Welcome back to Pixel Project Radio, the video game discussions and analysis podcast.

A different kind of episode.

Today, we're doing a first impressions on a recently released game, Claire Obscure Expedition thirty three.

I'm joined by Dave Jackson from Tales from the Backlog podcast What's Up?

Dave Rick, Thank you for having me on.

You know, I have to wait a little bit before I get to talk about this game on my own show, but it's there's so many thoughts whirling around, so I'm really excited to get into it.

I am feeling the same way.

First impressions episodes are not something that I tend to do often over here, but every so often a game comes around that really excites me in such a way that I think it's it would be a fun idea to do.

Notably, we did that for Final Fantasy sixteen.

I remember.

I don't remember if that was released in the main feed or just the Patreon feed, but I do remember that, and Claire Obscure came out, I knew that I wanted to play this day one.

This was on my radar for a long time, as it has been for many and playing it, I am so far blown away.

I'm only about ten hours in or so, I'm really taking my time, but it is a breath of fresh air in a lot of ways.

And I want to say this up top two.

It will be on the show proper.

We've got three or four episodes of narrative analysis for Claire Obscure coming later in the year, but I wanted to talk about it now early while it's still fresh.

Admittedly, this episode's coming out like roughly a week after release, so you know, I'm not one of those day one folks.

You know there are already full playthroughs on YouTube of this game.

Yeah, people just get you know it comes out, they know life it for like three days so they can be one of the first to get the play through up there.

Respect to anyone who can like put that time in and put in that work to get a high quality playthrough up there so quickly, especially the no commentary playthroughs.

Those those are the real heroes.

Yeah, and we salute you.

But we're today, We're just going to talk broadly about Claire Obscure, what we've liked so far, about what we've been playing.

This will be spoiler free, absolutely no spoilers will preface with with things that we think might verge towards that.

But I don't think either of us will be spoiling anything.

We just want to, you know, talk briefly about a new game that's exciting us.

And hopefully, if you're a listen, if you're a new listener coming in because of the Clare Obscure hype, you know, hopefully you check out the back catalog and you stick around.

So, Dave, how long have you been playing Claire Obscure?

What's your what's your play looking like?

Uh?

Ten twelve hours something like that.

I just finished Act one.

That acts are very clearly divided.

You'll know when you get there.

So I finished Act one, I got a kind of an ability for exploration, and then I just explored a ton.

So yeah, twelve ish hours something like that.

So I'm not that far ahead of you.

There is a lot to kind of explore around if you don't want to just mainline the story in here.

And you and I have talked off Mike, you are feeling just as excited about this as me.

Oh yeah, dude, it's you said, a breath of fresh air, and it's like, I have a lot of thoughts about all the discourse about how this game is saving jarpgs or turn based combat or any of that bullshit, but like, it's legitimately different from even a lot of like the recent favorites in the genre that I've played, and I play a lot of these games, like this is one of my favorite type of game, and the games that this game takes an inspiration from are some of my favorite games of all time.

So to see a kind of different take, and I think a lot of the difference in the fresh air quality comes from where this studio is from, and you know what art inspirations they're taking and things like that.

So I couldn't agree with you more that it just feels incredibly fresh, while maybe not reinventing the wheel the way some people are claiming.

It feels fresh, but also, at least to me, feels very much steeped in the history of nineties early two thousands j RPGs, not totally.

This doesn't feel like I've seen some folks saying, yeah, this feels like a nineties JRPG.

I wouldn't go that far personally, but it feels more like that than not.

There's a lot of common DNA there and a lot of things that they're doing that pay homage.

Did you like how I frindshed up that word unintentionally?

Yeah, I'm gonna do homage.

They're doing a lot of that, a lot of the tradition in the genre, and it's working for them.

But they're adding a new perspective.

As you said, I'm playing this on PC finally putting my beefy rig to a test.

It looks beautiful.

This is one of the rare instances where I've been taken aback by a game's visual fidelity.

And I think it's because also the art direction is so nice.

Yeah, it's it's not just that it has these beautiful photorealistic four K textures or something like that.

