33 Extra Big Eclairs aka Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 aka still my game of the year so far got patched last week, the headline items being a generous increase to parry timing windows and big damage reductions on its easiest difficulty. Frankly, this rules and I’m surprised it took so long. I enjoyed how tense these RPG battles can get, but I got the sense a fair few people didn’t fancy nailing reaction timing and just wanted to enjoy the story. My ideal solution would be more freeform customisation, because I reckon the game does some really clever and compelling stuff with buildcraft that got overshadowed by the Sekiro comparisons, but this is still a great fix.
In numbers, story mode got a 40% increase to parry and dodge windows, with incoming damage reduced by 10% to 50%. You can also now tweak player damage caps, or give enemies much more health if, say, you really liked fighting a particular boss and want to fight them for several hours at a time. There’s also the usual round of bug fixes, alongside proper cutscene scaling for ultrawide and other nonstandard resolutions. There’s, uh, also baguette emojis in the Steam points store now. Mon dieu!
I could spend a bit of time here evangelising for the game, but I already did that plenty in my review. I will add this, though: I am such a tedious contrarian that I frequently bore myself to sleep with it, and even I haven’t soured on Clair Obscur in light of all the praise it’s gotten from everyone and their local patisserie owner. It really is that good, and now even more people can enjoy it. No notes!
