A reflection on Clair Obscur: A Modern Myth on Loss and Hope

Intro

For me, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not just another indie RPG—it is a rare achievement in interactive modern mythmaking. Its world is shaped by unseen divine forces; its characters echo mythic archetypes—gods grappling with grief, obsession, and fractured kinship, while their mortal creations are left adrift in their wake. The game’s storytelling structure mirrors the fragmentary, evolving logic of ancient oral tradition and mythology texts. It is a game where myths are not merely referenced—they are lived. Players journey through a world of hidden truths, cyclical loss, and apparent hopeless resistance, confronting fate while uncovering the divine and human stories that shape it. At the heart of this modern myth are timeless human conditions. The story is deeply concerned with loss, grief, and identity at every turn. Placing everyday real-world  human experiences within the extraordinary fantasy circumstances of the Canvas create a story that is equally thought provoking, entertaining, and worth reflecting upon. 

The below essay pulls from some web sources, encyclopaedias, and other books on myth from my bookshelf. I am not a scholar, just someone who loved the game.  

Expedition 33 – a modern take on timeless ideas

The story of Clair Obscur is a masterclass in how videogames are an essential medium for modern mythmaking. Clair Obscur can be understood in many ways; I cannot say which one is right. Like all myths, there is room to explore, discuss, and find our own meanings. I hope everyone does so too. 

The narrative, world design, music, acting, and gameplay are a canvas in and of themselves for multiple mythological concepts. Eight stood out to me, which I have written about below:

1. Mortal Plight, Cosmic Fight 

2. Gods as Artists, Mortals as Brushstrokes

3. Myths of Fate, Freedom, and Unintended Consequences 

4. Creation Born from Sorrow: a mythological tradition

5. Broken Gods, Resilient Mortals  

6. Fragmented Lore: No Canon, Only Chorus

7. Real through Consequence: Myth and the Painted World

8. After the End: Myth and the Will to Rebuild

The interpretation that resonated with me is that of a modern myth. The world of the Canvas is a world of mortals and their struggles. The world outside the Canvas is a “Belle Epoque Olympus” - a world of gods akin to the Greco-Roman or Norse Myths. Not omnipotent and omniscient beings, but flawed beings who are a reflection of our deepest hopes, worries, vanities, and ambitions. 

In this setting we meet Aline, Renoir, Alicia, and Verso (and others) who represent a distinctly modern but also timeless pantheon of damaged gods. These are gods that carry cosmic power (painters) for the purposes of a fantastical RPG, but also carry immense emotional burden so they can show us stories of loss, family life, emotional fracture, and trauma told through a lens of psychological realism.They are joined by mortals who are defiant in the face of apocalypse and carry the same depth of emotions as their so-called creators. 

This is one of the game’s strongest contributions to modern mythmaking: it builds its divine drama not from omnipotence, but from brokenness—and asks what kind of world can emerge when gods refuse to forget, refuse to heal, and refuse to let go.  These figures speak to a 21st-century mythology, one in which the divine is not transcendent, but deeply personal—and where the act of creation cannot be removed from the traumas that wound us and the messiness of healing. In the gods and mortals we can see ourselves; wounded and hurt seeking refuge and succor. Whether it is the loss of a loved one or a cataclysm we are all faced with tragedies. And these tragedies lie at the heart of this narrative. 

If ancient myths asked how the world begins and ends, Clair Obscur asks of us how we go on living after our world breaks—and what we are willing to do to rebuild it.

As an interactive artform, the player gets to make choices within the story that reflect our own view on these struggles - whether we define rebuilding as leaving the canvas or remaining within. 

 

1. Mortal Plight, Cosmic Plight

Mythological Parallel: In traditional mythology, mortals live under the sway of gods whose actions shape the world in ways often inscrutable to human understanding. From Zeus’s arbitrary wrath to Odin’s cryptic manipulations, mythology presents a cosmos governed by divine wills beyond mortal grasp. Mortals make sense of this through inherited stories, rituals, and myths. In the Greek flood myth, Deucalion and Pyrrha survive a world-ending deluge without ever fully grasping that it was Zeus’s judgment on humanity. In Norse myth, mortals suffer through the Aesir-Vanir war and the strange omens leading to Ragnarok, unaware that Odin has long foreseen and accepted their doom through knowledge he alone possesses.