It's it's the beautiful textures and character models and stuff like that, plus this very very stylish art direction, like you said, like you know, just think about the prologue and how you know, you have those really striking colors and all the flowers and everything like that around the city streets, and it's striking when you boot it up just looking at how it looks.

It's not all the flash of you know, the stuff in combat, which it is flashy, which turn based combat is not always flashy.

This one definitely is.

There's an emphasis on that too, But just like, look at any screenshot of this game basically and you'll be like, wow, this is not only is it realistic looking, but it's it's got a real style to the art direction too.

And it's no surprise that color plays such a large role.

Let's talk about the name for a second, Claire.

Obscure is a sort of Englicized spelling, I guess is one way to put it of an Italian phrase called kierascura, which, okay, is made up of the Italian words kiao, which is light or clear, and obscuro, which means obscured or dark.

Okay.

This is a technique that was found in painting as far back as like I don't I don't want to drop stylistic periods and get it wrong.

But painting's dating back to, you know, the fifteen hundreds, maybe even before.

This technique was used back then, and what it is is a contrasting of light and dark, of light and shadow, and j RPG writers around the world are palming their foreheads saying why didn't I think of this?

Yeah?

You can also tell in like the naming of game systems and stuff.

You know, you have pictoes and lumina and chroma, and you have all of these other words and phrases that are like directly related to light and color and things like that too.

So you know, art is on the forefront of this as a game, just generally.

Yeah, And color symbolism plays a huge role, and I suspect it'll play a larger role once I'm farther in the story.

That idea of kiro and obscuro light and dark shadows, we can expand that out to be about contrasts life and death, light and darkness, you know, the shadow versus the self.

Any number of thinkers across time have grappled with this concept.

And on one hand, yes, this has been brought into stories before, but on the other, I think this is being done in a fresh way and I'm really excited to see where this goes.

From the opening scenes, you see the color symbolism at play early on this town Lumiere, well, particularly certain members of the town.

But again, we're not gonna that's not really a spoiler, but I don't want to dive too much into the story.

Are characterized are represented by the colors of red and white.

Both of those can mean a lot of things, but they are both in tandem and sometimes at opposites with each other.

Power versus purity, birth versus red, the color of blood.

We could think birth and murder, birth in the loss of life, passion and what do you call it?

Passivity.

A lot of different directions you could go with this, But that opening area lumiere that is characterized in such a colorful, vivid way is completely at odds with where game goes shortly thereafter, a very much darker landscape, with the exception again of one area.

I have a lot of theories about where this may be going.

But we see this idea of contrasts of light and dark, of opposites and how they relate to one another being put forth very early on, and I'm really really excited and looking forward to seeing where this goes.

Yeah, same here, And you mentioned contrasts.

I mean I learned a little bit about French history by looking into the inspiration for the setting from a particular period in French history before World War One, when optimism was at an all time high and arts were flourishing and things like that.

And you have that contrast with what happens like the not even a spoiler, just like what the basic premise of this story is does not fit with high optimism, you know, and it fits into character motivations super early on, like within your first ten minutes of talking to people in the game.

So the way that they set those things up, it makes for like a really interesting and rich world from like basically the second you start playing it, the first time you look at something, the first time you see what the story concept is, and the first time you hear two characters talking in a way that's not super like let's teach Dave what this game is all about.

It's like two characters really talking to each other about their shared history and how they live in this world and stuff.

It all comes down to that contrast.

I like the setting a lot too, and I did appreciate that they're not afraid to drop certain ideas or phrases at onto you and sort of wait to expound upon them or define them, well, not even define them.

They don't really do that.

You don't get a lot of as you know, dialogue here.

You don't get a glossary that explains exactly what the fracturing was or the fracture.

I think it's called you're you're left to fend for yourself with context clues for a while, which is a mature way to handle this.

Yeah.

No, they introduce that stuff and then they just kind of trust that you're going to be interested enough to play long enough to find out what the gomage is and what the fracture was and these things like.

That's perfectly fine.

I'm hooked.

I'm happy with waiting to find out exactly what happened.

You know, do you happen to know what time period this is modeled after.

In French history?

Just is the Bell Epoch setting?

