedicating any free time I could

to bless with split fiction. So didn't get too much time on the sticks here, but enough to, you know, have an impression. Blessing you've played the whole demo? I didn't, but I have played close to four hours of the game. Okay. Anya how much of this have you played? I'm probably close to three hours, around like probably 2.45, I'd say.

And then I have played, again, coming off of Monster Hunter review, everything else, I was able to get like 45 minutes in today an hour or two. And I'll start since then at the end. After 45 minutes, after an hour, I'm glad that's all I got to play of this because this game's fucking special. And I don't want to play anymore until I have review code.

I am not a JRP person. I know I have had a history with them. I loved persona four and then it's always in three. It's been hit or miss for me, obviously, since then. This is a game I could see me going all the way through for a number of different reasons. But what I played today was so goddamn impressive. Like, I mean, my notes are, again, short but glowing. But I think the biggest takeaway and I think the biggest compliment I could give from the top is,

when I was playing this game, I finally had it click in my head to what Andy is, what you are, what bear it is, but you guys get more spotlight for it of like, I gotta learn to be Perry Poppy. Like the counters feel too good in this game for me not to get this. This needs to be what I need to go do. So I am shocked by how much I like this. I hope they're able to stick the landing and go through this entire game this way. But from what we play it, holy shit, it lives up to what I've seen.

But am I wrong blessing? I agree. Okay. So I didn't finish the demo because I didn't want to play more to then take away from my like full experience with the game. Yeah. Like the more I played this, the more I found myself getting into the RPG systems. Because I think on the top level, a thing to shout out that I at first was apprehensive about, but then what's very sold on was the amount of inspirations and influences that this game has.

I've been getting ads for this game nonstop for the last like six months or so, right? Just on my social media. They know the audience. Yeah, yeah. And I'm like, I'll see like an ad on like Twitter or whatever. And it's Expedition 33 redefining the GRPGs. And I'm like, I'm like, okay, sure. I'm sure this game from a French developer

is going to redefine the GRPG genre and I'm playing it and I'm not saying it's going to redefine anything but as I'm playing it I can see the Final Fantasy I can see the near but then I can also see some of the souls and I can see like different inspirations taken from

different places that are applied in all the correct ways to where I get to the checkpoint system and the checkpoint system feels like a soul's checkpoint system where you get there you can rest and then you can also apply your skill points and stuff and I'm like all right there's weapon scaling with, depending on how I want to put my points into might or defense or,

you know, agility or whatever it is. And I am, I found myself so deep into those systems already in just a few hours I played. And I was like, I can't get too invested. Because then I'm going to, I'm going to break my heart when I have to restart this whole thing again. And we're so close. Of course, April 24th is the release date for this. And so yeah, I want to talk about that skilletry because I think that is such a big part of why I was like, oh, okay. Andy, what do you think? I'm really, really into it so far. I think narratively, it's just kind of hitting, even though I don't fully understand a whole lot of what's happening narratively. I think having Charlie Cox and the character who's, it's not Jennifer English because you meet her later on.

Jennifer English played Shadowheart in Baldur's Gate, but you end up meeting her character later on. but the other co-protagonist Loon, aka it's Loon played by Chrissy Ryder. Who I think was one of the villains in Sifu. Oh,

Oh shit. Choose the one with like the chain male thing with like that shoot throughout you. Yeah. Amazing voice performances from everybody, really. Great emotion, cool systems and God damn do those Perry's field meaty.

and they sound great. More importantly, they sound great. They look impressive. The parries are great. And then not only doing the parries, but if you don't want to parry, if you can dodge as well, that's also an option.

Having that real time action kind of built into your turn-based combat, I think just feels so active and so right. Kind of, initially, it could be a little bit overwhelming having all of these different, hold on, let me hit the top. menu in the game right now because immediately as you sort of hop into the game you're thrown a lot of lingo and jargon and most of my notes here are just writing down systems of the game so I can like we can talk about them because it is so deep the the the pictos and the uh the

there's some other word it's like okay that just means you know go with elder ring terms your talisman or you know your passives or whatever um I think you can get kind of overwhelming at the start, but it immediately kind of goes away once you get into the flow of the gameplay. And I think that's on purpose, right, because we're being tossed into a demo, a vertical slice. Like a lot, they give you a, hey, story so far, here's what's happened in the game already. Clearly we're hours into it by the time we get this. And granted, I want to point out that, you know, Blessing said he's like close to four hours. I'm close to the three hour mark, like 245, 250. And they said that it takes three plus hours to beat. So,

I'm sure we were knocking right on the door of beating this demo. It's just, yeah, Monster Hunter Man. Monster Hunter got on the way. Barrett, of course, everyone knows you as Mr. Persona. What is your take here with Expedition 33? Yeah, and this was another one. Like, every time we see this, it just feels like too ambitious of a game, especially when it was showcased at the Xbox Developer Direct, question mark, right?

that's where we saw recently. And we got to see how small that team is and we really got to see a deep dive into like how ambitious this game really is. It was one of those like, okay, this looks cool. How is it actually going to feel in practice? Are they actually going to land this thing in a way that actually like is fucking cool?

