Pixelache

I just finished the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. It was originally released back in April, but due to the organic praise from critics and the gaming community alike, the game was sold out for months, and I wasn't able to get a physical copy until last month, and promptly spent many nights and weekends working my way through the game—it lives up to the hype.

Clair Obscur is a story- and character-driven RPG, in the tradition of games like Final Fantasy , developed by an indie studio based out of Paris. The French influence is apparent from the prologue. Honestly, it's refreshing —for developers from a wholly different part of the world to start with the foundational mechanics^[1] of an established genre like JRPGs and layer on top their take on the graphics, music, gameplay, and storylines. Hell, the backstory of how the developer came about to build this first title is itself legendary; the director/founder found team members via Reddit posts and Soundcloud uploads, while the team was orders of magnitude smaller than comparable developers, working on their game on a shoestring budget until they found a publisher near the end of the dev cycle.

Oh, and the soundtrack is awesome; it's worth listening to even if you never intend to play the game, and was singularly composed by Lorien Testard, the aforementioned musician found via Soundcloud.

I hold games like Clair Obscur in special regard. Compared to other games and most other forms of media like movies and streaming episodic series, a well-executed, story-driven RPG stays with the player. That is, the fictional world, characters, and events are wholly fleshed out, given the space to showcase both depth and breadth. Characters, when well-written, are rendered with the wonderful complexity of human beings and can evolve throughout 30, 40 hours of cutscenes and gameplay. The player immersion is made possible by the sheer gametime length ^[2].

Upon completion, I'm often left with this mixed feeling of satisfaction yet wistful melancholy. It's not unlike coming to the end of a long novel series, thankful for the jolt of creativity and narration that I got to experience as a reader, but with a sense of loss knowing that there's no more story left to tell, that even upon future rereads it wouldn't be as wondrous as that initial readthrough. Some avid readers name this phenomenon a book hangover, describing it as a miniature bout of depression as they try to get over the book's pages, its world and its characters left behind.

Gamers can relate! Curious, I asked ChatGPT for a neologistic analog for video games, and it came up with a pretty good one:

Pixelache
n. The tender ache that follows the closing cutscene of a game you’ve loved.