I have the Wikipedia page open.

I'm not a French historian by any means, but that's the name of the setting, and it's like this pre World War One area when, like I said, arts were thriving and optimism was high and things like that.

Gotcha.

I appreciate that very much too.

I mean, not just that this is from a French perspective and it is very French inspired, but being steeped in the real world.

This isn't And you know you all know me.

I don't have anything against fantasy stories, sci fi fantasy.

I love that stuff.

But it's really nice to have a story where the setting is based in, you know, reality, once in a while.

This could be I don't know if you could consider this low fantasy.

I want to open that debate once again.

But well, I don't know.

But there are real world inventions here.

There are guitars right, There are Ferris wheels.

There are what look like apartment complexes.

This isn't There are mimes in this game.

That's that's as real world as you get.

Yeah, there are mimes.

Fuck me, there are mimes.

It's exciting.

The French angle.

I'm admittedly not super familiar with French culture, but the French angle is an interesting one.

I don't I can't really lock into the influences just on site that they're pulling from that except for the music, but it is.

It is nice.

You know.

We we see a lot of this genre coming out of Japan, and that's not knocking them.

I mean, the writers over there do this genre very very well, and the creators in general, I should say.

But seeing a new perspective and a new team is really exciting.

This is a brand new team.

I don't think this studio has done anything before this, have they it's.

Their first game.

Obviously not the first game that the people have made, but as Sandfall, it's their first game.

Extremely exciting and an incredibly promising start.

I mean, this is such a justification to what so many of us are saying about companies these days and how greedy they have become with their ips and with their workers, and you know what they're asking and what they're charging and what they're not paying related to that, and you know there's a cynical part of me that's worried about that too, which is another conversation for another time.

But seeing a smaller team make something so grand and so of the heart is exciting in a way that you know, we don't see a lot of the time.

Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts about the indie noss of this game, but it is definitely a smaller core team and they set out to make a game with these graphics, using the Unreal Engine and stuff like that.

There's things about this that kind of make me wonder, like should we be grouping this in with all the other indie games?

I mean, like Charlie Cox is the star of the game, Like it's not can't be cheap to get Charlie Cox on your project, Andy Serkis and Ben Starr and Jennifer English from Balder's Gate IREI like there's a lot of star power in the voice cast.

There's the credits are actually huge.

There's a ton of people that worked on the game.

So I want to, like, you know, set people out there this narrative.

There's like it's only thirty people that made the game, and it was not only thirty people that made the game.

It's a small core group of thirty people, but that doesn't mean that it's limited to those thirty people and that's.

It, Yeah, exactly.

But I think, like if I can kind of guess at what you were like getting at there, was like we want smaller teams.

We want companies to be able to make like games like this, single player games using supposedly outdated combat systems to make the kind of game and like tell the kind of stories that they want to tell.

And while I don't think this really fits in with that, Like I want like smaller games made by less people who are paid more to work less.

I don't think it really fits in with that, but I think that it does fulfill like the type of game that a lot of people are looking at the bigger companies who have the means to make more games like this and just being like, like, look how well this game did.

Look how much it's it's sold, Look at how highly it reviewed.

Look how many people love this game.

This is what we've been asking for instead of trying to make another fucking extraction shooter to try to make as much money as possible.

Look what games dominating the talk about video games over the last week.

It's this one.

So I definitely get like the the idea there that like, people can point to this and be like, this is an example of how this can work if you make a really good game.

And I'd be particularly interested in seeing just how much how to phrase this, just how much influence and pull the publisher had on what game decisions were made.

You know, that's something that we hear about a lot with these huge companies, you know, EA and honestly probably Square Nintendo that are making games, and that they have these guidelines and expectations for the product that are under their name, regardless of who's working on them, and those creative decisions have to fall in line with that.

There's that's just how modern business in this in this frame works, meaning that this is a smaller core team.

Yes, I know it's not just the thirty three people or the thirty people that is being kind of poetically tossed about online.

But I would be curious to know how much sway the developer or the publisher, the one that's funding this, had on this.

I don't know.

I didn't look into this at all.

It doesn't seem like a lot.