And playing only an hour and a half of this demo, I walked away being like, God damn, like I see the vision and I think they're pulling it off. so far. Whether they're able to pull it off for a full 30-hour campaign, we'll see, but at least from this demo, I walked away from it

very positive. Like, yes, I think the main kind of persona influence is more so just like the, using the face buttons to navigate your battle menus, which to me, since Persona 5 has made term-based combat

feel so active, although it's going back and forth. then also adding in the layers of like being able to parry all of the enemy attacks or dodge the enemy attacks, which is definitely inspired by Souls games, adding in the kind of like timed attacked things that is very Mario RPG coded and all this stuff. Go even further to make it feel even more active than like a persona has yet, right? which I found myself very impressed by and was constantly engaged with the battle system.

And then with the world, it's very visceral. That's the thing that really took me back with kind of the little story tidbits that we got early on where these 33-year-olds were going on their expedition for the painters and all this stuff. Seeing the early parts of this game of what they're dealing with, it's like, oh, Jesus Christ, this is such an interesting end,

kind of fucked up. up world and that's when I think I had played it before Andy had and I was telling Andy like you got to check this out because I think this world and the story is definitely for you whether the combat is or not uh you know it seems like it it is so far Andy but yeah like this is something special and I'm completely impressed of just constantly being reminded how small this team is and what they're pulling off uh and I'm excited to see the full game and yeah I'm glad I only spent an hour and a half with it because yeah I'm I'm ready to play the full thing in like a month and a half It's something I brought up during one of the presentations, I think probably after the Xbox developer direct, when, you know, the game looks so visually impressive and a lot of it is, you know, the lighting looks fantastic and everything.

But what sort of benefits them the most is having this turn-based combat system where whenever you go into combat, Barrett, I'm not sure. how well this will work right here if you can cut to like just a full screen of my feed. Oh, we got it, baby. What I want to show off real quick is just like, you know, the game looks good in action,

right? But then when you hop into combat, then they sort of set the stage for you. And it's like they have it lit in a way that's like so perfect. And it, you know, it's like you're not moving the camera in these, in these,

uh, sequences. So everything is going to look awesome here no matter what because we are kind of in control of this. And it puts you at a really big advantage from an art perspective to kind of immediately say like, well, you're not moving the camera. We don't have a roaming time of day. So things are always going to look nice and we're kind of in control that. And I, I freaking love how they're able to like kind of, it's almost like cheating in a way because other games, you know, you might have, I remember us thinking back to when Halo Infinite first showed off. And it's like, well, it's a, it's a full day, night cycle.

And there are times when the game isn't going to look great. But here they're like, no, we control this. Like the games that'll look good because we want it to in this little area. And the lighting is perfect. And all of the, you know, the amazing UI, which is very like Atlas coded. It looks so influenced by some of the best Atlas games that I've, you know, I hear Bear talk about all the time. In the live chat, yeah, Ryan says hand-place lighting will always be the best.

And one of my notes here is just drop-dead gorgeous. And I put the flex of running through this lush green forest to this dark cave and then into this red, evil light. It was like back to back to back in a 10 second. You know what I mean? I'm like, oh, man, it's really pretty out here. Oh, it's really dark and scary and dank in here. Oh, my God, it's red and horrible and evil in here. I was like, holy shit, this looks fucking amazing.

Yeah. I think even for me, one of my, one of the few critiques I had with my demo was that I think there's a lot of bloom. Yeah. Like there's like a lot of glowy effects where at first I was a bit put off, but as I played more, and I don't know if you guys got to like the second big section that's in the dental and like the second half of it. But you get to an environment that is way different than the first environment that you're in that is way more like underwater vibe.

Like you're walking and there's fucking like, you know, sea life that's flying around you and shit. And legitimately I was like, oh, okay, I'm sold. Like the fact that you can go from a super like dreamy fantasy world, like fantasy environment. that is more like, you know, foresty kind of area and then walk into something that looks equally dreamy, but still somehow, you know, just equally cool, yeah, to look at

and also so different. I was very impressed by that. Yeah, walking into this area, Bless, reminded me the time that we were doing the Nvidia sponsor stream, and I was like, always telling Greg, just walk slowly to kind of look at the vistas and let the visuals soak in, and there's an amazing moment in Dragon Age Vailgar

where you walk into the underwater area and a fucking whale is, kind of like, you know, underwater doing this cool thing and Greg just running around looting. I'm like, can you just look at the, can you just focus on the visuals because it looks so amazing. But I had the exact same vibe here where being in this underwater area, it's just so freaking cool. And I'm like, but you play the demo on PC, right, Blas? Yeah. So.

