Review Summary: One of the rare game soundtracks that earns its length.
In an industry of oversaturated, lifeless cash-grabs (and this false narrative being spun that single player video games are no longer profitable in the medium), Clair Obscur is a defiant breath of fresh air. It’s made by a small team with probably a fraction of what AAA devs are working with, yet somehow crushes what most big studios are seemingly capable of. It features this wild aesthetic style, like if a French painter had a fever dream and dumped it into a game engine, and I mean that in the best way. There’s this heavy atmosphere that just sticks to you, and the world doesn’t feel like it's cribbing notes from old JRPGs. It feels lived in. It feels intentional. The crazy thing is the soundtrack is doing so much of the heavy lifting. This OST doesn’t just back the world; it builds it. Put simply: if the game didn’t have this score, it wouldn’t be this game.
Across its absurd 154 tracks, the Clair Obscur OST carves out a world that feels solemn, enchanted, and most of all, tragic. It’s a kind of world-spanning musical language — sung, whispered, and occasionally belted out in operatic bursts — that manages to feel just as rooted in delicate memory as it does grand gestures. And unlike a lot of modern game scores, it rarely feels like it’s straining for emotional payoff.
You hear it in “Une Vie a Peindre,” easily one of the most breathtaking tracks in the entire OST. The title (A Life to Paint) feels like a mission statement, but the music itself tells a different story: not a quiet reflection, but an all-out reckoning. It starts slow, elegiac, almost resigned, before launching into full choral assault, flipping from mournful to defiant in seconds. It’s the kind of track so epic it makes a fight feel like the last page of a myth being written in real time. Same goes for “We Lost,” another towering centerpiece. Both tracks are paired with some of the game’s most punishing boss encounters, and the music doesn't just support that scale, it matches it, beat for beat. In the Simon fight especially, “We Lost” sounds like the end of the world. Not necessarily a collapse, but a battle to keep something sacred from being erased. If that sounds hyperbolic, well, yeah it kind of is, but it can’t be helped.
There’s far more going on than just these grandiose moments though. There’s a lot of ambient worldbuilding too, and it’s not throwaway. “Children of Lumière” (the world map theme) does what world map themes rarely do anymore: it stays with you. It doesn’t just signal you’re moving from one place to the next; it feels like it’s bearing witness to history, like it’s quietly mourning the weight of each step (you’ll get this more if you play the game).
Vocal pieces like “Sirène – Poème d’Amour” and “Lumière” also help to flesh out areas in the world. They aren’t just highlights, they’re entire narrative arcs wrapped in melody. The former in particular: Alice Duport‑Percier’s voice is huge here, but not in a flashy, Broadway kind of way. Her delivery sits somewhere between folksy lullaby and mournful prayer, and the way her vocals are layered and looped creates this almost ritualistic aura, like the game’s entire mythology is revealing itself. How these tracks are woven into the game’s areas is a masterclass of sequencing and atmosphere, but what’s truly impressive is how good they sound even outside of the context of the game.
The OST plays with many different moods and textures, too. Take “Monoco,” which is flamboyant, chaotic, and almost cartoonishly energetic in its jazziness. Or “Ancient Sanctuary – Gestral Summer Party,” a carefree, sun-drenched groove that sounds like the soundtrack to a festival no one expects to end in tragedy. These moments of levity never feel out of place, and they keep the world strange, vibrant, alive. It’s not all doom and melancholy. There’s joy here too, even if it’s usually colored by some kind of fragility.
In isolation, the ost is too long to listen to, but for the most part, this is one of the rare game soundtracks that earns its length. Yes, you’ll find short transitional cues, ambient filler, scene-setters. Even those pieces belong in the world of Clair Obscur, but there’s no denying an 8+ hour soundtrack isn’t the easiest thing to approach outside of the context of the game.
And despite all the praise I’ve thrown at it, it’s not forging some new genre or toying with crazy experimental elements. Comparisons to other game soundtracks can definitely be made here. The obvious one is NieR, especially in the way both soundtracks use vocals as emotional world-mapping. You could also point toward Ori or Hollow Knight for their ambient cohesion, but Clair Obscur leans more into romanticism and theatricality. You get strings that swell, choirs that haunt, and moments of stillness that feel like grief held in suspension.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a weird, stylish, confident game, and it knows what the hell it wants to be. No corporate filter. No microtransactions. No algorithms trying to predict your next dopamine hit. Just pure, unfiltered imagination, backed by one of the most thrilling and emotionally rich soundtracks the medium has seen in years. In a landscape dominated by safe bets and recycled formulas, Clair Obscur is a line drawn in the sand: a reminder that you don’t need a billion-dollar budget to make something unforgettable. You just need vision and passion, and a soundtrack that matches those values.
