Spoilers ahead for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and Life is Strange.
I recently finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an experience I would compare to having my soul scraped out with a rusty ice cream scoop by a methhead I had deeply offended in an earlier life. It’s the sort of game you don’t beat so much as survive. After the credits rolled, I just stared into the middle distance for a while until the existential angst left me.
The game has two possible endings that you choose from. In one, Maelle continues to live in and maintain the painted world, resurrecting all the dead characters who congregate at a concert. However, the final shot implies that this process is slowly corrupting and killing her, dooming her to rot away in a fantasy world rather than face her grief. This is generally considered the bad ending.
In the other, the simulacrum of Verso we’ve been playing as forces Maelle out of the painting back into the real world where she is a scarred, mute shell of herself. Her father erases the magic canvas, dooming all the inhabitants to non-existence but forcing her family to face the grief around real-world Verso’s death. The camera lingers on a shot of the painted characters sadly waving goodbye as they fade. This is considered the good ending.
It’s pretty clear which ending the game wants you to think is the good one. Maelle’s painted world ending is presented in black and white. The happy reunions are all tainted by the somber palate, and the whole thing ends on a discordant musical sting as we see Maelle’s face covered in the swirling paint that indicates madness. Meanwhile, Verso’s real world ending is bright and colorful, with our beloved party members getting a final bow. It’s not a happy ending, but it’s definitely a hopeful one.
I remember when developer Dontnod pulled this same trick in 2015 with Life is Strange. The game offered the same type of binary choice. Max can rewind time so her girlfriend Chloe dies, preventing the natural disaster ravaging Arcadia Bay, or she can keep Chloe safe, dooming most of the people in town.
Save Chloe, and she and Max ride out of a devastated town with grim looks on their faces. Kill Chloe, and you’re treated to a moving funeral scene with cameos and upbeat music. Again, it’s sad, but it feels noble and emotional progressive for the characters.
When I first played Life is Strange I always chose to kill Chloe. It was the right thing to do, a simple trolley problem that the game subtly rewards you for solving. Over the last several years, though, when I revisit the game? I let Arcadia Bay drown, damn the consequence. Somewhere in the last decade, I became a different person, and so my Max became a different person when I controlled her.
Video games are an interactive medium. They are designed to be explored, manipulated, and to have paths chosen rather than presented. Some games are more linear than others, but all incorporate interactivity. The player is an intrinsic part of the experience’s movement, no different than a projector moving a film frame by frame.
That means that the ending you chose is the true ending of the game based on your experiences. How playing changed you changes the paths you take. Are you made crueler or kinder by the world you have to navigate? Have you grown to love characters too much to let them go?
There’s this fascinating meta commentary in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. The lives of the painted world residents are treated as less than those of the real world ones, but they are all pretend people in my PlayStation. It’s an obvious rumination on how attached we become to our stories, but it’s also sincere. Who here hasn’t cried over the death of a fictional person, or swelled with pride when they overcome an obstacle?
I read once in a Michael Scott Rohan book that the gods take on human corporeal form because to change the world you must be part of the world. Players are certainly gods to their the games, controlling everything and writing the history of the world one playthrough at a time.
When I got to the choice of endings in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, I chose Maelle, with a pretty good guess of how that was going to play out narratively. I’m someone who has spent two decades mired in grief over losing my best friend. If I could hold her again, even just a painted version, I would do so at the cost of my own health. Is that good? I don’t know, but it’s me.
By the time the game offers you this choice, I had spent 60 hours fighting hard for the world to survive. Yes, I saw the costs, but it seemed a low enough price to pay to see characters I loved live another day. Maelle would hurt, but that’s life, at least as I have come to know it.
I don’t blame game developers for having a favorite ending or a preferred one. They make the world and are changed by it, too. It would be weird if they had no opinion on what the player should’ve done.
But in the end, every ending is valid, including the one where you put down the controller and never pick it up again to technically finish. Interactive media exists only when you play it; everything else is a facsimile. Whether an offered ending was satisfying is up to you, but none of them are good or bad. Like a mirror, a game can only offer what you put back into it, moving as you move.
Even if someone traced the exact paths and actions I took in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Life is Strange, it wouldn’t be the same game because they aren’t playing it with my brain. Things I thought were mercies might be evil in their eyes. Hard choices to me could be nothing to them. We move the thumbsticks, and the thumbsticks move our emotions in a haptic loop.
What grows inside that loop is the game, and however it ends is how we choose it to end. That’s neither good nor bad. It just is, and what that means will always depend on the player, not what society considers right or wrong.