I believe we all. I think there was only PC available. Okay. Immediately when I see the bloom, I go into post processing and I go to off or like low. because post processing usually includes bloom and all sorts of like visual things to try to make the game look cooler. But that was really distracted for me as well. And it made the experience a lot nicer when I turned the post processing, post processing down to like lower. I might have to hit you up at the full game because I was in my settings like looking for a bloom off option.

Like I turned off motion blur and I was like, oh, this didn't do enough for me. But even still like I think one of the things that grew on me as well as I played through the game is how much they threw out you. both like presentationally but even within the RPG stuff where there's so many systems in this thing. Sure. Every character that you have as part of your party has their own unique system of combat that like works in different ways, right? Like we had at least in my play through, I had three characters Gustave, Loon, and

Mayel, right? And Gustave has like a charge system where the more you attack the enemy, the more you dodge, the more you parry, I believe. The higher your charge goes up and then you can use your overcharge attack at some point to deal big damage. Loon has a stain system that is element-based to where the more you do attacks Different elements

We then collect those elements And like your stain thing And certain abilities you have Will then absorb those elements Then use them to make it strong To make them stronger And then Mael has like a whole stance system That is separate from that

But the fact they're able to like Loop those in like make those character Make the combat feel unique with each character While also I think like Maintaining the overall thing of like the active combat Dodging pairing like throwing in these attacks very impressed by it. It is very fun.

And to Barrett's thing of how Persona 5 felt like it was taking turn-based combat and trying to make a bit swifter, this game feels like it's doing the natural evolution of that of, all right, we found a way to make it swift. Now how do we make turn-based combat almost feel like it's action combat? And so far it's working. Yeah, like we haven't seen like huge, a lot of people try that since like persona 5. Like, yeah, we've had Sea of Stars, like a dragon as well, has made it more active. and how this game, and it's, it's really cool to see, like, how these different teams,

big or small are trying to, like, iterate on that and try to convince the Andes of the world of, like, hey, term-based combat can be fun, it can feel active. And I think what Expedition 33 is doing so far is fucking incredible. Yeah, the thing that stood out for me about the combat is everything you just said, right? But it was the idea of, like, okay, here you can dodge. But if you want to take it to that next level, you can parry. Because pairing will get you the action points. You can actually go and use it, right?

That was super swift. and cool, but it was then obviously the X on there. So it was having to pay attention the entire time, but I then really appreciated, you know, there's these flags throughout the world from the previous expeditions. As you said, or I think the chat said, us as a whole said.

You get to, this is where you can rest and heal up. This is where you can unlock your abilities. And going into those skill trees, that was like what really, really got a hook in me. I've been like, oh, okay, I can go through and really make these characters

act the way I want. want them to act in this. Whereas with persona in the past and you know, emerging personas and you know, you unlock this new ability, you can get rid of an old ability, that kind of thing. That's similar to what we're doing here, but I felt like this gave me more of a roadmap or runway of what I was doing in a way that it felt like it gave me more control. I mean, it's closer to metaphor than its persona, I think, in that sense. Or metaphor, I think, does a similar thing of, you can kind of look down the barrel and be like, oh, this is what I'm going to build to. And I

know I can mix and match my abilities however I want to to make my party into what feels like an original creation by me. Like this game, yeah, the same thing of looking down the skill trees. And then also just looking down my stats in general because the 80's point earlier,

there's just so much as far as I got Pictos, which gives me a passive, but then it also gives me like, you know, some stat buffs. I have my actual staffs or stats that I can like,

you know, upgrade individually by putting numbers into them. And then I have my skill tree. So I'm going to have this character be very like high on might and then maybe high on luck because they have a weapon that scales with that.

But then I know they're going to do that. So I'm going to have my abilities be more, you know, taking out an entire group of enemies as opposed to one enemy at a time. I'm going to have this person heal or I'm going to have this person, you know, buff this other person. They give you so many options and let you see those options. So at least in this place we're at in the demo. And again, I had to stop myself from falling too into it.

And I had to keep reminding myself that this is not my canon play-through. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I can't let myself get lost in this play-through. Because in the four hours that I played already, I'm like, I'm into it. I'm looking at everything here. And so a quick question for you just because we're talking about, like the luminos,

the pictos and all this stuff. It sounds like none of you had trouble, like, equipping some of this stuff because I don't know if my session was just, like, it wouldn't let me, like the feedback in the menus didn't seem like it was letting me equip some of these things, like, early on.

