"Cruel Choices": Thoughts on the Endings of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Expedition 33: The French JRPG is a phenomenal turn-based roleplaying video game developed by Sandfall Interactive and released in 2025. As is common of the genre, the game offers two possible endings to its complex story, determined by player choice. I had my issues with both of them, but the game has a lot to offer overall, and it's best played knowing as little about it as possible. If you haven't played it and there's any possibility you ever will, I'd ask you to stop reading now. 

 

For games you play after.

 

I. A Life to Love

 

Setting aside any personal preferences for which ending is best, Verso's is pretty straightforward, I think. The Canvas is erased. All the painted beings within it die. Maelle returns to the real world and becomes Alicia again. No longer having a fantasy world in which they can escape from their grief, the Dessendres are left to face it head-on. Reunited as a family, they may finally have the strength to overcome it. And at the end, Alicia must say goodbye not just to everyone she lost in both worlds, but to the life she might have had as Maelle. Her vision of her friends and her other self fades away, leaving her alone and facing an open path.

As a conclusion to the narrative we've just watched play out, Verso's ending is neat, clean, and thematically satisfying. So much of the game is about death and grief and the way people deal with them. All the conflict in the story happens because Verso's mother couldn't deal with her son's death in an emotionally healthy way. She ran away from her grief and hid in a dollhouse of her own design. Alicia wanted to stay in that same dollhouse and live as Maelle, even though it would have killed her. Verso was willing to betray and condemn everyone who cared about him in order to rescue his sister from that fate. By driving her out of the Canvas and then destroying it, he forced her to see the world as it is, not as she wanted it to be. Now she can let go, move on, and make of her future whatever she can. She doesn't get the life she wanted, but no one ever does.

Fin.

 

 
The problem with the dollhouse metaphor, of course, is that in the Canvas, the dolls are people. This is why, despite loving its bittersweet thematic denouement, I can't countenance Verso's ending to the story. It's not a matter of wanting a happy ending or being upset that my favorite characters didn't survive, it's that by making everything come down to a binary choice between Verso and Maelle, we completely lose touch with the characters who held our primary emotional investment for much if not most of the game. This is also an issue in Maelle's ending, but I'll get to that in a moment.

I know that some players see the painted inhabitants of the Canvas as false people, nothing more than NPCs in a game of Sims played by the Painters, but I honestly find this such a blatantly deliberate misreading of the text that it scarcely bears discussion. The game never seriously suggests it, and spends a great deal of time convincing the player of the opposite. There is never any ontological discussion of what it means to be alive, no existential crisis from painted characters questioning their own reality. The only Painter who doesn't see the people of Lumière as sapient, autonomous beings is Clea, and the casual cruelty of her disregard makes complete sense for her cold, pragmatic personality. By contrast, the faded shade of young Verso says that "everything in this Canvas is as much alive as what is outside," while Aline sends Lumière a sign every year to warn them of who she can no longer protect from the Gommage. 

Even Renoir, who spends the entire game trying to destroy the Canvas and everyone in it, treats them as real people. He apologizes to Verso for the tortured life he was painted to lead. He commiserates with Sciel over the loss of her husband and unborn child. He acknowledges that Maelle's friends' arguments for their own existence are sound. He's still going to destroy them, but not because he doesn't see them as real; he simply values his family's lives over anyone else's.

"Burn the whole city," Majesty muses, shaking his head in slow disbelief. "That's pretty extreme for the life of one woman."

"Fuck the city," I tell him. "I'd burn the world to save her."

— Matthew Stover, Heroes Die

Perhaps even more significantly, for the first two acts of the game we are invested exclusively in painted characters. The prologue makes us fall in love with Sophie and acquaints us with the people of Lumière, only to break our hearts with the existential horror of the Gommage. We spend Act I as Gustave, watching our in-game avatar grapple with the trauma of losing the woman he loves, witnessing the violent deaths of all his friends, and almost ending his own life, only for his story, too, to end in tragedy. Then we become Verso, but not really; our Verso is no more real and no less fake than all the other denizens of this world where life is made of chroma. Even Maelle, arguably the central character of the entire game, is a painted construct; she doesn't become "real" until her memories of her life as Alicia return in Act III, though they coexist alongside the memories of her life in the Canvas as Maelle. Both sets of experiences are equally real to her. Lune, Sciel, Monoco, Esquie: every character we can befriend and develop a relationship with is made from paint.