Crucially, these myths are not about gods alone—they are about the mortals left to suffer, adapt, or find meaning within the wreckage. In Ragnarök, Norse mythology’s apocalyptic vision, the gods march toward inevitable doom—yet humanity is swept up in the chaos. Ordinary people suffer alongside the gods, and most are destroyed in the great conflagration. Still, a few survive: Líf and Lífthrasir, hidden in the forest, emerge to repopulate a world reborn from divine ruin. Their survival is not triumph, but quiet endurance. In the Mahabharata, entire generations of warriors die in a war orchestrated by gods and avatars, while survivors must reconcile with loss and moral ambiguity. 

**Clair Obscur’s Execution:**In Clair Obscur, the Painters and Writers function as a divine class. Like the gods of ancient myth, they remain mostly unseen, their conflict monumental in impact but opaque in meaning. The war between them—grief-fueled, emotionally charged, and deeply personal—is never fully known to the mortals of the Canvas or the players of the game.The conflict between them is a lost history— much like the Titanomachy (the war between titans and gods) in Greek lore, which echoes faintly through later myths of Zeus but is rarely fully told.

Yet the consequences of these rivalries define the reality of the game. Supernatural phenomena like the Gommage and the Fracture are understood only as curses, arbitrary rules of an uncaring universe. In truth, they are aftershocks of a divine family’s collapse—Renoir’s rupture of Aline’s illusion, Aline’s refusal to let go, and Verso’s lingering imprint on the world. The Fracture, mythologized as a world-breaking cataclysm, is in fact a desperate, godlike intervention—yet the mortals can only interpret it as a mystery. These mysteries are uncaring to the mere mortals and take multiple scales - civilization wide and down to the individual. Take Gustav, he could have been saved but Verso chose not to because he feared Maelle may go against the plan to free Aline if she had lingering attachment. 

The expeditioners rise in rebellion against a divine order they cannot understand, fueled by passion, courage, and flawed knowledge. They believe they are striking back at fate—destroying the Paintress to end the Gommage—but like so many mythic figures, their resistance is folded into a tragedy far older and larger than themselves. As the journey unfolds, fragments of truth are revealed, but not shared equally. The player may glimpse the deeper forces at work, but most characters remain in the dark—mourning, resisting, hoping without full understanding. In this, Clair Obscur mirrors mythic tradition not just in structure, but in feeling: the sense that the world is shaped by absent powers whose wounds become law. Divine conflict creates mortal crisis—and in confronting that, the characters are transformed themselves. Understanding the gods does not end their suffering; it recontextualizes it, forcing new questions of memory, agency, and consequence. The closer the expeditioners get to the source of their pain, the more mythic their struggle becomes—not just to survive, but to interpret. The divine war may be hidden, but its fallout defines every mortal choice. And in the end, as in myth, survival is not about clarity—it is about carrying on despite the unknown.

This disconnect raises mythic questions. Some may be more ‘ancient’ - such as ‘What happens to mortals when gods wage wars they do not witness?’ or ‘If the divine is driven not by justice but by grief, what responsibility do mortals bear for their survival—and what choices remain truly theirs?’ While others fit into our modern time: can meaning be made from suffering when its source is invisible and incomprehensible? 

2. Gods as Artists, Mortals as Brushstrokes 

Mythological Parallel: Across many mythologies, mortals are not merely created—they are crafted, sung, or painted into existence by gods. The divine act of creation is inseparable from artistry, and mortals are often the expression of divine memory, desire, or sorrow. In Orphic Greek tradition, the cosmos and its people are born from the song and dismembered body of Phanes and Zagreus—a fusion of music, light, and loss. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s mythopoeic Silmarillion, inspired by Christian and Norse themes, the world is sung into existence by the god Ilúvatar and the Ainur, with each melodic layer producing landscapes, peoples, and histories. In Egyptian mythology, Thoth—scribe of the gods—creates and sustains the world through painted hieroglyphs and divine design, literally writing beings into existence.