So that was something that I was like, am I missing something here? Were you doing it from the menu, or were you trying to do it from the checkpoints? Yeah, flags. Because I think in the menu you can equip pictos, but I think to upgrade stats and equip certain abilities, you might have to be at the flag.

See, that I was doing at the flag, but I'm talking just about, like, luminas and pictos of just editing those. Like, do you have to be at the flag for that stuff? Pick those, you don't have to. Okay, yeah, it was the, that was getting a little bugged, so. And then this is the skill tree I was talking about,

which again, I loved being able to see where I was going. You're talking about, you bring a metaphor, which is a far better example of this, but even metaphor, I always felt kind of overwhelmed. Like, especially, like, over here in the chat, Prini dude says that meant, this menu is overwhelming, not the skill tree, but the one we were just looking at with all the words on it stuff.

I think it's important to show when we were playing this demo, we had one. I had one defense, one to start, right? It's not like this is where you start in the game, right? They're showing you how complex it could be. And then if you jump to the skill tree, the skill tree looked like this in the demo where it was, all right, these two are open,

these three are going to be next or whatever. So to be able look down that, figure it out, and go character by character and see who I want to build and how I want to build. I like that a lot. Yeah, the, the, the, all of those items that you were seeing are just things that you find around in the world. Those are just additive sort of, uh, things to add to your character where, you know, uh, I think one of the first ones that you get is called like the Dodger or something. Yeah.

And it mean, and your character gets more AP, uh, any time that they dodge, uh, you know, correctly or whatever. And then you can kind of find, uh, I think I have like up to five now where one of them is when an enemy is burning, you do such and such more critical damage or whatever. I think it's like 20% higher critical damage rate. And so those are all little things that you can kind of add to your character to kind of make the experience kind of feel more like your own and kind of customizable, you know?

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Betterhelp.com slash kind of funny. We're back, everybody, still talking about Claire, obscure Expedition 33. It's a good title. Say what you want about the name. It's a good title. It's a good name. I like it. Look, say what you want about the name.

It could be Outlander or fucking void land or what, like, there's just so many similar sounding games. Sure. At least this is, you know, going the extra mile and just being too many words. And we're, I think we're trying to put clear, obscure on the map, you know? This is the brand. This is the brand. I can't wait to meet Claire.

I mean, can somebody look up clear? She is the patron. Now is Claire a real person? Because I assume this is a Tom Clancy scenario. where like they're a writer or their creator? No. There's nobody named clear obscure in this game. So it must be a creator

situation. No, it is not. No. Is clear obscure the name of the world? I think it's like, Claire Obscure is the metaphor and then Expedition 33 is the refentatio. No. Yeah, I thought Claire obscure was like a, like a state of mind, a state of being, you know. We're all clear obscure.

It's so clear obscure, yeah. Of course, like I said, at the top of the show, which reminds you, this is developed by Sandfall Interactive, published by Kaplan Interactive, out April 24th, 2025, and what we didn't mention at the top, only $50 and also Xbox Game Pass day one. So it's not a bad deal out there for a game we love, and that we're not alone and loving. I really loved over at IGN.com, Will Borgers opener. It went like this. Years ago, a mentor told me that the most important part of any story is surprise.

A few years later, a writer I deeply respect wrote that perhaps the difference between good and great writing is technique. Though, even that was probably not as important as conviction. But what keeps us invested in a story is curiosity. The gap between what we know and what we want to know, the questions that drive us. Combined all three, and you tend to create something special. Each and every one of us has played a video game that grabbed us from the jump, that connected with us in some unexpected way, a game that surprised us, whose belief in itself was obvious

from the first frame. That made us want to explore. I've played a lot of video games friends, and that feeling is increasingly rare for me, especially in the AAA space. So when I tell you that Claire Obscure, Expedition 33, grabbed me by the throat from the jump

and didn't let go for a single second of the three and a half hour demo I played twice, believe me when I tell you, that's some powerful magic. That's fucking writing right there, Will. That is you writing your ass off. Great job over there. And what a great way to put what we're all talking about.

And I think, again, and perhaps the greatest show of respect from all of us were like, we didn't beat it on purpose. We could go, but we don't. You're sitting there, and I was like, in today. You know, there is a deadline on the demo I'm playing, right? Because I'm like, all right, we're alive at a little after 11. It's like 10.30 and I'm sitting there,

hemming and hawing over what skill. I'm like, this doesn't even matter. Why am I worried about the skill tree for a demo I'm never coming back to? Claireupscarer is the French translation of Chero Scuro. It is a term used in art to describe a particularly strong contrast

of light and dark. Thematically, it's a reference to the Pinterest the party is journeying to stop. Oh, there you go, thank you very much. State of mind. Stayed of mind. It's a vibe.

