For the last decade or so, I have watched as the rhythm game genre has slowly withered away. A lack of new, exciting ideas (outside of rare diamonds like Hi-Fi Rush or Thumper) and Harmonix getting bought by Epic Games has left the genre feeling rather bare. While Fortnite Festival brought Rock Band and Guitar Hero's formula back in 2023 – albeit with a lifeless, homogenized art style – playing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on Expert difficulty has unintentionally (or maybe even intentionally) given me the huge, showpiece rhythm game I have wanted for years.
Indie games have been trying to keep the spirit of the genre alive. But, there hasn't been a big, ambitious rhythm game that felt like it was the next step for the genre in a long time. And, while I didn't go into Expedition 33 wanting it to be that game, after five or so hours with it I realized it was doing more for the genre than anything in recent years.
Cut the music
In our Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 review we said that "this is an old-school feeling JRPG as dynamic as Persona but with parry-filled battles as hard-won as Sekiro".
Rhythm games have been stuck in the shadow of what came before them for a long time. Using music as the base of a game's rhythm has been the template that they have followed ever since Rock Band and Guitar Hero hit it big.
While the genre has shifted to new areas with games like Crypt of the Necrodancer and the aforementioned Hi-Fi Rush, most of these games have still revolved around music by having you perform actions on the beat. Beat Saber, Fortnite Festival, Metal Hellsinger, and Robobeat are all brilliant games, but they haven't evolved rhythm games. Instead, they have pushed forward their respective genres in new ways or translated the existing formula to a new perspective, whether that be VR, first-person shooters, or social games.
But Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, on Expert difficulty especially, pushes rhythm games forward by daring to ask: what if a rhythm game wasn't about the music at all? By implementing reactive, active button presses into a turn-based combat system, the game's rhythmic drive is about memorizing small clusters of actions, and one-off clashes that are intense and satisfying to pull off, but let you take a breather between them. It doesn't force you to constantly stay on top of a beat like Metal: Hellsinger does, or stay intensely focused on a monitor for 3 minutes at a time like when you play a song in Fortnite Festival.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers an experience that revolves around short, snackable flurries of rhythm and learning to master and memorize them to succeed, thanks to it being turn-based. It doesn't matter whether you are parrying or dodging a three-hit enemy combo, or pressing a face button on a controller to deal extra damage with an attack, that core is still there. This expands as the game moves into the second half of act 1 and act 2, as mechanics like jumping, counterattacks, gradient parries, and gradient attacks are introduced, deepening the rhythmic options to choose from and asking you to memorize when to pull each one off and to interchange between them.
On Expert difficulty, the game feels perfectly tuned to replicate the challenge and demand that keeps rhythm game fans like me hooked, constantly asking more from the player as bosses get more complicated, movesets expand, and timing becomes more acute in late-game and endgame areas. It's the same progression you get in rhythm games as you build up to higher difficulties and tackle more challenging songs. However, it is wrapped inside of a continent-spanning, visually impressive RPG and delivered in an entirely new way through these bite-sized moments of rhythm with breaks in between each attack or enemy combo.
As moves like the jump and gradient parry get introduced, the game even plays around with symbols, visual effects, and color to symbolize where and when you need to parry, attack, or dodge. It even forces you to look at several of these factors at times. For example, while the screen turning black and white signifies that you need to Gradient Parry an enemy's attack, it doesn't tell you how long the wind up time for that attack is, requiring you to register that you need to Gradient Parry and also observe the enemy's animation and sound effects as it attacks to precisely time your dodge or parry.
It's a full sensory rhythmic experience in a way the genre has never been able to achieve, even in VR. In that way, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 feels like it will be as pivotal for rhythm games as Demon's Souls and Dark Souls have been for action games. I hope that after seeing what Sandfall Interactive has done with rhythm gameplay here, developers will push to use rhythm in fascinating and innovative ways in games in the future. I dream studios discuss and brainstorm how rhythm can go beyond music and be translated across the visual and audio experience. I pray that in five years, a new generation of rhythm games will have emerged and the genre will finally leave past conventions behind.
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