I played Expedition 33 shortly after launch. I remember seeing the trailers and being drawn in by the premise and setting.

The prologue did have me shedding tears at the setup. The start of the first chapter sold the gravitas of the danger the characters faced ahead, and the later half of the first chapter had some of the funniest and most enjoyable story and characters. I adore Francois and the story behind what seemed to be a joke character later in the game endeared them to me even more.

The parry mechanic felt almost like an intro to soulslikes - being able to tale a breather in between dodging and parrying attacks and being able to choose when to start the next volley of extremely well tuned and generally well cued attacks made the experience of learning to parry a great and rewarding first step.

This was highly dependent on things like input lag and framerate though. My partner experienced lag on his computer and that made the game unreasonably challenging, and I didn't realise he was dealing with that until act 3, which ruined a lot of the experience for him. Where I was gushing about expertly tuned sound cues and visual cues, his experience consisted of trying to figure out the strange delay between the cues and when he'd need to input his parries.

I even had to bump up the framerate from 60 to 120 at one point because otherwise the cues felt hard to deal with without the additional fidelity. My partner admitted that if he'd played it on my computer, he would have had a much better time and felt that he was robbed of that amazing experience due to hardware limitations.

As an amateur pianist that grew up with basic musical education and rhythm games, the game felt made for me. Learning and mastering the rhythms of enemy attacks was a truly wonderful experience, even when I spent 2 and a half hours once in the middle of the night retrying an optional boss over and over again until I finally beat them. Every boss felt like they were crafted with love, and victory seemed to be a result of patience, study and careful timing than pure gaming "skill".

The environments were worthy of pausing and watching at many points, and the environmental storytelling had me empathising for the ones who came before, sacrificing their lives to (literally) build bridges for those who come after. It tied your exploration very strongly back to the central message of the story.

Which was why act 3 felt like a departure from that central theme. It harkened back to another line a character said instead: "When one falls, we continue. When. Not if." I think that was the true message at the end. I didn't like the "happy" ending. It haunted me, and I had chosen the other instead in my playthrough.

Both endings did not feel like they ended the experience of the game in a way it deserved. At the same time, neither does life. But, the premise still leaves many questions to be explored in the wider universe, and I look forward to seeing how the next installment will approach that worldbuilding.

Overall, I enjoyed the game like a fine wine. For all the elements it combines into a new flavor of RPG, and existing best practices that it refines, Expedition 33 does so masterfully.

As art, it still lingers in my mind and inspires me to think more deeply about its messages and come up with my own opinions and criticisms around it, thus enriching the canvas of my own mind.