I like that they give you a gun. They give you a gun in the combat. And obviously, again, this is another like persona-ism or an atlasism of, oh yeah, here's an option to shoot at your enemies. The thing that I like about the gun

is that literally, like, you aim and you have to shoot at their weak point to, to, like, do a lot of damage to them. Yeah. Some enemies are flying. again, they take more damage, which I think also is a similar thing in the... Also, it doesn't use up your turn.

No, but it uses AP. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I mean, like, for the, like, flying enemies, you can only do that, but it felt great to be able to empty my clip, take out a flying enemy that wasn't that big big of a deal, then just attack the enemy that's vulnerable to physical attack, right? Like, I thought, especially, even though there's so much

going on in this game like we're talking about, I think getting in here and playing it, I was surprised that I wasn't overwhelmed by the spinning plates, where it was like, okay, I got it. Okay, I understand. Okay, this is great. This feels good. Oh, I should have done that, but I screwed this up. But I was so happy.

The spinning place feel fun. Like the, I mean, even in status effect type stuff where early on they give you a burn in this, in this demo, you can burn your enemies. And I like the fact that instead of taking place at the end of an enemy's turn, like the burn takes place at the beginning. So it is the thing of, all right, I know they're weak. I'm going to do an attack that's going to burn them. So by the time it gets to their turn, they won't even be able to do their attack because they're going to die at the beginning of their turn. Like having to strategize in these different ways work. one thing that Andy brought up during the break

is the fact that there's also a jump button in combat where at some point they introduce these sweeping attacks, these big sweeping attacks the enemies will do and if you time a jump at the right time you can jump and then shoot back at them in midair and it's sick as fuck. Again, a lot of really, I think smart things on the gameplay side that shows that they understand RPGs and they understand JRPs but then also just a lot of flare

which I mean I'm just very impressed. I think it's rare to see those two married so well. Like I think it is in the Atlas games that you get something like that or maybe like a Final Fantasy or whatever

to see a French developer be like, okay, we're going to take this on and do it so well so far in the demo. I'm impressed. Over here in the chat, before it goes away,

sorry, in the YouTube chat, SG17 says, but if it sells poorly, it'll either end up on Deep Sale or PlayStation Plus in the next three months like Veilgard or and Immortals.

I'm not, I don't think you have to be concerned about that. I think you're talking about VailGard specifically, right, being from a gig, a gigantic publisher, a gigantic developer, and took a gigantic amount of time where I think

expectations were far different for that one than there are for this one coming from a small French developer put out by Kepler, who isn't the biggest name in game, so it makes good stuff. Like, I think they have the thing right. And I think the reaction you're seeing today, as long as this game doesn't fall apart immediately after this or before it, this game's going to find an audience real quick and be a darling, I think. 100%. I wanted to bring up near the beginning of the demo, you're immediately sort of shown a way to grapple towards little places in little platforms, little things in the world, and your controller vibrates, and you can like grapple towards this

new platform, and now your characters are walking over there. And it's kind of a small nitpick, but I hope it's not just grappling for the sake of making traversal flashier. Like I hope that that's more of a, Metroidvania type thing where maybe at some point in the game you didn't have the ability to grapple towards those things and now you do. Because as cool and flashy as it looks, it's like, okay, well, this does nothing for me mechanically that's different than walking or running. It looks cooler, sure, but I hope that there are parts where maybe I don't have access to the grapple. And then finally, when I have a grapple as an ability, then I can go back to certain parts of this really cool overall map to go back and explore. Because otherwise it just feels like,

you know, is it style over substance, you know? Do you think you're going to get that though? Because like playing through this, this felt very much like, oh, cool, this is a linear game that I'm going. There's side, shoot off the side, get the glowy purple, shoot over here, use your grappling. But like, we're being funneled.

It doesn't strike me as a game. I'm going to double back in Metroidvania. I think you're being, I mean, I think the fact that there's a big open world, uh, Like an overall world? Yeah. Yeah, the overworld map.

I think that that indicates that there will be a lot more exploration that we think that there will be. I think it'll get pathy as well. I was surprised to see further on in my demo. They had like the, you know, in God of War, either 2018 or Ragged Rock, where they have like the chest that you had to hit the three things to open. Yeah, they have that in this game as well where it's like you have to shoot the three things with your gun. I call Corey Barlogger right now. Start the lawsuit. I'll do it.

And again, like great inspirations and influences from great. places. I like that mechanic and god of war. And to see it here, I was like, okay, cool, like that's another layer added to exploration on top of just the chest that you're opening, right? Or like, whatever you're doing. I think the fact that you have an overall probably means that, yeah, you're going to be doubling back to certain locations. But I think my hope is that when you go back to certain locations, things will be different, right? Like, you're going to have more tougher enemies or maybe like some paths change or maybe you have a new ability. I guess the big hope is that you have a new ability that allows you get to certain places that you weren't able to

before. But I think that is almost like the max that you can do because then you are getting to Metro Evina vibes of, all right, well, that's not what this game is. It's a GRP kind of thing. But if you're going to have an overall like this, I think you've got to make it so that you are exploring it. There's reason to come back and explore and stuff. Yeah. The big elephant in the room we haven't addressed, of course, is we're talking about these playable characters.

