The opening to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a master class in grabbing the player’s heart and wringing it out. That’s partly because the opening of Clair Obscur makes it clear that it’s a pandemic game.
In Clair Obscur, the people who live on the island city of Lumière have been besieged for 67 years by a magical curse that methodically kills certain people every year. Specifically, the curse kills older people—at least, at first. The curse counts down by one year every year, first killing everyone aged 100 and older, then everyone aged 99, and so on, every year until the events of Clair Obscur begin. At the game’s outset, a monolith in the distance of Lumière bears a glowing “34,” and as the opening unfolds, a mysterious goddess-like figure called the Paintress replaces the 34 with a 33. As soon as she does this, all of the 33-year-olds in Lumière disintegrate before the eyes of their peers and loved ones.
The game’s writing doesn’t actually make the terms of this curse very clear during this opening scene, or ever, really. You have to figure out how the curse works by talking to people and paying attention. This means that at the very beginning of the game, you’re just walking around the city of Lumière on the day of the “Gommage” (the day the Paintress changes the number on the monolith) without yet knowing what that means or what everybody in town seems to be preparing to experience.
There is a very important clue, though. There are no elderly people in the city of Lumière. There are no middle-aged people, either. In fact, there is no one over the age of 33, anywhere, at all. It was one of the most haunting parts of the game.
Why? Because seeing all of those young people in Lumière transported me instantly to specific experiences I had in my own neighborhood in Massachusetts in 2020. Even after my state’s stay-at-home advisory was lifted, the virus and its capacity to spread remained ill-understood. Many people remained at home and chose to do internet deliveries for essential resources like food and prescriptions, especially middle-aged and elderly people. This meant that, like in Lumière, there were young people on the streets. And yet these younger people nonetheless carried a shroud of fear upon them. Not always fear for themselves, specifically—a more generalized fear of the unknown force surrounding all of us, a force that could and did take older loved ones away from us.
One of my strongest memories was driving home to my apartment from the grocery store on an evening when the stay-at-home advisory was still in place. Even though it wasn’t allowed, some teenagers were hanging out near my apartment, standing closer to one another than the official guidance suggested (remember “six feet apart”?). But they didn’t look guilty to be breaking the rules; they looked haunted, tired, older than they should. They weren’t smiling or laughing at some personal joke; they weren’t even talking, actually. They were just standing near one another, not as though in defiance or solidarity, but more in a resigned sense that this tiny bit of rule-breaking was the best they had right now, and it still wasn’t that great.
As I ran around Lumière on the day of the Gommage, the Paintress’ monolith towering in the distance, all of these non-fantastical and grounded memories of COVID-19 came flooding back into my mind. Oh, I thought to myself. This is a pandemic game.
The game’s creators haven’t talked about COVID-19’s influence in terms of the game’s story, even though the game’s development began in 2020. But given that the COVID-19 pandemic was the world-shattering event of the past five years, it would be absurd not to assume it impacted the art that was created during its spread, whether the artists in question acknowledge that or not.
Video games tend to take a long time to make—several years, in most cases. And now that it’s 2025, we’re firmly in the realm of games that were directly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s definitely beginning to show.
There have also been games that remind me of COVID-19 with equal or greater frequency, but which couldn’t possibly have been influenced by it due to timing. Perhaps most notably, there’s the first Death Stranding, which came out on November 8, 2019 and depicted a world ravaged by a supernatural cataclysm that killed millions and left all of humankind relegated to bunkers, relying on postal workers to deliver their necessities. Did the developers at Kojima Productions have a crystal ball?
Jokes aside, it’s not like COVID-19 was the first-ever pandemic; Death Stranding’s development team had plenty of real-world examples to draw upon in designing that world, and so have the developers of many other famous pandemic-themed games, from The Last of Us to the long-running Pandemic board games. As humans, we’re clearly fascinated by the idea of stories about surviving terrible, world-changing events.