It seems like this is a passion project in the best sense of the phrase.

Yeah.

The publishers Kepler, which is I mean they've they've put out some pretty or they have published some pretty notable releases over the last few years, but they're not a giant in the in the publishing sphere.

I mean like they before this, probably their most notable game was Ceafu that they they worked with, which is like a successful game, I think, but it's not it's not clear obscure level of huge, you know.

So Yeah, I would.

Guess, like you said, I mean, you play this game and you're like, don't.

I don't feel like they sand it off any weird creative edges in this game.

I don't know if you've got that feeling.

No, not at all, Not at all, and I don't expect to just based on how things have been going, but it'll be interesting to go through this and do a full analysis on it.

You had mentioned the combat.

I want to talk a little bit about why the mechanics of this have have been so exciting to me, and the two things that stick out right away way are the battle system and the Pictose system Pictose and Lumina system.

Let's talk battle system for a second.

This reminds me a lot of you know, everybody is saying Super Mario RPG.

That's the one that I've seen get tossed around the most because that's a popular j RPG, and it's it's a fine j RPG.

It's good.

I was thinking Legend of Dragoon.

That's what this reminded me of immediately.

I'm a huge fan of that game.

I just finished up playing a large portion of it this year.

That game has an addition system with the combat, wherein you know, this square overlay will be on the screen and when another square falls into it, you have to press X and that's how you do your combos.

This is similar to that, it's still time presses.

There are multiple sometimes there are singles, sometimes multiple, sometimes none at all, and that's how you get your combos and your moves to be more powerful.

I'm a big fan of that.

I see this kind of bashed online a lot, as you know, being kind of like a jingle keys, you know, for somebody to get into the combat like jingling keys.

I think that's a pretty cynical way to look at it.

I don't agree with that.

I find it to be exciting, particularly because too, you don't have to engage with it.

I mean, you're you're nerved pretty significantly if you don't, but you don't have to.

I disagree.

I think you do have to, but more on the defensive end of things than the offensive event.

I agree with you, though, I think, I mean, I haven't played Legend of Dragoon, but I mean there's a bit of Lost Odyssey's combat system, and when you get to your full analysis, Lost Odyssey may come up again, but there's a bit of that.

You know, it's much better than the ring system in Lost Odyssey for sure, And then you do have some of the the defensive options that feel more out of the Mario and Luigi RPGs, where you have multiple ways that you need to to defend against attacks, whether it's jumping over stuff, paying dodging out of the way.

There's like four defensive verbs for these, depending on what attack is coming out.

So that's what I got.

I got a bit of Octopath Travelers combat system out of the AP system and the conservation of AP between turns if you don't use them all stuff like that.

I love it.

I love the combination of influences that go into the combat system.

It feels like they were very strategic about like which things they used from other games.

And I love how that characters all play very, very differently.

It feels like each character comes from a different game, almost within the confines of Clare Obscure's combat system as a whole.

If that makes sense.

It does.

It does.

There's one character in particular that you get.

I want to say it's the fourth character that reminds me a lot of a sort of deck builder style game, not be which that sounds like a really vapid comparison.

It's not because of the weapons that they're using.

It's because of how many if then statements there are.

If this is used, then this charges up, if this many charges than this, if this move used and this many charges, that many if then statements makes me think of a crunchy card game, and I really really appreciate that.

And in tandem, I mean going back to the theme again of contrasts.

In tandem with a high octane, action oriented combat system at least as action oriented as turn based can get.

With Perry's dodges and jumps, that makes for a really exciting battle experience.

And I do like having those defensive verbs at play too, because they each have their own timing quirks and timing difficulties.

It's significantly easier to dodge than it is to Perry.

Yeah, I don't know when I get the dip or the or the dive verbs, but I'm looking forward to it.

Yeah, it's a long game.

They're coming.

Patches o'hulahan big inspiration for the game as well.

One thing I'm wondering about, you know, since this is just impressions, it's not a fully formed critique or opinion yet, But one thing I'm wondering about is how the game is going to balance players skill versus RPG stats, gear, Picto's everything that you know raises the math of how effective your characters are because the best players in the game could just go beat the superbosses right out of the gate.