I fundamentally don't understand how someone could experience the vast majority of this story, then argue in good faith that the eleventh-hour reveal means that the game wants us to think that nothing we went through mattered, none of it was real, we were just wasting our time getting emotionally invested in soulless simulacra acting out preprogrammed behaviors, and the correct decision now is to burn down the Canvas and everyone in it.

To me it's a justification to avoid having to weigh one family's emotional well-being against the genocide of the Gestrals, the Grandis, the white Nevrons, Esquie and Francois, and the people of Lumière, but that's the choice the game is asking you to make. You can't reason your way out of it without intentionally missing the point. If Mass Effect 3's Destroy ending didn't require the deaths of EDI and the geth in exchange for destroying the Reapers, everyone would pick it. If Verso's ending didn't require the destruction of the Canvas in exchange for Maelle healthily processing her grief, everyone would pick it. Life keeps forcing cruel choices.

II. A Life to Paint

 

At the end of my game, I sided with Verso, not realizing that doing so would entail destroying the Canvas. My main intention was to save Maelle by getting her to leave the painting, but after seeing Lune's look of total betrayal and melancholic resignation, I knew I must have picked the bad ending. Somehow, though, watching the alternative on YouTube didn't feel any better. 

 

Mfw when he destroys the world after we banged in the woods because he promised he wouldn't try to destroy the world anymore.

 

In contrast to the clear-cut nature of Verso's ending, Maelle's feels asymmetrically vague and ambiguous. It raises many more questions than it answers, some of which have no apparent reason for being asked. 

 

Nobody Likes You When You’re 33

 

Some players insist that there must have been a considerable time skip between Verso's duel with Maelle and his recital before the resurrected population of Lumière, because in the epilogue he looks so much older. Ten or fifteen years easily could have passed, because Verso just looks so darn old!

 

Am I crazy or does he not, like at all? His scar has healed, and he's no longer dying his hair, which we know is naturally white. And those are the only differences I see. The "wrinkles" people talk about just look like the normal facial lines of a mature adult to me. The grayscale filter makes them stand out more, and I feel like there's a good chance the game uses higher resolution textures in cinematics like this one than it does in gameplay, because that's a common thing games do. Maybe he's supposed to be older, but if so, why wouldn't they have made him significantly older to avoid any confusion over whether or not he's aged? 

 

And what about the other characters in the scene? Unless Maelle unpainted Verso's immortality and replaced it with rapid aging (why would she do that?), shouldn't Lune, Sciel, Gustave, and Maelle herself all look older too? Well, some people say that they do. 

 

Am I going insane? 

 

The Boy

 

The primary reason people think there was a lengthy time jump, other than Verso's gray hairs, seems to have to do with the kid Maelle brings to Verso's piano recital at the Lumière opera house. Who is this kid?

 

 

He must be important because the developers put him in the final scene of the game, where he's the only NPC shown directly interacting with the main characters. But who the hell is he, and why is he hanging out with our heroes? The same small handful of fan theories usually come up in answer to these questions.

 

1. "He's Gustave's apprentice, Guillaume." 

 

No he isn't.

 

 

2. "He's Lune and Verso's son."

 

I find this slightly more plausible, but it still doesn't feel right. He does look kind of like Verso, and Lune is the only character besides Maelle who interacts with him, displaying affection and familiarity as he sits between them in the opera house. I know that Verso can briefly be seen wearing a wedding ring in this scene, but the fact that the camera never focuses on it suggests to me that the suit Verso wears for a few seconds at the recital is just a re-textured version of his Renoir's Suit outfit, which includes the ring. Notably, Lune is not wearing a matching ring in this scene.

 

More significantly, Verso and Lune getting married and having a kid doesn't feel like an adequately telegraphed outcome for those characters. She is a romanceable party member, but so is Sciel, and following either path is completely optional. If you didn't romance her, the two of them suddenly being married in the epilogue would come out of nowhere. And even if you did, how many times is she going to forgive him for trying to kill her?

