"Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33", a major bargain

It's the prerogative of very good-looking people to be immediately noticed in a crowd. Ever since its first trailer at a major Microsoft event, we knew that Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33 shone with its looks. This Japanese role-playing game presented itself with the trappings of a blockbuster when, in reality, it's the first creation of a studio of about thirty people in Montpellier. Generally, these technological bluffs end badly, with games with narrow gameplay and imagination, lacking originality or depth.

And for an hour, we thought that Clair obscur belonged to this category of posers by overplaying its French side in an introduction presenting a fantasy Paris in the style of the Belle Époque. Handsome, very chic young people parade down a cobbled main street covered in a shower of petals. The heroes are called Gustave and Maëlle and soon find themselves in sailor shirts and berets. We are no longer in a postcard style Emily in Paris but downright in the image of Epinal. A kitsch barely offset by the fascination aroused by a few wide shots of a petrified and disturbing city, where lie a fractured Arc de Triomphe and an Eiffel Tower that seems to have undergone the same shock treatment as Salvador Dalí's soft watches.

And then little by little, the game reveals its complex substance. The city, Lumière, is an island and the crowd we accompany rushes to embark on gigantic