**Clair Obscur’s Execution:**Creation as art of the gods is central to Clair Obscur, where the Canvas is a world crafted not by mechanical precision but by emotional artistry. Chroma is their medium of creation—akin to divine breath, flame, or song in other world myths.

Humans in the Canvas are living brushstrokes, shaped by love, grief, and memory. The painted Verso, Renoir, and even the creatures like the Axons are all echoes of the divine—fragments of the Painters’ psyches given form through Chroma. Like many mortals in mythology, they do not know they are the artwork of a higher being. They live, feel, suffer, and make meaning in a world painted into being.

Art as creation is crucial to Clair Obscur as the story is driven by creative impulses coloured by hope or despair. Aline recreates her family from memory, emotion, and denial—her brushstrokes are acts of longing, not logic.The world was not planned with blue prints and precision - it is a messy world created through the artistic impulse of a higher power.  The denizens of the canvas are an expressive art, like a statue that weeps or a melody that remembers.  This mythic lens brings us a world that is messy - not master planned but iteratively created through artistic impulses, memories, and expressions of the deepest feelings of the painter. This echoes traditions in which the cosmos is not built like a machine, but evoked—sung, carved, danced, or imagined into being. The canvas is not what you and I can buy at the art shop; it is a metaphor for creation driven through emotional expression. The Canvas is messy, beautiful, and inconsistent—not because it is flawed, but because it is art. Its asymmetries are intentional. Its inconsistencies, expressive.

3.Myths of Fate, Freedom, and Unintended Consequences  

Mythological Parallel: Fate is inescapable in many myths. Greek tragedies—like Oedipus Rex or the labors of Heracles—turn on attempts to outmaneuver prophesied doom, only to fulfill it. In modern mythologies like The Matrix or Neon Genesis Evangelion, prophecy becomes less divine decree and more psychological trap—a design that folds resistance into its fulfillment. Ancient myths often caution against defying the divine order, while modern myths tend to interrogate that very order, suggesting that free will—even flawed or limited—holds meaning. Perhaps this shift reflects an after-echo of the Enlightenment and the cultural prioritization of individual agency and human dignity over the last 300 years.

Clair Obscur’s Execution: The titular “33” acts as a silent prophecy, a ticking clock that marks those to be erased by the Gommage. In the Canvas, fate is not an abstract principle—it is a number. The culture responds with rituals of farewell, rushed parenthood, and unspoken fatalism. Fate here becomes socially encoded, not just metaphysical. To the inhabitants of Lumière, it appears as divine punishment—a mysterious but natural law imposed by the Paintress. The expeditioners, believing they are striking back at fate, rally to destroy the Paintress in hopes of freeing themselves. But in doing so, they unknowingly serve Renoir, whose true goal is to erase the Canvas such that the Paintress (Aline) leaves it to process her grief outside of the Canvas. The Gommage is not Aline’s curse—it is Renoir’s method of saving his wife from a gradual decline in the world of the canvas. Her weakening grip on the Canvas is all that shields humanity from annihilation. In the end, the expeditioners do not escape fate—they accelerate it by defeating the paintress. Their victory brings no liberation, only the revelation that they were instruments of the fate they sought to break. Like Oedipus or Shinji Ikari, they confront the horrifying truth that resistance itself was part of the design and only hastened the end. In pursuing freedom, they have sealed their fate. 

Yet Clair Obscur grants one final grace: through Maelle/Alicia’s intervention, the annihilation is paused. At the climax, the divine siblings diverge—Verso, the lingering soul of a dead god, longs for closure for his family and dissolution of his own suffering (or is it boredom and monotony?). Maelle, reborn and no longer defined by guilt or scars, wishes to remain in the painted world as a new painters. One wishes to dissolve and let his family pass through grief; the other to live beyond it. The player’s choice between them is not just narrative—it is mythic. Unlike the expeditioners or even the divine siblings, Maelle is not enacting someone else’s will at this point in the narrative. Her decision—to stay, to create anew—is an act of agency that transcends the will of her now ejected mother and father. It is a unique choice. However the story does not end there. 