 

The final clue people point to for this theory is the lyrics to "Maelle," the song that plays over the credits following Maelle's epilogue (Verso's gets a different song):

 

Verso dans la nuit 

Lune près de lui 

 

These lyrics are generally translated as "Verso in the night, Lune close to him." Versune ship confirmed canon?

 

Well, the same lyrics appear in "Alicia," the track that plays over the title screen. That's always the same regardless of the ending you eventually get or the romance you eventually pursue, if any. I'd be wary of trying to arrive at any definitive interpretation of the plot based on translated soundtrack lyrics. Who knows which was even written first, the song or the ending? 

 

3. "He's the Young/Faceless Boy, repainted by Maelle as a normal human child."

 

This was the impression I got when I first watched the epilogue, if only because of the cinematic language of the scene transition. We fade to black on Maelle center-frame with her back to the camera, the Faceless Boy—young Verso's soul shard—painting on the right. We then jump ahead an indeterminate amount of time. The shot tracks through the opera house before stopping on Maelle center-frame, her back to the camera, the unknown boy standing on her right. The visual connection is clear, but the narrative logic doesn't follow.

 

When a Painter creates a world in a Canvas, they leave a part of their soul inside it. This is the engine that powers the world, a literalization of the idea of an artist "putting their soul into their art." Verso created his Canvas as a child, so the game visualizes the "sliver" (Clea's word) or "piece" (Renoir's word) of his soul as a small boy continuously painting within a pocket dimension to maintain the existence of the Canvas.

 

I've seen this idea likened to "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," but the comparison doesn't hold water. In that story, Omelas is a utopian city whose people live in perfect luxury and bliss, but that state can only be maintained by the perpetual torture of a child. It's an ethical thought experiment: would you stay in paradise despite knowing the cost, even if it's paid by someone you'll never meet, or would you be one of the few who walk away from Omelas?

 

The inhabitants of the Canvas have no ability to walk away. The Faceless Boy doesn't sustain a perfect city in an imperfect world, he sustains the world entire. If he stops painting, the Canvas and everyone in it will be destroyed.

 

It's also inaccurate to view him as a true human child. He is a piece of the soul of a dead man; what exactly that means or entails is never explained. He manifests in the shape of a child, but he has been painting for thousands of years, and appears to lack the basic human autonomy to stop of his own free will. No one is forcing him to paint, but he doesn't stop until Verso—our Verso, the painted Verso—tells him to. From what we know, every painted Canvas in the Clair Obscur universe has a similar soul fragment powering it. Is the very act of creating a Canvas an immoral act perpetuating eternal slavery? The game never raises this as a conundrum or suggests it to be the case.

 

It's not clear exactly what the connection is between the soul shard you meet at the end of the game and the manifestations of the Faceless Boy you have encountered throughout it. His counterparts of the Fading Man and Fading Woman seem to be psychic or spiritual "echoes" of Renoir and Clea, respectively, left behind from their acts of creation within Verso's Canvas. The Faceless Boy, or Young Boy, looks like the soul shard, but the former can carry on a lucid conversation while the latter is mute; the former appears in various locations across the Canvas, but the latter can never stop painting in his pocket dimension or the Canvas will die.

 

If they aren't exactly the same, though, what they represent is similar enough: lingering aspects of Verso left behind in the Canvas long after his death. As such, I think we can take them both as truthful expressions of the same soul. Painted Verso asks the soul shard if he's tired of painting, to which he assents by nodding his head. People take this as evidence that he is being eternally tormented by maintaining the Canvas and he wants it destroyed so he can stop, justifying Verso's ending. 

 

But this complex interpretation of a simple action is not in agreement with what the Young Boy says when you encounter him in the overworld. There, he shows a more conflicted perspective. He's saddened by the disharmony in the Canvas and repeatedly asks you to stop his sister Clea's various creations from killing people. "Maybe I should continue," he says. "If that were a choice." In most of his encounters, he talks almost exclusively about Clea, and his main source of discontent seems to be how she has soured on the world they painted together as children and now has her Nevrons running around it wreaking havoc. "Stop her paintings from erasing any more," he pleads. If he wanted the whole Canvas erased, why does he only ask you to stop the Nevrons? Is it possible the discordance caused by the Dessendres' family drama playing out in his childhood fantasy world is the source of his tiredness, rather than a weariness of perpetually painting the world in general? Verso never asks.