Death Stranding 2
But there were some circumstances that were very specific to the COVID-19 pandemic, and these are the circumstances that are popping up all over the place in 2025 video games that were developed during that specific pandemic. More specifically, I would argue that COVID-19 has changed the way that writers write pandemics. Good thing, too. It’s the one we all know best.
Take the upcoming horror game Cronos: The New Dawn as an example. It’s a horror game set in the wake of what looks to be a classic zombie video game pandemic, with its once-human monsters now horribly disfigured by a mysterious disease. Doesn’t seem so different from other survival horror zombie game premises, does it? OK, but hear me out. When I talked to the game’s co-directors, Jacek Zięba and Wojciech Piejko, at GDC for Polygon earlier this year, they explained that the in-game monsters can “merge” to create more powerful adversaries, and that a key goal for the player is to prevent infected enemies from being near one another. One of the in-game virus’ first symptoms was “people starting to feel an urge to come together,” which is pure science-fiction; the virus in this game literally creates the urge within infected people to continue to propagate the virus. And yet this premise is also the perfect horror twist on our natural human urge to not stay isolated, and to instead go outside and see people, despite the government’s warnings (Cronos: The New Dawn also features government-issued stay-at-home advisories).
Then, of course, there’s Death Stranding 2, the sequel to the game that felt like it had to be about COVID-19 even though it couldn’t possibly be. Naturally, its director Hideo Kojima was influenced by the worldwide pandemic that unfolded shortly after Death Stranding was released; even though he already had a script in mind for the sequel before the pandemic began, he told Wired that he rewrote it to take into account his and everyone’s experiences with COVID-19. The result, he said, “comes from a very intimate place, from thoughts like a sense of loneliness, the mystery of where the dead go, and the pain of not having had a true goodbye with someone we have lost.” Those same themes come up in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, by the way—and of course, there’s the darker side of rejecting isolation in Cronos: The New Dawn.
Date Everything
Not every game that takes inspiration from COVID-19 is a somber reflection on the nature of human connection, however. Some of them are comedic reflections on the nature of human connection. I’m talking about Date Everything!, the comedy visual novel designed by voice actor Ray Chase. In an interview I did with Chase on my podcast Triple Click, he agreed that the game was very pandemic-coded, even though he actually came up with the core idea before COVID-19 began. After all, you’re playing as somebody who’s completely isolated in their home, with only your household appliances to talk to. Those appliances appear to come to life thanks to the game’s science-fiction premise (you receive a pair of sci-fi glasses that let you see the true essence of each of these inanimate objects—and now you can, well, date them). And yet, the game’s maniacal energy and strange sense of humor really speak to how I felt as somebody who lived alone during COVID-19 and did start carrying on very extensive conversations with my cat. I mean, at least my cat is alive, and I didn’t start talking to (or trying to romance) my refrigerator, but Date Everything nonetheless feels very much like a product of the remote-workplace circumstances in which it was created. Once again, the theme here is the human longing for connection at whatever cost—in this game, the results are just more ridiculous than dangerous.
At this point, I’m sure there are other games in this emerging category that I either haven’t played or just haven’t put the pieces together on. I mean, what art isn’t influenced by the circumstances under which it was made, whether its creators intend it or not? Other critics could obviously identify movies, shows, books, and other art forms influenced by the pandemic, but video games tend to take a lot longer to make, and so it’s only now that it’s truly becoming clear as to what the pandemic’s effects on this medium are going to look like. Right now, we’re seeing video games that were made during the industry’s first significant work-from-home time period (during which, at times, working from home was not a choice so much as a government directive), as well as video games made in periods of very specific pandemic-related stress. It makes sense, then, that these examples focus on experiences like isolation and loneliness, and in the case of the more serious examples, mass death. This is a trend that’s likely just beginning to show itself, and as much as it may hurt to return to my own memories of the early pandemic in playing these games, art is meant to mirror human experience—and this is one we all shared, and one that will keep influencing all of us for many, many years to come.
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.