If you can parry everything, you're allowed to parry everything.

As far as I know, there is no unavoidable damage in the entire game that I've come across.

Everything is there's one attack that will like remove a character from the battlefield, but it doesn't hurt them.

So if everyone else is okay, they survive and they come back.

So the best player will just time up all the peris they'll do great against everything.

The players who struggle with the time stuff can lower the difficulty, so they did include that, and then it leaves the people in the middle, like me, who are fine at perrying.

I'm not great at it, but I also don't want to lower the difficulty because I feel like I'm getting by.

I'm doing okay, and I'll go fight those superbosses when i'm level appropriate.

But there's a problem I had with Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga, where the end boss of that game is so incredibly difficult because they want you to be at a certain level and you have to be an absolute master of the defensive vocabulary, which in that game, I don't think that that worked well when they raise the challenge up to that level, and so it's got me wondering in the future, are they going to stay on an even difficulty curve or is it going to be like, Okay, we're getting to the hard stuff.

Now you have to parry every single thing perfectly or you stand no chance.

Because that's how the final boss of Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga felt, which was a nasty surprise.

Yeah, you have to somehow scale the difficulty such that it is challenging to the mechanical players that are parrying everything and the stats players that are playing the numbers game to win the battles, right, And that's a same line to walk.

Yeah, honestly, I think that what I've noticed from Expedition thirty three so far is I think that they're okay with just saying our you know, our top ten percent of players, they're just going to breeze through this, and we're okay with that, because I've been talking with some people who think the game is way too easy because they're really good at the parrying.

So that makes me think like they and this feels like a good thing.

On Clare Obscure's part to just say, if you're that good, you're just going to breeze through this because you're that good, and we're not gonna make it harder for the other ninety percent of people just because of that.

And they've got a story to tell as well.

This isn't so mechanically focused that the story falls to the wayside.

I think the narrative is still the forefront, so it would make sense for them to think that way.

Like, you know, if you're that cracked at parrying, then you know, enjoy the story.

I don't mean to brag, but I'm pretty I'm schmooving with the parrys.

I'm doing pretty well.

The thing is, though, is that I have fought some things that I think I maybe shouldn't have so far.

And yeah, while I won, you know, not to brag, but while I won, and like, while I could parry them and it's you know, dodge, it's fine.

It wasn't exactly exciting because it turned to the chip damage game, right, and yeah, the steaks are there, like they could wipe me out in two three turns, but it takes me a long time.

You know, I have to really chip down that health that health bar and is that exciting.

I mean I kind of look at that the same way as folks look at grinding.

You know, it's it's not mindless, don't get me wrong, and it is meditative as I've called grind before.

It's just a different kind of tedium.

You have to choose which one you're okay with.

I don't know.

It would be like if if Final Fantasy seven the original was just like you can fight Ruby Weapon right at the beginning if you're good enough, instead of being like you have to grind up to be able to fight this thing.

I think it's the same thing.

Like if you have the patience to go do a half hour of NonStop perying to beat this superboss before your level appropriate, then by all means try it.

Give it a shot.

I think that's what they're saying here.

But for everybody else, they're like, yeah, just come back later.

Like it's an open you know, the overworld map is open.

You can backtrack to places really easily, So just come back in you know, ten twenty hours and try it again.

This is the minorist of spoilers.

It's it's almost not but it's the most minor so you know, skip forward a minute if you don't want to hear it.

There was one fight that I think I stumbled on a little earlier than I was intended to.

I mean, I got there, so it's not like I choosed the environment.

But there was a part of that fight where the enemy faked out their punches and kind of pretended to hit and then stop and then hit, which I laughed out loud.

I loved that so much because it threw a wrench into my plan.

And that's the kind of difficulty thing that you would have to adjust for those mechanically oriented players, right like being with this as an art themed game, there's a lot of art influence.

I would love to see like a status effect that's like water logged or something that slows down your movements so you have to adjust how you time your perry's or your dodges or your jumps per character.

I think that would be really exciting.

It would be a pain, but I think it would be very exciting.

It might.