This is where Clair Obscur transcends some of its mythological inspirations: the player's decision becomes the final mythic act. You choose not only how the story ends, but what kind of myth this is—restoration or release, acceptance or transcendence, annihilation or creation. And like the mortals of every great myth, your choice is shaped by unseen forces: prior events, emotions, values, and a save system that denies second chances. The game’s final revelation is not just about fate—it’s about you.

4. Creation Born from Sorrow: a mythological tradition 

Mythological Parallel: While section 2 explored ‘the how of creation’ (art) this section explores ‘why gods create’. 

In many mythic traditions, creation is born not from joy or triumph, but from loss, longing, and grief. In Norse myth, the world is formed from the corpse of Ymir, but the gods build it knowing its fate—Ragnarök—will one day consume them. Their act of creation is already haunted by inevitable loss. In Orphic Greek mythology, Zagreus is slain, and his dismemberment leads not only to the origin of humanity, but to a cosmos steeped in divine mourning. In Egyptian myth, the goddess Isis, grieving the murder of her husband Osiris, pieces his body back together—this act of restoration becomes the basis for kingship, resurrection, and the cosmic order. In Sumerian lore, the goddess Inanna descends into the underworld to mourn and recover her dead lover Dumuzi, and through her journey, seasonal cycles of death and rebirth are set into motion. In Hindu cosmology, Shiva, in his grief and rage over the death of Sati, enters a cosmic dance (the Tandava) that dissolves and re-creates the universe. Even in Christian theology, creation is reimagined through the death and resurrection of Christ—a divine act of love and loss that rewrites spiritual reality.

These myths don’t simply depict gods warring—they show gods grieving, remembering, and rebuilding in the wake of absence. In these stories, the world is not the result of divine joy—it is the expression of divine sorrow, a monument to what was loved and lost.

 

Clair Obscur’s Execution:

Clair Obscur draws directly from the mythic tradition of divine mourning as world-making. The Canvas is not the product of cosmic curiosity or creative whim—it is a grieving mother’s refusal to let go. Originally painted by the child-god Verso, the Canvas holds a fragment of his soul—perhaps even the most enduring part of him. After his death, Aline does not move on. Instead, she retreats into his creation, expanding and reshaping it with her mastery of Chroma, populating the world with echoes of her lost family.

Like Isis reassembling Osiris or Shiva dancing through destruction, Aline paints not to build a new future but to preserve what she cannot bear to lose. The Canvas beings are remembered into existence. Her creations of Renoir, Verso, and the damaged Alicia are not mere replicas. They are emotionally charged myths of a family reimagined. At first, they live, suffer, and act unaware of their origin—like mortals shaped from the remnants of a dead god. As truth emerges, their paths diverge—each following the contours Aline painted into them. Painted Renoir becomes an unwavering, even fanatical, defender of his wife’s work in the Canvas, in contrast to the real Renoir, who seeks to break her free. Verso retains the idealized traits of the lost son: innocent, brave, endlessly creative. Painted Alicia, perhaps most tragically, is painted as broken—scarred and silent, even though Aline could have healed her. Her pain is preserved because Aline’s grief demands it. For the mortals who inhabit the Canvas, this creation of grief becomes their entire reality. They live out lives shaped not by their own stories, but by the emotional damage and lingering battles of gods who cannot let go. Their suffering, their joy, their very existence are the echoes of divine sorrow—and they are never told why.

But just as gods in myth face the consequences of building worlds from sorrow, Aline’s illusion becomes untenable. In the eyes of the real Renoir, her preservation is a form of self-destruction. He enters the Canvas to confront her, initiating a divine war between husband and wife. The Gommage—a slow, creeping erasure of the world—is not a punishment from Aline, but the visible symptom of her failing divine memory, as she struggles to protect what little remains.

