Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Pulls the Same Trick as Wandavision—Except Here, It Works

By Maddy Myers | July 15, 2025 | 10:30am

Wandavision photo courtesy of Marvel/Disney

Video Games Features Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Pulls the Same Trick as Wandavision—Except Here, It Works

There’s something that’s always bothered me about the ending of WandaVision. And it was this specific part of WandaVision that I kept thinking about when I finally got to the end of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. (The rest of this article contains full spoilers for both the show and the game.)

In WandaVision, the protagonist Wanda Maximoff has the magical ability to bend reality to her will, and it’s such a powerful ability that sometimes she uses it without even realizing it or intending it. In a state of extreme grief over the death of Vision, the love of her life, Wanda regresses to a period of time in her childhood spent in a war-town fictional country where she witnessed mass death, including the deaths of her parents. Her happiest childhood memories were of watching American sitcoms, their repetitive and formulaic structure providing her great comfort during a time when nothing was certain and everything else in her life was out of control. And so, in WandaVision, Wanda’s grief-stricken regression causes her to unwittingly cast a magical spell on an entire town of people that forces them all to re-enact premises from various American sitcoms.

Wanda also manifests a version of her lover who is still alive, as well as a cute suburban home for the two of them to live in. She even manifests the rest of a nuclear family for them; they now have two young twin boys named Billy and Tommy. Except the problem is that her husband and two children don’t really exist at all. Except they also kind of do, because Wanda’s reality-wraping powers make it so that they do exist, for all intents and purposes.

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At the end of WandaVision, Wanda comes to the realization that she has unknowingly cast tons of innocent people into her warped play. But removing the spell on the rest of these innocent people will also cause her two sons and husband to disappear, so she is reluctant to do it, even once she realizes what she’s done. Wanda does eventually reverse the spell, but she seems more sad over what she’s losing rather than what she’s done to all the people she tortured.

The result is a finale that didn’t sit right with several critics and viewers, due to Wanda’s seeming lack of remorse. The part of the show that also bothered me, though, was its depiction of Wanda as someone who obsessively inhaled sitcoms during a time period of extreme grief. This is something that’s deeply relatable to most people; it’s something I’ve done myself. Sitcoms also have a lot in common with certain kinds of video games, especially if the game involves repetitive, soothing, formulaic tasks. They both scratch a similar itch, and they’re both things I’ve resorted to when I felt like I just needed to experience some control over something because everything else in my life was spinning out.

In WandaVision, that’s presented as a bad thing, ultimately, and I don’t disagree. At a certain point, you have to drag yourself out of that hole and face reality. But there’s a big difference between Wanda immersing herself in a fantasy world that only hurts her, and doing what she did in WandaVision. The former would be an experience that a lot more people would be able to relate to. The latter is absurd, especially because Wanda doesn’t even seem to care about how many people she hurt.

Clair Obscur pulls a very similar trick at the end of its story with main character Maelle, except that in Clair Obscur, the circumstances of Maelle’s magic spell are pretty different. Here’s how it works: in the world where Maelle comes from, some people have the ability to make magical paintings in which the inhabitants of the painting are so real that they may as well be alive. These painters (or paintresses, as they’re goofily called if it’s a female painter) can also enter into their own paintings and live in them. This is the part of the game’s mythos that makes painting seem a heck of a lot more like designing a video game than painting a canvas, incidentally.

Maelle’s family, the Dessendres, comprises a long line of painters with these abilities, including Maelle. But most of Clair Obscur isn’t set in Maelle’s world. The twist at the end of Clair Obscur is that it was all actually set in the world of a canvas that originally belonged to Maelle’s brother Verso. After Verso tragically died in a house fire, Maelle’s mother took Verso’s canvas and began painting more people into it, including her dead son. She then entered the painting and lived there with her family, much like Wanda Maximoff, acting as though Verso was still alive—because, in the painting she created, he was. He was only a facsimile of the previous person, of course, but he seemed so real that Maelle’s mother never wanted to leave.

In the world of Clair Obscur, staying in a painting too long has some serious side effects, namely that you completely lose all grip on reality and forget it even existed at all. This is presented as a magical form of mental deterioration, but it obviously harkens back to the experience of devoting yourself too much to other forms of media (e.g., sitcoms, video games). Grief is the understandable and relatable catalyst here as well.

