Astral Ascent, the highly acclaimed indie action roguelite from 2023, has received the rare blessing that is a crossover with Sandfall Interactive's 2025 GOTY sweep, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Of course, by rare I mean singular, as there's yet to be any actual game content featuring characters or world elements from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 until now.
Announced in a Steam blog, Astral Ascent's Expedition 33: For Those Who Come After update is live now and free for all players, with the only requirement being completion of the main quest on base difficulty. Once you've got the update downloaded, you'll want to pop a seat at the new Campfire room, because you'll find some of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's best characters waiting there as special, themed summons.
Gustave is a support-type companion who heals you and gives you attack buffs, but he also has "a devastating" attack that charges up every time he's summoned. Maelle fights alongside you using a stance determined by your HP, shifting from attack to defense and unleashing a "powerful attack" that unlocks when she maintains the same stance for a while. Sciel is a card-based battler with mana regen, a basic strike attack, and a "powerful attack," each triggered under different conditions.
Meanwhile, Lune is an elemental spellcaster who syncs up with your own spell-using habits, and as is starting to become a pattern, she gets her own "powerful spell" when you summon her "enough times." Verso ranks up every time you hit an enemy and drops a rank with every hit you take, starting with an attack penalty and then building to a "massive attack bonus" as he ranks up. Finally, Monocco draws a random card from a set of five and unleashes a "powerful monster summon" based on the card he pulls.
There are also three new Expedition 33-themed rooms in Astral Ascent's crossover update: the aforementioned Campfire, the Lumière, where you square off with Petank and the Mimes with Lumière in the background, and the Gestral Village, where you face off against Golgra. Developer Hibernian Workshop says these rooms appear randomly before the final boss of each run, and you'll have the chance to pick between the Expedition 33-themed bosses or the usual Andromeda Bar, "but choose fast, it won't come back this run," warns the dev.
"We've wanted to do this for a long time. Getting to work with Sandfall Interactive on this crossover has been one of the best experiences we've had making Astral Ascent," the Astral Ascent team says in a statement. "Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game we fell in love with, like so many of you did, and this update is our way of paying tribute to it. Our biggest challenge was translating this world into our own pixel art, staying true to what makes these places feel alive while making them ours."
Speaking of crossovers, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 "broke" T-Pain with its "too sad" intro: "It gets worse? Absolutely not"