It would definitely shake things up, especially for you know, if you ever get to a point where you're like, this thing can't touch me, but oh I got hit with this status.

Now I have to adjust.

It would shake things up.

It would also I would also probably complain in the moment about that for sure.

Though, Oh sure, I wanted to ask you a question about how you feel about this because the last time I was on the show, we talked about Soul's games.

I think that was the last time I was here.

And the game Clare Obscure takes a lot of from software influence, and not just because you know it can be difficult, YadA, YadA, YadA.

I think there's a lot of like mechanical systems that they took straight out of Soul's games.

And well, I've heard anecdotally that the games director has a history with Sekuro, so like maybe a little bit of influence there too.

What did like are you picking up on that stuff?

Do you think that Soul's experience has helped in any way?

If it has, I wouldn't be the guy to ask, you know, I can see it.

I haven't got far enough in Securo to really make an informed analysis on that.

And Demon Souls too, I mean, I don't know that I'm the guy to ask.

I can see it though in some of the monster design too, But and obviously of course the paying I'm I'm a big fan of the parrying and the dodge system.

I think it's really great.

I like how the wind ups and the time execution and the frame data of enemy attacks is generally not what you'd expect.

It's always a little bit awkward, and that kind of prevents complacency.

I'm a big fan of that, you know, I don't I don't know that I would be the guy to ask about any other influences, but that's, you know, if you think they're there.

I tend to trust your word on souls more.

Yeah, so I think, and we talked about this in that Soul's episode, but like there's so much more that goes into those games, even mechanically than this boss hits really hard if you get hit by it, you know.

And so I like this game using the estes system and the quote the bonfire system where you should rest and replenish all your potions.

They're limited potions, so like this is the thing in a lot of turn based RPGs where it's like I'm gonna make sure I'm ready for the final boss by taking ninety nine you know, ex potions or whatever.

You can't do that in this game because they're limited.

You start with like three or something, and you rest at those those flags and they respawn all the enemies, but they replenish all your healings.

So it sets up that little like should I push forward and try and find another flag or should I go back and heal up and try again now that I know the enemy is better and I can probably get through this easier this time around.

They brought stat scaling into this, which is something I absolutely never see outside of the Souls series.

Like, when you level up your your weapons will have specific stats that will give you bonus if you level up what kind of synergizes with your weapon, And that's a Soul's mechanic that I even, you know, even like the oh like the the Nios of the world and stuff, I don't think those even have those, like even the hardest of them.

So they definitely feel like they've taken a bunch and kind of looked at what else can we take?

Besides enemies are going to hit hard if you don't watch their animations and stuff like that.

Yeah, the stat scaling is interesting too.

Going back to that theme of contrast, you've got a decidedly non JRPG approach to building characters with you know, you level up, you get a certain number of points and you allocate those to whatever stats you'd like.

You also have a point system that I think is kind of right out of Final Fantasy nine with the Luminas and the pictose.

So you don't have gear in this game like you know Final Fantasy seven, like you had said, but you do get these pictose which are equippable items, and once you battle enough with them, you learn their ability.

That's the same as Final Fantasy nine.

And then all of your available AP points here called Lumina, can be used to equip abilities that you've already learned now here.

They give they do you a solid and if one character learns that, everybody can equip it, which is really awesome.

It's it's really allowing you to min max builds and play how and express yourself through play however you'd feel.

And I think that's very interesting to combine those two in that way.

It's made this a real blast.

You know, my l in my game is just beating ass and tearing down everything almost single handedly, whereas Mike Gustav is a powerhouse in terms of defense, but he's kind of getting outclassed in every other metric.

Yeah, it's cool too, because I've run into some situations where I needed to completely remake my build right there for one specific fight, and the way that the Picto and Luminous system works, you can do that, and then you can just change your build back to something that fits a more general approach of just going through a level.

For example, there are fights where you fight alone.

Only one character can take part in this fight, and you can build up you can spec for a solo fight as opposed to a full party fight.

So stuff like that's great.

The only issue I had is it took me legitimately five to ten hours to understand the menu for the Picto's Aluminus.

I think they could have done better with that.