The frustrating thing about the ending of Clair Obscur is that it has “it was all a dream” energy, in some ways. It can be tough to get through an entire story with an enjoyable, charismatic ensemble cast only to find out that none of them were real and they were all figments of some other character’s imagination. That’s basically what the main characters in Clair Obscur are; Gustave, Sciel, Lune, Monoco, and Esquie are not real people, they’re paintings of people. Maelle is the only one who’s “real,” and even she doesn’t actually know it at first, because she’s lost her memories of the outside world.

That’s by design, because in the real world, Maelle survived the house fire, but in the process, her face was severely wounded and so was her larynx, to the point where she can no longer speak at all. Maelle’s mother pulls her into Verso’s canvas so that Maelle could live as a version of herself who could still talk. Once Maelle discovers she’s in a painting, though, and remembers what her real body in the real world is actually like, she doesn’t want to return to it. She wants to stay in the painting, where she can still talk, and where her dead brother Verso is still alive.

Clair Obscur makes it clear this decision would be a bad one for Maelle. There are two endings that the player can choose at the end of the game: Maelle can stay in the painting, or she can leave and allow her father to destroy the Canvas and everyone who “lives” there, including the facsimile of Verso. Before you make this choice, the Verso facsimile will beg Maelle to choose to leave the canvas, saying he craves death and an escape from the false “life” with which he’s been cursed.

If you don’t listen to Verso and let Maelle keep living in the painting, the results look pretty terrible. In a final cutscene, Maelle is depicted as having fully lost her grip on reality, just as her mother did when creating the painting in the first place. She sits in a concert hall surrounded by her “friends” (the ensemble cast of Clair Obscur, all of whom are figments of her mother’s imaginings). Her brother Verso, or rather the facsimile of him, angrily walks out onto the stage to perform a piano concerto for his sister, who—as the only “real” person in this situation—controls all of reality. Similar to WandaVision, Maelle is torturing these people, but unlike WandaVision, they aren’t real people, per se.

The “good” ending, I would argue, is the one in which Maelle comes to terms with the disability she has in her world, as well as with her brother’s death. This ending is a lot less dramatic and doesn’t include the fun horror movie musical stings that are in the other ending. It just shows Maelle with her family standing at Verso’s grave, all of them finally grieving his loss together, no longer in a painting.

It’s disappointing to realize that so many of the great characters in Clair Obscur weren’t “real.” But that’s the entire point of the game—it’s a video game, a beautiful place you could live inside for hours upon hours. And that metaphor, as presented in the game, is also about the dangers of staying too long in fictional worlds, especially if you’re only doing it to avoid experiencing feelings that you need to feel.

Clair Obscur’s characters are so well-written and fully-realized that it’s actually hard to believe that they aren’t real people, though. As far as complaints go, that’s my main one (I admit it’s funny to complain that a game is too well-written). In the ending where Maelle leaves the painting, we’re treated to cutscenes in which our main cast of characters evaporate into thin air as the canvas on which they live gets destroyed for good. Verso may have begged for death, but these other characters all wanted to live—and are their lives real, or not? It’s an open question.

In WandaVision, the answer to this question is far more obvious. The brainwashed people acting out Wanda’s fantasy were definitely real, and torturing them was wrong, full stop. But in Clair Obscur, the ethics are a bit harder to parse. By choosing the ending where Maelle returns to her world, it feels like I—the player—killed off Gustave, Sciel, Lune, Monoco, and Esquie. And unlike many video games with poor character writing, these characters do feel like actual people. It feels bad to watch them disappear.

But in the world of Clair Obscur, isn’t that the point? It feels bad to finish a video game and have to face the real world, especially when you’re going through something traumatic that you’d prefer to escape. If you finish a wonderful television show or video game, it can almost feel like a death, especially if the characters in it were extremely meaningful to you. You might want the experience to continue on and on, forever. But you can’t.

And if that’s the lesson Clair Obscur’s writers wanted to impart, then I’d say—unlike WandaVision—it worked.

Maddy Myers has worked as a video game critic and journalist since 2007; she has previously worked for Polygon, Kotaku, The Mary Sue, Paste Magazine, and the Boston Phoenix. She co-hosts a video game podcast called Triple Click, as well as an X-Men podcast called The Mutant Ages. When she is not writing or podcasting, she composes electro-pop music under the handle MIDI Myers. Her personal website is midimyers.com.