There are two concepts at the core of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: grief and legacy. How will the people we love be remembered by us when they are gone, and how might our grief twist and warp them, leave them as facsimiles? It’s impossible to eulogize the entirety of a person. Just as we can never truly know another, any one person’s life and legacy cannot be containerized. It’s easy for the grief to take on its own form, dilute the memory, fill in the gaps we cannot account for, distort the afterimage of the person we loved into something more palatable, something we can handle and explain. In this way our golems become more a reflection of us than the person they represent – our fears, our regrets, our desires. The farther we get from a person, either through death or by distance, the less our memories represent that person themselves rather than a construct of our own design.
I used to love Clair Obscur. It’s one of the few games the conclusion of which left me with genuine tears. I found it a deeply moving meditation on the aforementioned concepts, packaged in tightly wound turn-based RPG layers with fascinating character building possibilities and impeccable world design and art direction. The interplay between mechanics is divine, each piece of the game feeding into the other in a way few RPGs of this scale can accomplish. There are gameplay innovations so simple and so genius they seem obvious in hind-sight. Then I found out that generative AI content had been used in the game.
I grieve for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Or rather, I grieve for my construct of it. I have heard the arguments: it was just placeholder, it was left in by accident, it was always meant to be removed; the list goes on. The hard truth is that this placeholder has tainted the entire experience, rendered it all nearly meaningless. I adored the unique Art Nouveau-inspired world. How do I know that these designs and artistic choices were actually made by people? It’s impossible to know if this came from someone with a passion for these and a clear love for Nier Automata’s gothic-baroque, or if they were machine generated and iterated upon. I love the angular, asymmetrical design of Lune’s jacket, the single sleeve on her dominate hand. Was this a human choice? Impossible to know.
I want to believe that these were all human decisions, that each and every aspect of these fascinating and profound characters were deeply considered to reflect the very human-feeling people I had come to love over my 90 or so hours with the game. Much like catching plagiarism, unfortunately, I now cannot be sure that something I love was not pumped out as slurry and painted over with a human touch. Wanting to believe something doesn’t make it true. I cannot open my heart to a choice made by a machine, a flourish excreted from the statistical mean of stolen dreams. Clair Obscur’s world is full of characters who choose to struggle against a dying world, to save what remains to build a better future. “For those that come after”. How deeply cruel that it also uses a technology that contributes to cooking our planet. And for what, some environmental posters?
Nearly every generation feels as though it’s the last, but with the impending climate disaster (and the ones that are already occurring in places around the world) and world powers’ refusal to tackle it in legitimate, concrete ways, it truly feels as though we are witnessing, at minimum, the end of the world as it has been known by countless generations prior. Many writers much more adept and considered than myself have written plenty about the despair of the billionaire class attempting to replace art with “content”, designing generative machines to distribute slurry, but the most perverse aspect of it to me is that it is attempting to rob us of our humanity at this crucial moment. We live in a reality where cataclysm lurks only decades away, and machines threaten to stifle the final shout of a world we know. There is nothing more human than the attempt to translate the complex phenomena of existence into something communicable. It’s a lot like grief in this way – impossible to contain, yet we struggle.
I wish Sandfall Interactive the best in their future endeavors, and I wish them success. I hope that they reject the use of generative AI at any point in their creative process. I loved what I thought Clair Obscur was, but hate what it is – a fascinating work that is now inextricably linked to a technology that attempts to stifle the human soul for peanuts in return. I am terrified of the new world that is being shaped in front of us, though whatever humanity looks like in fifty years, they deserve to look back on the art of the moment and see a soul – something made by people in an attempt to create something true and messy and complex and full of failure. Art is made to communicate the incommunicable for those that come after. They will look back at our works and decide what kind of people we were, how we lived, and what we valued. I hope that our construct will be one of desperate and noble struggle, of compassion and humanity, of grief and terror and hope and love.