We're talking about an amazing cast list, of course. As you already said, Jennifer English, Balders Gate, Eldon Ring, Christy Ryder, the Sandman and Seifu, like you were saying, Barrett. Then you have Andy Circus, of course, Nick's, a mortal enemy. Ben Starr, of course, my mortal enemy. But Charlie Cox playing Gustav. Charlie Cox playing Robert Pattinson. Yes.

Charlie Cox playing the elephant in the room is why did they make this man look exactly like Robert Pattinson? I was joking with Andy that it felt like they might have been in talks with Robert Pattinson early on. Not even early on. Like full glove. It's a handshake deal. We haven't signed the contract. Don't worry about it. They were just so dedicated to it.

And then that fell through because he decided to go make Mickey 17. And they're like, fuck. Yeah. He was like, I love Final Fantasy. He talks about how he was in love with Tifa as a child and stuff. It's like, we all know those stories of Robert Bannison. He was definitely in this game. There's no way.

This guy looks exactly like. I thought all was crazy. I had to look it up. I was like, did I miss Robert Pattinson in the trailer? Because why is this man just Robert Pattinson? It's just Robert Pattinson from the lighthouse. It's so weird. But Charlie Cox, very good.

Of course. Amazing. Daredevil, you can do no wrong to worry about that. What I liked about Gustav, and this is an early point. But it was one of those like, you're looking at this game, especially for where we're at for endearing things or whatever and like you know for me it's about connection to the characters and yet i think the plot line in general so cool right of again you have uh the painter's who's coming through and killing everybody at a certain age so

all the 34 year olds die in the story so far clip we see and then of course 33's numbers up to go out and try to stop her uh i appreciate it when they got there and all hell breaks loose and you get the whole thing and da da da there's a million people talking about like more of the story part of there but what was cool from what we saw in the story so far you play a bit and then you get to where you're just finding all these expedition members just murdered, right, killed all the stuff. And the character Gustav collapses in front of one of them and brings up his gun from combat and puts it to his head. And I was like, God damn. Yeah. That's a real fucking moment, right? I'm always talking about killing myself if shit went sideways like this. Yeah. It's visceral.

And then like 10 minutes later you get into like your first kind of like entry level boss fight where you see that boss like fuck up one of your expedition like people and it's really fascinating like how much they're gonna try to get us invested in some of these characters and immediately kill a bunch of people off. The first

note I put in my notes was based off of the previously on that starts off the preview where they show you like a bunch of stuff that was in the trailer right but like one of the things was somebody just fucking getting just slashed and their head falls off. Yeah I was like holy shit like this seems really cool. Yeah 100%. They got

They're cooking over here. And I'm like, music is fantastic as well. Yes, yes, yes, yes. It's very operatic during the, you know, during battle. Can't get a little samey

when you're kind of just running around. But, you know, that's most games when you're just kind of running around and adventuring. I do like how they, it feels like there are different genres that they're exploring there as well.

Because when I got to that second big area and like I get into combat, there's like more of like a chill vibe to the music where I'm like, yo, this is, I'm kind of digging it. Like, see, I, I'm really curious.

to see when we get that final game how varied the soundtrack is because yeah I like what they're offering so far even though there wasn't anything like big and bombastic but that also doesn't seem like the vibe they're going for with it. Yeah, I agree. One of the things we didn't touch on

that was a point for me that was like, oh, this is Greg Miller kind of shit was going through and there's this whole thing of picking up the journals of the previous expeditions and learning from the ones that came before to kind of, the whole idea here is that you're, even people who die,

you're passing the baton. So learn from the ones who came before and then leave something for the ones that will come after so they can do this. But then they're audio journals so you collect when you get to listen in. I was like, oh, the performance was great and the one I found, I'm like, I want to see this through.

I want to shout out design, like character design specifically. I think the character outfits look fucking dope on all the party members that you're playing with, but the enemy design is so, like, weird and cool. It's tough to get me to fight,

like, enemies in a game that don't have faces. I know it's a weird thing. You want to fucking see these motherfuckers. It's like such a weird thing where I'm looking at, at first I'm looking at these enemies, and I'm like, all right, I'm fighting just a rock creature. Like, I mean, I wish I had two eyes and mouth or something shit. Give me some personality.