 

Regardless, the point is that the real Verso's fragment of soul that powers the Canvas must keep painting in his pocket dimension or else the Canvas will be destroyed, as we seen in Painted Verso's ending when he tells the soul sliver to stop. So in Maelle's ending, how could he be at the opera house watching the piano recital?

 

4. "He's just some random kid from Lumière, it doesn't matter."

 

If it doesn't matter then why would the developers put him in the most important scene in the game?

It's frustrating trying to understand what happens in Maelle's ending when this new character is front and center for it and we have no idea who he's supposed to be. 

 

Dead Is Dead

 

Besides the boy, the second most notable attendee of Verso's recital is the long-departed Gustave. 

 

I love Gustave. Gustave is my favorite character in the game. His death was the most shocking thing I've ever experienced in a video game, and when he died it changed the course of the story. But he did die. I watched him die. I mourned for him and watched the other characters mourn for him. I saw how his loss affected Maelle and altered her journey's trajectory. I missed him for a long time, and while I eventually got over it, the game never felt quite the same without him. Then in Maelle's ending he's just there, smiling and laughing and joking like nothing happened, like he never tried to kill himself, like he never died. 

I could live with the ambiguity of Maelle's and Verso's ultimate fates. Is he a puppet being forced to perform against his will? Has she gone mad with power and turned all of Lumière into her reanimated thralls? Anything's possible, but there's room for doubt. But watching Gustave and Sophie stroll into the concert hall, brought back from the dead off-screen without a word, casually nullifying the two moments that defined the tone of the entire game—that felt wrong in a way I can't live with. 

To reiterate, Gustave is my favorite character. I did not want him to die. But he did die, and it meant something. If he can come back just as easily, what does that mean?

What does it mean for Sciel, another character defined by grief, to have her years-dead husband restored to life as if by rubbing a magic lamp? Pierre wasn't killed by Nevrons, Gommaged by Renoir, or murdered by Renoir's painted duplicate. He drowned in an accident. It's sad, but tragedy is a part of life. What kind of life can the people of Maelle's Lumière expect in a world where even natural death is subject to erasure?

As for Sciel, she was so badly devastated by her husband's death she tried to drown herself, only to heap trauma upon trauma when the only one who died was the unborn baby she hadn't known she was carrying. The character we meet and watch develop throughout the game is a product of all that trauma, loss, grief, and guilt. When we, as Verso, help her overcome her fear of swimming, we're helping her forgive herself. Who is Sciel if all the pain that made her who she is can be undone so easily? Who are any of us?

"You know that pain and guilt can't be taken away with the wave of a magic wand. They're the things we carry with us, the things that make us who we are. If we lose them, we lose ourselves. I don't want my pain taken away. I need my pain."

 

— Captain James Kirk

The Avengers could restore everyone dematerialized by the Snap, but they couldn't bring back Loki, Gamora, or Vision (they eventually came back anyway, but, you know, whatever). The story could have been written to allow Maelle to save the people of Lumière who were Gommaged after the defeat of the Paintress while being unable to resurrect the characters who died before that, whose deaths had emotional weight and significance to the narrative. The answer was right there, when Maelle explains why she could restore Lune and Sciel from their freshly Gommaged chroma but could only raise the past expeditioners as a shambling army of undead: "It's old chroma, not pure. It won't be like bringing the two of you back." 

The only way I can see this extensive resurrection following organically from the narrative is if we’re meant to infer that Maelle is repainting the Canvas as Heaven on Earth. Literally, everyone who Gommaged is reborn and reunited with their lost loved ones in a paradise world where they no longer have to experience suffering or death. Personally, I find that idea dramatically inert and uninteresting, but at least it is an idea.

It isn’t the one I think the game was going for, though. The transition to grayscale when Verso comes on-stage, the harsh musical sting and jump-cut to Maelle's disfigured face, Verso's visible discomfort at the piano and the cut to black before he starts to play all suggest something more sinister and disquieting.

