My favorite 2025 game won GOTY. It was worthy of every award it won. When you think about it, an ultimate underdog story. Then they did the thing — Verso’s Drafts popped up in an update at the end of the 2025 Game Awards. I didn’t wait and I streamed within the last 3 days.
Photo mode is a delight because it will make me want to revisit the game in NG+ to capture those moments I wasn’t able to when I first played it. SPOILER ALERT for those who come after.
The bonus Endless Tower fights? They made Simon in Renoir’s Drafts almost feel like Eveque in comparison. Chromatic Lampmaster is a reflex and memorization nightmare. Dualliso is a duo with one health bar ala Painted Lovers and while I got some offense in…I fell in defeat as well. Clea Unleashed? She beat me harder than Brock Lesnar ramming a midget through a fire truck. Endless Tower version of Simon?! Pure. Nightmare. Fuel. I got caught like a deer in headlights.
The most valuable thing, though, was Verso’s Drafts. It was a delight to be there. It was definitely a major contrast in visuals compared to the rest of The Continent. More importantly, the environment, creatures and the Treehouse tell us of Young Verso Dessandre and how he felt about his family in images that honestly made my heart melt. It made me understand why the family were broken from his death but also why Aline broke.
The wild bit was how we learn just how more askew time dilation between the Canvas and outside really are upon running into Osquio, the main boss of the new area. Whatever theory you had, just throw it out there window.
Upon the streaming and just exploring, I was reminded of why gaming can be a beautiful reminder of art and its power.
In the process, I found myself listening to my old music through my earbuds on my phone for the first time in almost a decade and…I felt like I was falling in love with myself as a musician again for the first time.
Usually when I make music, I put it out there and just move on. If I keep my ears on it too long, I’ll feel a need to rework an re-release and that just ruins the point of just creating and sharing with the world that moment in time of who you were, imperfections be damned.
What if I just made music for sheer therapy, expression and enjoyment instead of treating it like work or like something to be scrutinized by every outsider? What if I just let my art come to life and let it be both window and mirror as Renoir Dessandre taught Verso?
Verso loved to create in a very sweet way. He painted and clearly had his own style but learned it well. He also strived for music and even the boss fight ending with Osquio calls back to that side of him. Aline taught him piano as we learned in the flashbacks in the Monolith and is shown in the Treehouse and the way Verso painted that memory, he did so with expression of joy and fondness. We learn that he admired Clea and loved watching her paint and thus implied that he was under Clea’s guidance more than Aline in that regard. He loved playing with Monoco, he adored Renoir and as Esquie once implied in the game’s story, likely learns to sing from Renoir and given that Renoir moves his baton in the boss fights like a damn conductor stick, Verso took after his dad very well.
Lastly, he adored Alicia as his baby sister that the poems and music he wrote was to amuse and delight a baby Alicia in her crib. That part melted me. The Treehouse tells in artistic format the weight of the Dessandre Family’s relationship dynamic more than anything else the base game ever could. It further shows why Young Boy had grown weary of painting and why Painted Verso said it’s okay to stop.
In the process, before the Game Awards, I do a livestream revisiting the final boss fight with Renoir all the way to the ending itself that I chose as a means to reflect on everything and by the end of it, I found myself agreeing with Verso’s ending more than I did the first time. Neither ending is purely good but from my experience of having lost a sibling, to seeing how my family suffered at their passing and ultimately as a father of a daughter myself…the conclusions of the story of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 hit me in ways far more severe than how a lot of players reacted.