But like, fuck up this guy's mouth. The more I'm finding, like, these different enemies and these different creatures, the more I'm like, damn, who the fuck thought of this shit, right? Like, it is just the, I don't know, like just cool, like, cool ass designs. Yeah, for sure, 100%. Yeah. And again, I like the different size stuff. I like the idea of, like, you know, the ones that come up and slam their shield down

and it goes off. And then, again, how satisfying it is, you hit the Perry and just throw it back at them and fucking. kill him and shit like that. That was awesome. Like we're talking about the guys who have you had the light for their head basically that you pop then to get the thing off of there. That's Robert Pattinson bro. It's just him

man. It's great. It's just Robert Pattinson. Like there's no way that it's not. It's unbelievable how uncanny it is to being Robert Pattinson. We'll figure it out. Look at him, dude. The handsome guy, the handsome guy. They're so dripped out. Look at that. Yeah, well, I upgrade his outfit to have that

like one wing thing. It looks so cool. Yeah. He's the one-wing angri-gill. Tim's always talking about. We had a lot of people write in for super chats, but no super chat questions. First, we'll start by booing AK, who writes in and says, French J-R-P-G equals R-P-W. I don't like it. R-P-Wee.

It was good enough that I clipped out and put on social media, but still. It was like, you got me. CJ splits on says shout out to Ben Starr's agency. He's killing it. Did you guys run into Ben Star? I didn't play deep enough to... find Verso is what the character's name is according to our little guide here. I don't recall.

Okay. I have not. No. Jordan White wrote in and said, Since this game was announced, no other game has excited me more. With avowed, Expedition 33, Outer Worlds 2, and eventually fabled, a fable, it's a great time to be an Xbox RPG

fan. Yeah. 100%. It's crazy. Game Pass is a great pickup for this one. Yeah, a great pickup for this one for sure. And again, I'm just excited to see what looks to be a game that's going to have a great story because I'm super into the premise of this. I love this idea, right? And then have it just be,

just, in quotes, just be 30 hours or whatever. Yeah. Like be a turn-based RPG that I can see like, oh, I can actually commit to beating this and be. Did they say that it's going to be 30 hours? Is that like a development?

A quick Google found that. I would assume that that's true, but I can try it again for you. Once I start looking at those stats, I was like, ooh, I wonder if we're talking to me. I wonder if this is the thing where they say 30 hours and like we come out of it

being like that shit was 50, 50 hours long. Yeah, yeah, Yeah, the Googles I'm finding are 30 plus, yeah, is what people are saying. This comes directly from their ex account. This says, to be clear, we poured all of our hearts and souls into this game. When you play Expedition 33, you can expect 30 plus hours of main game and as much side content for our completionist expeditioners.

Now it's back in October. I don't like that plus word. That plus word makes me nervous. Just don't go off and do every side thing. Trevor's super chat while we were going and said was interested, but now quite excited for this game. Two questions. Number one, how well did the demo run? Number two, even though y'all didn't start at the beginning,

did the demo do a good job of introducing combat and other systems at play? Andy Cortez, you have the visual triangle. You know it well. You sold merch about it for us. You are the one who we always throw at the Nvidia streams to tell us why games look good. How did this game look for you? The game looks like it still needs some more work. because, you know, there are a decent amount of, like, visual hitches and frame rate kind of drops, but, you know, I'm still impressed with where it's at.

Like, I guess I'm just impressed that this game is running at all based on what we've seen. This game always just looked like. It's a small developer, and holy shit, this looks really ambitious. I don't know if, you know, we've, we've, you know, heard this song before so many times with small developers. But I think it looks awesome in action still. I think like once a game comes out, hopefully it comes with all the bells and whistles like the DLSS and, you know,

for the AMD fans out there at getting FSR running, getting anything to help, you know, because right now it currently has just the resolution scaler where if you're kind of having trouble running the game, you can drop the resolution down at like 75%. So it'll go down and help the game run better at a lower res. Sure.

But it doesn't have to, have any like AI upscaling or anything like that. So hopefully when the game launches, it'll come with a lot of those buzz and whistles, because that happens with a lot of games. A lot of previews don't have everything, don't have their sort of options fully kidded out. The other thing I noticed, too,

is like in gameplay, things really starting to pop and, like, look smooth and stuff. I was noting a lot of weird, like, frame drops and stuff like that in cutscenes, which I don't know if they're pre-rendered or not, Andy. I couldn't tell, but like, it says like you can have like your custom outfits in cutscenes. So I don't think they are. But that was where I was seeing a lot of like, oh, okay.

This is a. Yeah, I noticed that too. I'm not sure. I was wondering the pre if they were pre-render or not as well. Because it, the cutscenes immediately started. It's like, okay, what you were watching. Now it's 30 frames per second with a shitload of film grain. Yeah.