My initial read was that Maelle had become the "It's a Good Life"-esque puppet master of Lumière and was using her Paintress powers to force Verso to perform as an unwilling participant in her make-believe perfect world. I've seen it correctly pointed out, however, that exercising such direct control over a person is never shown to be among the Painters' abilities. If it was possible, surely Expedition 33's battles with Aline and Renoir would have gone very differently.

The closest possibility the game shows us is when Clea paints over her chromatic counterpart, a feat that Maelle remarks only Clea is talented enough to have accomplished. But even then, the final product is something that is Clea-rly no longer human.

 

I'd still suck on her toes, though.

 

So what is actually going on in this scene? Is everyone here to watch Verso perform of their own free will? They all just decided to forgive him for pretending to be their friend while secretly plotting to erase the Canvas and kill them all not just once, but twice? Everyone looks so happy but it feels unnatural, performative. Is that just because it's in contrast with the dour tone of the rest of the game, or is it intentionally indicative of something else happening in this scene, something we can't see undulating beneath the surface? 

 

At the end of their duel, Maelle asks Verso, "If you could grow old, would you find a reason to smile?" Like most players, I take this to indicate that she used her Paintress powers to remove the eternal life Aline bestowed on Verso, and when he appears in this last scene he's now a mortal man. So even though Maelle refused to let him die, he still got what he wanted, after a fashion. Maybe his unhappiness at the recital isn't due to Maelle forcing him to perform, but because he was unable to save her from remaining inside the Canvas while her body wastes away in the real world.

 

If Maelle isn't using her powers to control Verso in this scene, maybe the jumpscare shot of her face with the Paintress ink over her eyes isn't meant to be taken literally, but rather to represent how Verso sees her in that moment. From what we're shown earlier in the game, Painters only get those stains on their physical bodies while their minds are inside a Canvas. Maelle's Painted avatar actually looking like that wouldn't make any sense, especially since this shot also shows her missing the eye she lost in the fire (but curiously the accompanying facial burn scars are absent). When Aline was in the Canvas, Renoir said that every day he sees her ink-stained face as her health declines. Maybe that's what Verso's seeing now, and his final tragedy is that despite Lumière being saved, he's helpless to save the person who the real Verso gave his life to protect.

 

(Am I close, Sandfall? Can I get some kind of hint? Who the fuck is that little kid?)

 

Like Verso's, Maelle's ending could have been a bittersweet resolution: some characters are saved but others can't be, Maelle gets what she wants but it will cost her in the long run, the Canvas survives but its future is uncertain. We didn't need to go down the path where maybe Maelle is now a power-drunk demigod exercising absolute control over life and death. 

 

It feels like a complete thematic betrayal. "If you're going to give someone flowers, you should probably do it before they wither and die." The opening line is such a brilliant thesis statement for this game, and Maelle's ending utterly disregards it. "Tomorrow comes"? Not anymore it doesn't. Now it's always Today.

 

I guess they're going to have to come up with a new motto.

  

Maybe that disparity between what the game was about and what Maelle wanted it to be about was the point, but if so, why cloak it in the epilogue's dream-like ambiguity? The issue isn't that Expedition 33 lost, it's that we don't even know if they did. Verso's ending is clear, but Maelle's remains obscure.

 

I'm not upset there wasn't a perfect ending, a good ending and a bad ending, or even a happy ending; I love a story that ends on a nice downer. But I do generally prefer a satisfying ending, even if the satisfaction can only be found in how profoundly unsatisfying it is. Both endings to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had things that I loved and things I disliked, but neither satisfied me as a conclusion to everything that had come before.  

 

III. A Life to Dream

 

So, what would my ideal ending have been? I don't mean a perfect ending, where everyone gets what they wanted and lives happily ever after, but an ending that would have been thematically, emotionally, and dramatically satisfying to me.

Maelle leaves the painting, either of her own volition or forced out by Verso. The Canvas may be more Neverland than Wonderland, but it's still a fantasy world, and all children who visit one of those eventually have to grow up and come back to reality. Before she goes, she undoes the last Gommage, restoring Emma, Gustave's apprentices, and the rest of Lumière from their freshly disembodied chroma the same way she did with Lune and Sciel. She's unable to bring back anyone who died before that, however; their chroma has been dispersed too long to retain the impression of their memories and souls. Or maybe she reverses the Gommage first, and then the duel with Verso occurs, expelling her from the Canvas before she can even try to repaint anyone else. 