But otherwise, now that I get it, it's a cool character customization system.

It's an overflux of information for sure, but I think that appeals to those stats based players that like to play that like to play RPGs by the numbers.

You've got this huge, crunchy menu that you can just pour over, you know.

I'm I mean, I'm only nine ten hours into the game, and I've got upwards of thirty skills, you know, and that is a lot.

That's not even counting the fact that you could still equip things that you've already learned if you don't want to spend the ap on that.

It's a very crunchy mechanical game in that way, just like the j RPGs of the nineties and the early two thousands.

It's really, it's really, really something.

I cannot wait to see how this expression of play evolves.

I did get spoil old on the class of a character that's coming up, which I'm very excited to see how they do.

I I genuinely don't know how they're going to do it, but I can't wait to see it.

I was I was gonna say something earlier, but I held back.

But it's it's interesting, and I don't know if there are more characters in coming, but it's uh.

They they certainly have lots of ideas for how to make different characters feel extremely different from each other.

We would be remiss.

This episode is not going to be overly long, but we'd be remiss not to talk.

I think about the music, dude, Yeah, what are you?

What are you feeling about the soundtrack?

I could not be more positive about this soundtrack.

I'm blown away by it, and I don't have a lot of like really specific things to say or like, you know, I love this particular influence in here, but just like a few small things, like there's a bunch of songs that like don't sound really noteworthy on their own, but they have these really cool accents in them throughout.

There's a mansion in the game that you go to and the backing track is really just kind of chill, and then you have these like electric guitar accents that pop in and it's really cool.

And then there's another song that has a talk box in it.

Dude, I've been going nuts about this talk box because when was the last time you heard a talk box in a video game soundtrack?

And it sounds really cool.

So like stuff like that, the music will pop, but not in ways that I often am used to in video game soundtracks.

Like there are like the melodies and the main menu theme is great, and the battle songs are awesome.

But I can say that about a lot of RPG But there's a lot of these these tracks that have these things that just make me think, like, man, the composer is like really cooking in here, like trying weird stuff out.

Did you hear this story about the composer and how they got involved with this game?

By the way, Lorian Tastard, they found him on SoundCloud, right, yeah, just.

A random like I think they said.

The composer said they posted a track or a collection of tracks in a Discord server for indie game developers, and the people making this game found it and they were like, yeah, this is our guy.

So it's crazy the way that you would hear that and be like wow, they had they had a vision for what this soundtrack should be, and then because it fits perfectly.

In my opinion, I'll turn over to you.

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

I think it's great.

There's a lot of variety, there's a lot of contrasts, going back to that core theme.

What I think will be the core theme of this game is contrasts.

There's a lot of that in here.

The contrast between the areas, you know, the talk boxes versus the more intimate chamber settings versus the more low five beats to chill and perry to how I've seen it referred to what I really like.

There are some areas that are very that really do feel like they've got a French influence to them.

You know, there's this gracefulness that is in a lot of French chamber music and French works in elegance, in like a fragile elegance that is always there, even when the music it's a little heavy, it's always effervescent, sort of bubbly and fizzy, elegant.

It's refined, even if it's kind of folk inspired.

Again, contrasts the theme of Lumiere is, which is the opening area, by the way, is really nice.

You get this really singable folk melody dun dun da da da dundund very singable, very narrow range that just the common person can sing.

And even in that kind of plottingness of a singable folk melody that farmers sing, there's an elegance to it, a gracelessness.

There's gracefulness in gracelessness.

I guess you could say one thing, this is this is me going kind of pepe Sylvia a little bit.

You can find this soundtrack on Spotify, on band camp.

You can listen to the whole thing.

This is me going a little pepe Sylvia for a second.

And this isn't a spoiler, because I don't I'm just guessing and I think I'm looking too far into this.

But that theme of lumiere, you can boil that down to three notes d just three notes.

That's the skeletal structure.

It's how I used to describe it to students.

If you go to a much later track on the soundtrack that is titled after who I expect is the antagonist, although I think that might not be so simple wh all I'm saying, but it's named after that thing, that person.

Oh yeah, that skeletal structure is both alluded to and put forth in inversion.

