It just won Game of the Year at the gaming awards thing that is apparently a bigger deal than I knew.
Also the new update is live!
You can expect to find:
A new, playable environment, taking the characters to new adventures…
Brand new music tracks by award-winning composer, Lorien Testard.
Challenging boss battles for late-game players to overcome within the Endless Tower.
An official Photo Mode, allowing players to get creative and capture their favourite moments from the game’s story and battles.
New text and UI game localizations into Czech, Ukrainian, Latin American Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese, Thai, and Indonesian, bringing the total number of supported languages to 19.
New Quality of Life improvements, other new features, and additional improvements to the game’s performance across platforms, including on handheld PC systems.
Read the full patch notes here: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1903340/view/491585297311596633
So we got a free DLC or something? Any idea on how to access it? I have an end-game save…assuming Steam Deck keeps your saves after the game is uninstalled.
I could reinstall just to play this DLC if it is easy to locate.
Steam should have your saves stored remotely via Steam Cloud or whatever they call it. When you reinstall, it’ll install the saves. Or they also might still be on your system as well.
As I understand it, you just need to head to the new location on the map but I haven’t actually done it yet (they just dropped it during the awards show)
Cool, I’ll wait a bit since I’m playing Tales of Graces f. I wonder how long the area is. Probably an hour or two.
Apparently its dominance at the Game Awards was 50% greater than Baldur’s Gate 3’s big sweep in 2023. BG3 won six awards that night, Exp. 33 picked up nine awards tonight.
Game of the Year
Best Game Direction
Best Narrative
Best Art Direction
Best Score & Music
Best Performance (Jennifer English as Maelle)
Best Independent Game
Best Debut Indie Game
Best Roleplaying Game
Baldur’s Gate 3 managed to pick up a Best Community Support award tonight, a couple years on after launch.
And No Man’s Sky won the best ongoing game. Good for it; my understanding is that the amount of stuff put into it is amazing.
Clair Obscur has dropped their “thank you to the fans” free update. Apparently, it adds even more challenging encounters. Significantly more challenging to the point some say are impossible (although of course some are beating it but not many). I have not tried. Honestly, I doubt I have the ability or stamina to cope with it when looking at some examples of what is new.
You can read about it here (and see some examples…I don’t think this is spoilery but up to you to decide for yourself):
The Indie Game Awards just rescinded two of its Clair Obscur awards, due to generative AI usage for placeholder art early in the game’s development: Indie Game Awards pulls two awards from Clair Obscur over generative AI use: 'We have a hard stance against gen AI in videogames' | PC Gamer
No worries, we can just AI generate it some awards of our own 
PS In happier news, I’ve discovered that there is at least one easy-to-use trainer that enables auto-parry (along with other cheats). Might let me play through the game after all.
IIRC the devs patched out the AI art shortly after the game’s release. Didn’t matter to the award people though.
I find it weird that this is happening now because it was already a “story” that they had an AI placeholder asset left in the game basically as soon as it launched. Having it be a revelation after the award was, well, awarded seems strange to me. More likely, someone complained after the awards and they made a show of it then.
This is nuts. This is why I hate these games. To be fair, this is not the main game and extreme for pretty much everyone but a select few. Still, it shows the mindset the game wants. There is a lot I really like about this game but ooof…this is too much for almost anyone:
Eight hours and more than 10,000 parries later, a Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 superfan is being praised for beating one of the game’s toughest bosses in frankly ridiculous conditions.
Underpowered but undeterred, Reddit user Recordbreaks has posted a screenshot showing that they beat the super strong Duollistes boss after managing 10,545 successful parries — which feels like more than I’ve completed in the entire game.
The encounter took eight hours, two minutes and 36 seconds, during which time Recordbreaks says they “took one break maybe for about 5-10 minutes” in order to go get snacks, then “went back to it.”
Yeah…I’m not completely familiar with this, but this battle isn’t designed to take that long. He was underpowered and choosing to do it this way? I don’t know. I never re-downloaded it to the DLC.
Yep. It’s like people adding challenges to soulslikes like “no leveling”, “no dodging”, “use a sensor-enabled punching bag as a controller”. Come to think of it, I see the same thing happen with games like Final Fantasy. Some people just want things to be unnecessarily harder.
The article says he was underpowered and just stuck with it for the sake of doing it. Playing the game, it occurred to me early on that you could, in theory win the whole game without assigning any points (you’re forced to level) if you wanted, you’d just need to be okay with each fight taking forever to complete and never get hit.
It’s not remotely the game experience the developers wanted. They have an Easy mode and made it even easier after launch (lowering damage taken and widening the parry window). I’m a strictly mid-skill guy on my best days and finished the whole (pre DLC) game with the only serious problem being the previous King of (Optional) Bosses[1]. I’m not saying people who struggle are somehow bad/wrong but it’s not reasonable to accuse the devs of having the mindset of expecting a punishing experience with the game.
To be fair, once you apply obvious Pictos to Maelle, much of the game becomes trivialized quickly ↩︎
I don’t care for the combat in this game, but I agree that I don’t think they’re trying to make it a slog at all.
In agreement with others: This is a self-imposed challenge by the player, and the praise is coming from the long-standing and vibrant community of gamers that aim for (or that appreciate the dedication/skill required for) ridiculous feats in their chosen game(s). Sure, this boss is hard, but it’s not designed to be beat this way. In the same way, Mojang doesn’t expect anyone to beat the Ender Dragon just seven minutes after spawning into a new Minecraft world, but people do it anyway, nor is the original The Legend of Zelda (NES) designed to be completed without ever using your sword, but – heck – why not?