In this way, the Canvas joins a long tradition of mythic worlds created not by gods in their strength, but by gods in their sorrow.

And perhaps, depending on the ending, the expeditioners—Maelle and her companions—can be read as a parallel Odin, Vili, and Ve: the next generation of divinities who confront a dying world built by a grieving god, and choose to end it. In Norse myth, they slay Ymir, the primordial being, and from his body create a new world. In Clair Obscur, Maelle is the daughter or Renoir and Aline who are now expelled from the Canvas.Her choice is to remain in this world and not return. By hiding the Canvas and choosing to remain, she is acting as a new generation of creator, guiding the canvas into a new future. 

5. Learning from Broken Gods

Mythological Parallel: In many myths, gods are no strangers to pain—they are broken, incomplete, or exiled, and their divinity and how they execute it becomes entangled with their damage. These gods reflect cosmic forces and human flaws. 

Instead of healing, they create—not as an act of renewal, but as a way to hide, contain, or recast their brokenness.  In Norse mythology, Odin sacrifices his eye for wisdom and is haunted by knowledge of his own doom—he is not a conqueror, but a god preparing for the end In Greek myth, Hephaestus, born lame and thrown from Olympus, is rejected by his mother and scorned by the gods. He responds by retreating to his forge, crafting exquisite weapons and automatons—a world of perfect control in contrast to his own rejection. In Japanese mythology, Izanami, goddess of creation, dies in childbirth and is trapped in the underworld. Her husband, Izanagi, flees in horror after seeing her decayed form—but she still curses the world to balance life with death. Even in her brokenness, she asserts cosmic order. In some Gnostic traditions, the demiurge is a flawed, ignorant god, exiled from higher realms, who creates the material world as a projection of his limitations—a reality shaped by misunderstanding.These are gods who do not create because they are whole—they create because they are wounded, cast out, or remade. Their worlds are not celebrations of what is—they are refuges, projections, or prisons shaped by what cannot be faced.These gods shape the world with their dysfunction, but their flaws often serve as metaphors for natural or cosmic imbalance—storms, cycles, entropy, judgment. 

Clair Obscur’s Execution:

Myths of broken gods ask not only how the world was made, but what it costs to live in a world shaped by pain. Clair Obscur continues this tradition—and asks whether, by understanding such gods, we can escape repeating their mistakes. Our pantheon carries the power of immense creation but reflects the interior conflicts of modernity: grief, denial, restoration, and self-authorship. Their wounds are not symbols of the cosmos—they are personal. This is a myth not about how the world works, but how the broken keep building anyway and the conflicts that can emerge during grief and rebuilding.

Aline is a wounded goddess. If her entrance into the Canvas was born of sorrow, her continued presence is an act of denial. She lives in a world where Verso never died, her family never fractured, and loss can be indefinitely postponed. She is a divinity addicted to refusal: refusal to grieve, to let go, to heal. Each stroke of Chroma is a defense against reality. But what begins as mourning becomes obsession. Like Selene, who visits her sleeping lover in eternal stillness, Aline surrounds herself with painted echoes of her loved ones—simulacra shaped to match her grief, incapable of challenging it. She paints on to preserve what she’s lost—her son, her family, her place in the world of other painters.

Renoir becomes the destructive shadow of this same logic. Damages by regret and loss he seeks to assert control over his wife rather than face the present as it is. Where Aline hides within illusion, he seeks to destroy it—convinced the only way to save what remains is to unmake the Canvas entirely. Yet even this is not freedom. He acknowledges the beings within the Canvas as real, but accepts their destruction as necessary—a cold calculus to restore a broken family. His crusade to "free" Aline is obsessive and violent to those who dwell there, a mirror of her own compulsion to remain. Aline denies the past; Renoir denies the present—especially his wife's agency in choosing grief over healing.

