Recent indie darling Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is more polished on PC than you might expect from the size of its core development team, but it still has some presentation issues that conflict with its narrative focus and some PC-specific problems that make the PC release arguably the least polished version of the game.
Clair Obscur is built on Unreal Engine 5, giving access to modern graphical features but also opening the door to some familiar issues. The game’s settings are largely cribbed from the standard UE options, but unfortunately there’s no option to use hardware Lumen ray tracing, so players are stuck with the somewhat-compromised software version of Lumen global illumination and reflections. Otherwise, we generally recommend sticking to the settings that developers Sandfall Interactive have selected for the console version of the game, which we’ll cover later.
Before that, let’s quickly run through the game’s presentation issues, which all seem fixable. The first is how cutscenes are presented, with a (poorly frame-paced) 30fps limit that means the game necessarily underperforms on higher-end and future hardware that could easily run these scenes at 60fps or higher. It’s distracting to see the game swap from 60fps or even 120fps back to this unstable 30fps limit, and it ought to be possible for players to disable the cutscene frame-rate cap if they prefer – without resorting to third-party mods like Lyall’s ClairObscurFix. The same frame pacing issue, with frame-times varying from 16.6ms to 50ms rather than coming at a constant 33.3ms, also applies to pre-rendered cutscenes, making them look jerky.
Beyond cutscenes, the gameplay itself also has smoothness issues from a variety of sources that I want to highlight so that they can be fixed. These aren’t quite as bad as the recent Oblivion remaster, for example, but the game still suffers from its fair share of frame-time hiccups and stutters – two of which are unique to the PC version.