This Game Reminded Me of Who I Was

I put the controller down in the middle of a boss fight.

Renoir was still on the screen. The fight was not over, but for a few seconds I stopped caring about winning. I just wanted to listen to the music.

So I sat there.

That was the moment Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 became more than a game for me. It was also the moment I realised I had been wrong about myself for years.

I thought I had lost the ability to feel this way.

As a child, I used to come home from school eager to turn on the computer and disappear into another world. I loved the early Assassin's Creed games, especially Assassin's Creed II. They were not perfect, but that did not matter. I did not simply complete missions. I lived in those places for a while.

I remember wanting to grow up partly because adults could buy their own games and play whenever they wanted. I imagined that one day I would build a powerful PC with my own money. Then nobody could tell me when it was time to stop.

In 2023, I finally built that PC.

It was fully decked out, the kind of machine my younger self would have stared at in disbelief.

Then I barely touched it.

Life had become louder. There were bills, pressure, work, and dreams that had not gone the way I imagined. At 27, gaming no longer felt like a private joy. It felt like something I had to justify, even to myself.

Whenever I sat down to play, another voice in my head would ask whether I should be doing something more useful.

That was the part I had never imagined as a child. I had spent years waiting for the freedom to play, but when the freedom finally arrived, the feeling did not come with it.

I tried to find it again.

Last year, I picked up The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. I loved it. I spent more than 50 hours exploring, meeting people, getting distracted, and avoiding the ending because I did not want the journey to be over.

Then it ended, and I moved on as if it had never happened.

After that came Black Myth: Wukong. The graphics and combat kept me there more than the story did. I completed it twice, still chasing something I could not name.

Life interrupted again. Gaming faded into the background again.

The games were good. That was not the problem. I was trying to force the return of a feeling, and feelings do not work like that.

Then I started Expedition 33.

The opening introduces Gustave and Maelle in Lumiere, a city where everyone knows that the Paintress will soon paint a number. Everyone of that age will disappear in the Gommage.

One of the first conversations is about giving someone flowers before they wither and die. Gustave asks whether Maelle means the flowers or the person receiving them.

I paused at that.

Most of us do not know when something is happening for the last time. We do not know which meal will be the last one with someone, or when we will say "I love you" for the final time. We live with the luxury of assuming there will be another day.

The people in Expedition 33 do not have that luxury. Their ending has a number.

The rest of the game confused me at first. The combat had dodging, parrying, skills, and a turn-based system I did not immediately understand. The story kept introducing questions faster than it answered them. Who was the Paintress? Why was she erasing people? What happened to the expeditions that came before?

But I wanted to understand.

Every new question pulled me further into the history of that world. I started reading what earlier expeditions had left behind. I paid attention to conversations I might have rushed through in another game.

The world was beautiful, but not in the empty way some technically impressive games are beautiful. From Lumiere to the path towards the Monolith, every place felt made by people who cared about where they had placed you.

Then the music got to me.

During the Gommage, when Sophie turns to dust, I almost cried. Later, there were battles where the soundtrack made it difficult to think about the battle itself.

That is what happened during the fight with Renoir.

Until then, some part of me was still treating the game like a test. I was waiting to see whether it could make me feel the way games once did. I was watching myself play instead of simply playing.

Then the music rose, and I put the controller down.

For those few seconds, I was not thinking about the money I had spent on the PC. I was not thinking about work waiting for me. I was not wondering whether gaming was a useful way to spend an evening.

I was just there, listening.

And I did not want the moment to end.

The feeling I had been chasing was already back.

Nothing dramatic happened in the room. The game continued waiting for me. But I understood something I had not understood when I built that PC.

The computer was never the dream. The feeling was.

Expedition 33 kept finding ways to hold me there. The voice actors gave the characters grief, humour, hesitation, and affection without explaining every emotion. The camp lets you replay songs, and sometimes I returned just to sit and listen.

Even the combat changed my mind. I have played Pokemon since the early versions, so turn-based systems were familiar to me, but I often treated them as something to tolerate for the sake of the rest of a game. Expedition 33 made every turn feel active. Dodging and parrying meant I could never fully switch off.

More importantly, the gameplay and the story seemed to be asking the same question: how long can you remain inside a beautiful illusion when the truth outside it hurts?

The choice near the end makes that question impossible to avoid.

On the surface, you are choosing between two characters. Underneath, you are choosing between holding on to a fictional world and returning to the people who still need you in the real one.

I do not think the game gives us an easy moral answer. That is why the choice works.

Gaming had always been a form of escape for me. As a child, that escape was simple and joyful. As an adult, I had started to distrust it. I worried that disappearing into another world meant I was avoiding my own.

Expedition 33 did not solve that tension. It helped me see the difference between using art to hide from life and allowing art to return me to life with more feeling than I had before.

After I finished the main story, I looked up the people who had made it. The credits felt remarkably short for a game with this much care in it. Learning that the studio was founded by former Ubisoft developers made the experience feel strangely complete.

Assassin's Creed II was one of the games that first made me love gaming. Years later, people who had worked inside that same larger world left to make something smaller, riskier, and deeply personal. Their game brought me back to the feeling I had when I first played theirs.

For years, I thought adulthood had taken that feeling away from me. I thought the child who rushed home from school to enter another world had been replaced by someone who could only measure time by how productive it was.

But he had not disappeared.

He was there when the music started. He was there when I stopped trying to decide whether the game was worth my time. He was there in the few quiet seconds when I let myself feel something without asking what it was useful for.

The joy was not gone. I just could not command it to return.

I needed the right story.

The fight was still waiting on the screen.

I picked the controller back up.