Clair Obscur, Undertale and Escapism
Where we say goodbye to all the characters we grew to know and love in the last 30 hours.
Massive, all encompassing spoilers to both Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Undertale. You were warned.
I.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a new AA darling, reaching impressive player numbers despite only having a development team of about 30 people. It is beautiful, it has a lot of great gameplay ideas, it has heart-wrenching music — it is, by all accounts, a great game.
But it would be too boring to talk about all the good things. We are videogame snobs, after all, and we must home in on the one thing that is flawed. As such, today we will be talking about the story of Clair Obscur, and to be specific, its final revelations.
Allow me a brief recap for people who didn’t play the game. The primary conflict of Clair Obscur is the struggle of the people of the city of Lumiere against the mysterious Paintress. Every year, the Paintress paints a number on her monolith, and everyone older than that number are wiped out — an event that becomes known as Gommage. Our ragtag group are members of the expedition, one of many, that would desperately attempt to stop the Paintress from continuing — and our journey towards that goal occupies the absolute majority of the game.
However, as we approach the end, the game presents a big twist: this world is not real. People known as The Painters are capable of creating worlds out of their paintings — and ours is one of them. Lumiere in particular was created as a coping mechanism — the real world Paintress lost her son in the fire, and as such created the painting containing the fake, artificial version of him — and then willfully lost herself inside of her creation. As such, the protagonist has a choice — either allow the painting and all of its inhabitants to continue living, or destroy it, and forcefully exit this maladaptive coping mechanism.
While the game presents a choice to the players, it’s not really all that hard to figure out what is the “correct” choice here. In the epilogue, we spend some time in the real world, and get a taste of the discussions there. We hear how dangerous it is for the Paintress to spend this much time in this imaginary world. We see how annoyed her daughters and her husband are with her foolishness. Even the fake-painting-son, Verso, works against his own survival and guides the player into destroying the painting. The game’s ending to me seems to have a pretty clear message: escapism might be nice, but only in moderation. At some point it is time to put your delusions aside and return to the real world, with real people, to take care of your responsibilities.1
And I disagree.
Even putting aside “none of this was real” twist, which is rightfully considered to be of bad taste in modern times, I really disagree with what I believe to be this final message of the game. I disagree with it from the in-game perspective. Even if Lumiere is a painting, it certainly feels real enough! People there act like people, they seem to have history, lives, dreams, ideas, feelings. How can anyone discard all of them as simply products of one’s imagination, something artificial and unworthy of second thought? Painting or not, the people of Lumiere are sentient and killing them carries the same moral weight as killing a “real” person.
But I also disagree with it from the position of pure narrative. Clair Obscur, as a game, spends its entire duration trying to make us care. We, the players, are supposed to fall in love with this world and characters, we are supposed to see them as more than just videogame characters, they are supposed to find their own place inside our hearts and souls. Why would you cheapen your own world by directly stating that it’s imaginary and as such doesn’t really matter? “It’s just a painting” equivalent to “It’s just a videogame” in this case, and it’s a lose-lose situation for Clair Obscur. If the players disagree, then they will surely find the ending morals annoying. If they agree, that means that none of the characters really stuck with them.
II.
Undertale is one of my favorite games. There are a lot of thing to be praised in Undertale. I love its humor, I adore its music. But most of all, I love that Undertale is smart.
The plot of Undertale, broadly, is about moral choice — the player has a choice of either befriending its many characters, or killing them. That, in itself, is not very original, even if Undertale executes it on the highest level. But the point the game becomes really interesting, is when we really get to talk to two of the characters — Flowey the Flower and Sans the Skeleton.
Flowey represents the player. He possesses much of the same powers as the player — the power to SAVE and LOAD, and he had abused them for a long time prior to our appearance. And, locked inside the game world as he is, he also describes the archetypical journey that players would go through. First just stumble around and discover things. Then try to achieve the best possible ending, making everyone happy. Then, as boredom settles in… explore other options. After endless RESETs, Flowey has enough of the predictability of his new “friends” and “family”. He had seen it all. He can predict every reaction perfectly.
So he stops seeing them as real people, and starts killing them. Oh.
This receives a followup callback when the player decides to follow in Flowey’s footsteps, in the game’s genocide run — killing absolutely everyone they encounter, and depopulating the game’s world in its entirety. Despite valiant resistance and heroic effort of the game’s characters, none of them can stand against the power of the protagonist. But, just as Flowey, players are unlikely to go on a genocide run in their first playthrough. They most likely went for it because they’ve… seen all they could see in the friendly, happy, shiny "pacifist” playthrough of the game, and they’ve decided to explore what else the game has to offer.
And the game brilliantly calls us out on it, in the fight against Sans, in what I consider to be the best monologue in the game.