 

Either way, the point is that Pierre, Gustave, and Sophie can't come back, and their loved ones who have learned to live without them have to go on living without them. At the same time, Maelle has to go on living in the real world, reconnecting with her family as they help one another through their grief and learning to see the world as it is, not as she wants it to be. I think that part of Verso's ending is pretty perfect and wouldn't want to change it.

 

The Canvas survives. The people of Lumière go on, finally getting the opportunity to lead full lives that they've been fighting for for fifty years. There are still Nevrons out there, and the world remains a mess from the Fracture, but at least they now have a chance to live.

 

In Paris, the Canvas is hidden to prevent the Dessendres from meddling with it further. I know Renoir said that Aline would always find it, but did he mean that literally, like it emits some kind of beacon she can always detect with her Paintress powers from anywhere in the world? What if he locked it in a waterproof box and had it sunk somewhere in the ocean? The Canvas survives in Maelle's ending and Aline returning to it never comes up as an issue, so I don't consider it a huge concern either. 

As for Verso, well… to be honest, I don't really care what happens to Verso. I understand why he did what he did, and I sympathize with him, the same as I sympathize with Renoir for prioritizing his desperate need to protect his family above basic morality. But Verso is a liar, manipulator, and betrayer many times over. He murdered Julie, he allowed Gustave to die when he could have saved him, he used Expedition 33 to save his mother and end his curse of immortality, knowing all the time that it would result in their destruction. Then, after apologizing for his treachery and potentially regaining enough of their trust to sleep with Lune or Sciel (or both! Sneaky Verso!), he backstabbed them again, consigning all his friends and lovers to oblivion for the sake of saving someone who didn't want to be saved.

That's what he says, at least, but his final plea should he lose the duel shows his truest motive: "Unpaint me. I don't want this life. Help me." 

He smelled alkali, bitter as tears. The desert beyond the door was white; blinding; waterless; without feature save for the faint, cloudy haze of the mountains which sketched themselves on the horizon. The smell beneath the alkali was that of the devil-grass which brought sweet dreams, nightmares, death.  

 

But not for you, gunslinger. Never for you. You darkle. You tinct. May I be brutally frank? You go on.

 

— Stephen King, The Dark Tower

He can dress it up as concern for his sister, but Verso's main concern, as usual, is for himself. To be unburdened of eternity, he's willing to sacrifice the world. Comparing our two player characters, we were told directly in the prologue: "Gustave is a good person." 

 

Verso is not.

 

He's a wonderful, complicated character, though, so even if I disapprove of his choices, I also can't hate him. If he's stripped of his immortality and left to find peace in a finite life as a normal man, I'm fine with it. If Maelle grants his wish for death and allows him to Gommage after their duel without repainting him, I'm fine with it. And if he has to spend the rest of eternity being forced to play piano for the new Paintress and her entourage of puppet-people, I'm fine with that too. That would never be my preferred conclusion, but I feel worse for Maelle potentially becoming a monster capable of that behavior than I do for Verso suffering the consequences of his own actions. 

 

I don't think any of these proposed changes are too radical of a departure from the endings as written. The game was great overall and I wouldn't want to ruin it by inserting my own stupid ideas into someone else's work. As of this writing, it's been a week since I finished and I'm still thinking about it. The only reservations I came away with, aside from the godawful platforming side quests, involve the endings, specifically Maelle's. I think I might have preferred not being given a choice at all and getting Verso's betrayal as the true, singular ending. I could have lived with that.

 

Allowing the player to choose, however, makes them feel complicit in Verso's genocide of the Canvas. This doesn't feel like it was by design, because making Verso and Maelle the focus of the ending the way the developers did removes all voice and agency from the other characters. They take a backseat to the conflict between the two leads, even though they're faced with the direst consequences of both endings. If Sandfall trusted the player enough to make that decision, I think they should have trusted them enough to fully understand it. In my mind, Maelle's ending is just too vague, its stakes insufficiently explained.

 

That's why, whenever I replay the game, I suspect I'll take Verso's side again, as much as I feel it's an unfair choice. It's not how I would have written it, anyway, but it was never my story to write. As the philosopher Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want."