Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a depressing game. It’s epic and majestic, but undoubtedly bleak. Luckily, it also has some hilarious moments timed with comedic perfection, which somehow never feel out of place. It’s a credit to the writers, and the performances of the voice actors. These are my favourite funny moments of Expedition 33.
Monaco Joins the Party
The first time you meet him, Monoco has absolutely zero interest in joining you. He’s living the good life, he’s got his train station and wants nothing to do with the Paintress and your quest to kill her. But he’s also a Gestrel, and Gestrels love a bit of violence. A lot.
So Monoco belligerently refuses to help his old friend Verso for several moments, and you assume he’s never going to be convinced. But then this happens:
Verso: We’re going to old Lumiere. Monaco: Okay, bye. Verso: There’s gonna be a lot of fighting. Monaco. Okay, I’m in.
And this game’s version of a blue-mage joins your party.
Oh, What Lovely Feet
Shortly after he’s joined you comes this hilarious realisation about Monoco: the guy collects feet. Whenever you kill a nevron with Monoco in your party, he adds a new foot to his ever growing, presumably stinking, collection of monster feet. It’s completely bonkers, but serves a very handy purpose, as each one grants Monoco a new ability.
From then on, you’ll often hear Monoco’s crooning battle cry as a new fight begins: “Oh what lovely feet…”
Esquie’s Noises
Esquie was a surprise hit for me. My first impression was that he’d be this annoying flamboyant fool of a character, but he grew on me pretty quickly. When you unlock his various abilities, you get to hear him chant and sing whenever he starts to run, goes swimming or takes flight, and it’s funny every time:
“I’m the fastest swimmer!” “Wheeeee!” “Flying through the sky!”
He’s charming, whimsical and a welcome joy in a game that is full of so much grief and sadness.
Get Out of My Way!
Before you can even meet Esquie, you have to get past his bodyguard, which is one of the earliest funny moments in Act 1. You’re given the password by the Gestrel leader Golgra. This moment is funny in itself, as she tells you the password is simply “get out of the way”, with the instruction that you have to shout it as loud as you can. But then the moment comes when Gustave actually does it, and the poor guard is so offended and upset that you yelled at him, he sulkily moves aside, explaining that he doesn’t even know the real password. “I never realised humans could be so rude.”
Gestrel Math
The Gestrels give you various challenges at beaches scattered around the game map, and one little twerp gave me an annoying math problem to solve. He told me his current age, then asked the hypothetical question that if he were a human, how old would he be when he gommaged? I spent a good five minutes calculating it, by adding up from his age, at the same time as counting down from 33, straining my brain, wanting to get the answer right first time. I gave him my answer, 17. And he goes, “You’re probably right. I can’t count anyway.” I cracked up.
I want to talk about Cloudpunk, a game where you get to be a flying-car delivery driver in a futuristic cyberpunk city. Its world is an incredible achievement of environmental design, and while the gameplay itself may be basic, the city of Nivalis is a thing of beauty to behold. Nivalis is built out of hundreds of hand-modelled cuboid buildings; there’s nothing procedural about it. Apparently it took 3 years for the devs to design the city, and it really shows.
I do love me some quality pixel art, and it doesn’t get much better than this. Cast n Chill is a cozy side-scrolling fishing game by small indie dev team Wombat Brawler, with absolutely gorgeous visuals. It’s simple to play, and you you can dip in and out of it at your leisure, making it a fine addition to our collection of coffee break games.
Is bingeing bad for us? It seems an obvious question, but I have been thinking about it lately, while revisiting Lost, the tv show that started 22 years ago (cripes, I feel old). Back when it was airing, my friends and I watched it religiously every week, talked about it in great detail, eagerly awaiting the next episode. It was the definitive show of its time, sparking debates and endless theories. It felt great to be a part of that, the sense of all experiencing the same thing together over a long period of time – most seasons had over 20 episodes, which is way more than most shows get these days – and they aired one by one, every week for several months. In today’s age of bingeing a show from beginning to end, I wonder what we are missing by not taking our time.
It’s difficult to describe the levels of hype that I felt leading up to the release of Half Life 2, and I know I wasn’t alone. This was a generation-defining moment in gaming, the likes of which has never really been replicated, and likely never will, for multiple reasons. Not only was HL2 a huge leap forward for its artistic and technological design, it ushered in an entirely new way to buy games and changed the gaming landscape forever.
I’ve played many versions of Mario Kart, first on the Snes at a friend’s house, followed by my own copy of the N64 version. The Nintendo DS edition got a lot of play during the various anime conventions that I attended between 2006 and 2011, where you could LAN it up via Bluetooth with anyone else in the vicinity. But the version I truly have the fondest memories of has to be Mario Kart Wii.
Now and then one can’t help climbing aboard the hype train. You work yourself up into a frothing frenzy in anticipation of some new game whose trailers and screenshots make it seem like the best…thing…EVER. That’s how I felt about Conker’s Bad Fur Day when I first read about it in N64 Magazine (before the internet butchered the magazine industry). They did several preview write-ups about it in the years before it was released, and it changed from being a cutesy 3D adventure, to merely looking like a cutesy 3D adventure plastered with a layer of adult filth. I couldn’t have been more excited to play it. Did it live up to my expectations? Hell yes.