So instead of da da dah, you get du du u.

And I think I'm looking way too far into it because that's just a three note motif that's incredibly common.

It's there's nothing weird about it.

And I don't have the music in front of me.

But if I'm right, I think that idea of contrasts, let's say Yin and Yang, for example, I think is going to play an immense part in the true nature of who we believe to be the antagonist.

That's all I'm That's all I'm gonna say.

Near near automata, near replicant to everybody.

The clear inspiration from those two games.

I think I'm really excited about it.

This soundtrack is terrific and it really I hope it makes everybody think for a second about how many astoundingly talented people are out there and we just don't know it.

Yeah, one hundred percent.

Like what what did Brendan Brendan Fraser's character in the Whale say, Like people are amazing, These people are everywhere and this this person just happened to be found in a discord Yep.

It's crazy to think of what it would have looked like for both sides had that not, had that, you know, game director not just been looking at a Discord server on the day before that message got buried by a bunch of other messages.

I'm sure a lot of people sharing their work and whoever that placed, uh, wherever that place is.

So it is kind of crazy to think.

Of Balatro too, Balatro too right, like just just a normal person that's making a creative endeavor and just happens to get noticed.

That is a life changing event.

Mm yeah, and that it turns I'm not I'm obviously I'm not going to say that if they picked a different composer, the soundtrack would have been less effective, but it turns it then sets like the tone of of what this game is because I think this is one of those sound tracks that is going to win a bunch of awards at the end of the year.

I think it's going to be a soundtrack that people are going to like, very very strongly associate with this game and the story most importantly.

So if they do, you know, return to some of those themes as as you thought, perhaps they will some of those motifs, I think it's going to be the type of thing where you're going to hear those notes or you're going to hear maybe an inversion of that phrase, and it's going to have an impact on you because it's obviously just a super well done composition across the board.

Like every new area that I go into, even if it's like wildly different music, I'm like, wow, this is this is just so good.

My prediction for Claire Obscure is that it is going to be in my personal running for Game of the Year.

Yeah, and I think this is going to be a j RPG that's talked about long after this year is over if they continue based on the try they've built in me already, I really firmly believe that.

Yeah, I have heard.

I know.

I read reviews when it came out, and a lot of reviews mentioned that they didn't love the direction that the story took, which they obviously didn't say what happened.

So I don't know what they're talking about, but I agree with you probably regardless of where the story ends up going, unless it's like really fucking dumb, it's gonna be very high on my personal game of the year.

And if they stick the landing, like you said, this feels like at all timer to me.

The first ten twelve hours that I played have certainly been all time stuff.

I have trouble trusting these early reviewers, not like early reviewers from like outlets, just early reviews in general.

Ever since I saw several several early reviews saying that, oh yeah, one thousand times resist it's just near but it's not done as well, It's like, all right, I can't trust anybody anymore.

I'm glad I missed the reviews.

Then yeah, yeah, geez, talk about reductive.

I I really believe in what I've played with this so far.

I'm just you know, I want to play it.

So let's end the episode I want to go play it.

I was gonna say, you know, like I, I, you and I we both have several games going out of time for our shows and for me personally, I always have one, maybe two, but usually it's just one that like when it's like, all right, I'm done with work, I'm sitting down at my PC, what am I going to play?

And there's usually one that's like, that's the one you want to play right now?

And that's absolutely this game.

So probably after we hang up, I will be on it very soon after we're done here today.

Same rather same, Well, that's we're going to keep this short.

That's all for today.

Look forward to more Clear Obscure in your feeds.

At least in this feed I can't I can't reveal the intentions and plans of others.

But in Pixel Project Radio Land and later in the year, maybe August November sometime around there, you'll see three or four episodes on this.

Until then, I think easy to say that we both recommend this wholeheartedly.

Yeah, absolutely, go check this out.

Take a break from Lunar, which I know you're all playing, and check out a new JRPG and Claire Obscure Expedition thirty three.

Thanks Dave for joining me.

Tales from the Backlog podcast, folks, check it out, check it out, Thank you, and until next time, I'm Rick, I'm your host and we'll talk to you against So take care,