Expedition 33’ Ending Is Better?

I keep writing about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and people keep reading it, so I wanted to discuss what may be the most intense part of the game. Its ending. Rather, its endings, plural. Spoilers obviously follow and if you have not beaten the entire Epilogue and seen credits, don’t read this.

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The final confrontation of the game’s story (outside of endgame things) is the stunning choice that you suddenly have to make between Verso and Maelle, where Verso wants the fraction of the true Verso’s soul to finally stop painting and rest, while Maelle doesn’t want his final world to collapse.

Who to choose? Well, I sat staring at the screen for ten minutes, but I won’t tell you until we’re done with this.

Verso

Many will view Verso’s as the “happy” ending. With original Verso, the dead Verso’s soul fraction, done painting, the “true” Painter family is allowed to reunite and properly mourn what they’ve lost.

But in the process, by doing this, Verso erases all the painted friends he’s made for the entire game. A newly painted Maelle, a version of his sister, and Lune and Sciel, his battle partners, and Monoco and Esquie, his fictional childhood friends he brought to life.

Maelle

Maelle cannot let go. Of child Verso. Of adult, painted Verso, or all her painted friends, new and old, dead and alive.

It’s the “dream” ending. Maelle, now fully realizing her painting powers, has brought people like Sciel’s dead husband back to life, or more relevantly, Sophie and Gustave, the most brutal losses of the game.

The unsettling bit is when she’s now puppeteering Verso to play the piano, something he supposedly enjoys, but he’s being kept alive (remember he’s immortal) and forced to dance for her against his will. This ends with the most frightening shot of the game, painter Maelle:

I picked Maelle. No, I did not know at the time that her ending would be this unsettling, but my attachment to her character was greater than Verso’s, who had lied to us about a dozen times since we met him, and works toward a resolution for a family we simply do not care about.

I think you can make the argument that the lie is better. What is real, after all? Is it fair the Painters can bring infinite worlds to life, creating consciousness and erasing them at will? And use it as a way to cope with grief ahead of some larger war with “The Writers” we have no information about?

My friend who is adamantly pro-Verso ending told me that my view is like caring about the toys in Toy Story who are…toys. But you do care about the toys in Toy Story! That’s the point! And from a more meta sense, we are caring about what happens to fictional characters in a fictional video game, and the “right” answer is to pick one real family out of two not-real sets of characters.

But getting out of that mindset, I think just dramatically, the Maelle ending is better, and it fits more with the story. It seems bizarre to me to draw this “happy” ending and that just involves gommaging the entire cast you played with, it’s sad and weird, outside of the “real” family finally mourning. A darker ending after Maelle realizes her identity feels much more in-keeping with everything we’ve seen before. Why should she be forced to allow the erasure of this world and return to her cage of burns and masks, if she has the power to live like this? It’s her family being selfish for…what? If she returns, it’s not bringing Verso back, and there’s not even a guarantee it will cure her mother’s hysteria.

I expect a wide range of takes on this, and the answer is probably “there is no right ending,” which is sort of the point. Either one you pick, this remains one of my favorite video game stories of all time.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.