So it always looks pre-rendered to me, but I'm not exactly sure. To answer the second part of that Superchats question, one of the things that impresses me the most about this demo is how well it's just done is a demo where you start off. And one of the first MPCs you run into is literally, it literally says, hey, I'm an MPC that's for this demo. And basically that MPC, you have the choice of jumping into tutorial straight from that MPC to teach you the battle mechanics before they throw you back into that chapter that we're on. And like, that's like an extra piece of work to do to like for a DECD. demo that you usually don't see. I'm I don't remember seeing a demo that has that of like oh here's a specific piece just to teach people like the press play in this game how to play this game real quick before doing it. So shout out to that and then also shout out to like just how easy this was of a hey here's a code we're gonna you know let you redeem this preview on steam play at your leisure you know we have up to it says three three plus hours right but like you know I played for four hours or something like that and still kept going. And yeah like we're able to play it at our

for this preview. Yeah. Really well done. Real quick in the chat, Wolf Fox 10JC says, Nick is roasting Andy on Instagram. And yeah, the kind of funny vids account

on Instagram is live while Nick is just making fun of Andy. So that's upsetting. Sorry about that, buddy. Oh, they just ended the stream. But they were...

Yeah, I can't see it. They were zooming in on your face and Nick had the football so you know it was bad. And I could hear him laughing out there. I didn't really make content about you. What does he do? I don't know.

It's a great question. You know what I mean? That's a great question. I think he's really to work his way through the outer worlds right now. Outer wilds. He's got his finger on the pulse. He's liking a vowed though.

I know that. Yeah, yeah, that's true. He had to watch Alien 3. Yeah. That's what he's doing. Hard life. Any closing thoughts about Expedition 33? Blessing.

I think it's shaping up to be pretty awesome. Yeah, totally. I think it's shaping up to be a game that looks like it can hopefully deliver on the promise of just looking like this, you know, really gorgeous, but also awesome storytelling-wise. I hope it can kind of, you know, deliver there. Awasted Band with Assyu, Andy. Is it a contender? I'm going to say, I want to say no for now.

Ooh. I think it's too early to say, yeah. Yeah, I think it's too earlier to say. Like, again, off this demo, yeah, I'm feeling the high. But again, let's see if they can uphold this for 30 hours and keep it engaging in both world story and gameplay. I'm going to be bold and say, yeah, I think this is a contender for me, which is shocking. But I can't, like, if we had code right now, it would be toss a lot of things to the side right now.

Say goodbye to Ben, go to boarding school. You know what I'm going to do? You got to get in there. And again, like, if this is, if I can sit there, what I'm really interested in and what I didn't see in this game because I didn't feel like I was playing a normal difficulty. So I didn't, granted, I was very early. So I didn't die in the perception I was playing. I'm interested to see how they restart where checkpoints are. because again like I want to right now

bullishly on Monday March 3rd 2025 I want to commit to being Perry Poppy in this because it feels so fucking good to throw the attack back in their fucking faces and in one of the clips we showed from one of the trailers you saw the entire team Perry and throw it back at the boss I'm like oh my God like I want that but I'm not that person but I want that in this game

so let me just see if I commit to that or end up turning down the difficulty but I'm super excited and juice for this one bless yeah I think I think the office is going to be liking this one a lot like I'm sad that Tim isn't on this preview because this strikes me as very much like a Tim type of game knowing how much he loves Final Fantasy and like how much style

is in this and how fun the combat is here. Like I think this is one that is uniquely tailored to possibly all of our tastes here and coming out of this like I'm I'm with you guys that I think is early for me to say contender but like the projections for me are looking up like if I'm doing the you know the oh what do they call it

the not the rankings when you're doing like projections on like the financial shit, whatever. It's looking up for this game. Yeah. Oh, okay, yeah. Yeah, you know what I mean. Like stocks.

The stocks, yes, thank you. Yeah, the stocks in this game are looking up right now for me. Yeah, it's now most anticipated for sure. Exactly. Nice, Barrett. All right. Well, ladies, gentlemen, and NBs, we won't have to wait long, of course. Claire, obscure Expedition 33 is coming out April 24th, 2025,

meaning that we'll be covering it a lot more here on Kind of Funny Games. If you didn't know, we are all about live talk shows, usually about video games, so you can catch us when we're yapping over on Twitch.tv.tvs slash Kind of Funny Games, YouTube.com slash Kind of Funny Games. Podcast services around the globe.

No matter where you get the Kind of Funny Games cast, please consider picking up the Kind of Funny membership. $10 gets you all of our shows ad free and a daily dose of me in a series we call Greg Way. Of course, this is just the halfway point of our day. We are far from done with shows. Right after this, we are moving over to do the review, that's right alien three in review as we continue alien versus predator in review and then of course

there will be the stream of mike and nick in the afternoon for now though that's the end of the games cast until next time it's been our pleasure to serve you