“you are, uh, very determined, aren’t you? you’ll never give up, even if there’s, uh… absolutely NO benefit to percevering whatsoever. if i can make that clear. no matter what, you’ll just keep going. not out of any desire for good or evil… but just because you think you can.”
and because you “can”…
Sans here accurately describes the player behavior. No matter how much we claim to “love” all of these characters, we would, nonetheless, do terrible things to them. For the sake of idle entertainment, for the sake of seeing all the content. For a fun bossfight. Immersed and engaged as we are, we still discard the fictional lives as worthless, meaningless, having no real value.
But Undertale, however, goes for an unprecedented, novel take. Instead of accepting the nihilism of the fictional existence, it calls out player hypocrisy. The fiction fights back, it pleads, it encourages — it screams “I do matter”. Sans can “spare” the player in their fight - by killing them, and then advising them to never come back, if they really have any feelings left. When you are that deep in the genocide run, the only moral choice is to close the game and never launch it again.
It is also the only moral choice in the pacifist ending. What, you have managed to achieve this perfect utopia where everyone (save one) is happy, and yet you want to RESET all of it back to square one? Why? For your own selfish entertainment? The game doesn’t shy away from rightfully calling you a monster.
And the game tries its best to make sure you live with the consequences of your actions. Even if you RESET the game post-genocide run, even if you delete it altogether, the game will remember your choices, and will inflict consequences on you. Achieving an actual happy ending is impossible post-genocide2.
The game scolds you relentlessly for not taking the game and its characters seriously, for treating them as “just videogame characters”, and, through the power of exceptional writing, that scolding does land. I know a good amount of people who did close the game when the game told them to, who did resolve to never do a genocide route, myself included3. Through humanizing its characters, Undertale positioned itself as something greater than just a game, it forced people to accept that it is real, that the feelings it is causing are real, and preciously valuable. Undertale broke the fourth wall not for the sake of a cheeky reference, or a taunt. Undertale broke the fourth wall to escape into the real world, and occupy it as much as the world of fiction.
III.
My own personal taste is not obscure: in this debate I clearly take Undertale’s point closer to my heart. Part of it is just pure narrative, I do think it’s always better when games try to embiggen themselves, when they try to feel greater than they otherwise might be. As such, I would always prefer the game that urges the player to believe in it, to love it sincerely, without any caveats like “but it’s just a game”.
But even on the greater point, I have always been a fictionalist. I believe in the power of fiction, I think that fiction often works greater than the real world. And I always felt the displeasure of all the cases where the protagonist would say that they had enough fun in the world of imagination, and that it’s time to return to the “real world”.
Perhaps this is the influence of my upbringing. I am a child of the early internet, a place of promise and wonder. I always thought that internet is and always will be much more of my “home” than real world would ever be. People on the internet might as well exist in my own head — disembodied pieces of text and image, lines on the screen that I will never meet “in real life”. And they are my best friends and my worst enemies, causing a whirlwhind of emotions in me on a daily basis, joy, love, anger, frustration. Who is to say these are not real, or somehow less valuable?
The internet had certainly changed over the years, and not for the better, and yet I believe that its Realness still rings true somewhere in its core. Internet right now is poisoned with cynicism, echo chambers and radicalist slogans, it is now very much an unpleasant space to be in. But perhaps the lesson of the internet is not that every space humanity creates is bound to become rotten and corrupt. Perhaps the lesson is that we need to get better at creating our private little worlds, fix them, nurture them back to health.
We live in the world, where the technology to create private universes is constantly progressing. Fiction of the past, books, movies, or even tales shared from person to person — all of these had been tiny private universes, capable of capturing you only for a moment, for a few days at most, but unhappily releasing you afterwards back into the coldness of the “real world”. But now we have immersive VR environments that people spend entire days in. We have conversations with AI chatbots that feel profound and engaging, often barely different than talks with real people. The market for “AI boyfriend/girlfriends” is booming. The classic sci-fi scenario is creating fully immersive virtual utopias, private paradises, and living in them forever.
And is it really such a bad thing? Humanity have long practiced their mastery of nature, molding the environment to their needs. What makes that last step different, creating an entire universe from scratch, perfectly suited to your needs?
Regardless of your answer, that painting can hardly be destroyed. The monke will not accept us anymore. The only thing we can do, is try our best to make our future universe a better place.
People who spend too much time in the painting also get ugly paint splashes on their face. And that can’t be good for you, right?
At least through normal means. Of course, a savvy computer user will be able to find all the hidden save files the game creates, and would be able to delete or modify them. So, unfortunately, the age of internet makes it pretty easy to escape the consequences of genocide.
Although much fewer of them could stop themselves from watching it on youtube. Myself included.