 

Alicia, too, bears the marks of divine damage but is the only god with the opportunity to move beyond it. Scarred, silenced, and guilt-ridden over her brother’s death—having been manipulated by the rival Writers. Her older sister Clea brings her into a plan to aid Renoir and bring Aline out of the Canvas. However, upon entering the Canvas, she is remade as Maelle, her scars gone, her voice restored, her memory erased. But this is not rebirth—it is erasure, designed to make her a compliant part of Renoir and Clea’s strategy. As Maelle, she lives as a mortal, confronting joy and hardship, especially in her role within Expedition 33. This journey transforms her. When her memories return, she does not run from them. She does not seek to restore the past, nor escape it. Instead, she claims her own authorship. She refuses to return to Belle Époque Olympus—not to hide from pain, but to assert control over it. She accepts the painted world not because it is ideal, but because it is hers – she has been shaped by it just as much as she can now shape it . Where Aline painted loss into permanence, Alicia rewrites the illusion, not in service of the past, but in hope for a future.

These three – Aline, Renoir, and Alicia - are not creators of a world driven by fate—they are curators of grief and trauma. In many myth, as in Clair Obscur, divinity is not power without pain, instead the gods wield their power in response to their own pain and flaws. For Aline and Renoir, power enabled denial and manipulation. Aline denied the past. Renoir denied the present (a broken family and a lost wife). Some may read Alicia’s ending as an acceptance of the past and a choice to create in spite of it, not because of it.  

6. Fragmented Lore: No Canon, Only Chorus

Mythological Parallel: In oral traditions, myths emerge gradually—pieced together through conflicting accounts, recovered relics, and layered retellings. The full truth can never be revealed, only inferred. This is not unique to obscure traditions—even the most well-known myths exist in multiple, often contradictory versions. The Greek myth of Persephone’s abduction differs between Homeric and Orphic sources—sometimes she eats six seeds, sometimes four; sometimes she is tricked, sometimes complicit. The flood myth appears across the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Book of Genesis, and the tale of Deucalion and Pyrrha in Greek myth—each reshaping divine motives and human consequences. Arthurian legend mutates wildly across Celtic folklore, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chrétien de Troyes, and later romances, where even core characters like Lancelot or Morgan le Fay shift in tone, allegiance, and symbolic role. What we accept as “canon” is often just what happened to be written down—or survive.

Clair Obscur’s Execution

Like ancient storytellers gathering fragments of a fading legend, the player in Clair Obscur reconstructs meaning from traces—never the whole truth, but enough to understand, to feel, and to choose. Meaning is not given; it is assembled. Journals from expeditions, scattered corpses, obscured memories, and conflicting testimonies from the mythic backbone of Clair Obscur’s worldbuilding. The player, like a mythographer or oral historian, must assemble meaning from fragments—often too late, or never with full clarity. The game enacts mythology not as a history, but as a living, interpretive process.The ambiguity is not a narrative bug—it is a mythic feature. Like the lost verses of a ritual hymn, meaning in Clair Obscur survives through interpretation, not precision.

This narrative is mythic in three key ways:

1. Reconstruction through experience The player’s journey mimics the act of myth-making. Truths emerge slowly, and often ambiguously, from different times and perspectives. Unreliable narration, limited access to past scenes, and a save system that discourages replaying combine to ensure that the myth is built through memory and intuition. For instance, Verso’s manipulation or the true origin of the Axons is not a single twist—it is a pattern, slowly revealed through gameplay, loss, and reinterpretation—much like reconstructing the story of Orpheus from Homeric, Euripidean, and Orphic strands.

2. Myth as the seed of a new age In either ending, the events of the game form a creation myth for what follows. If the Canvas survives, its people now have a mythic origin to explain their world—a divine family, a cosmic rupture, and a cycle of rebirth. If Maelle leaves, the myth becomes personal: her memories and choices become a private story- but will it serve as a narrative of regret or healing? Whether collective or solitary, these myths are not just records of what happened—they are how the survivors make sense of it. The new age begins not with certainty, but with storytelling.

3. Living myth beyond the screen Even outside the game, myth-making continues. Each player’s interpretation differs—depending on which journals they find, which truths they uncover, which characters they believe. We retell the game to one another, shaping its meaning socially, as ancient myths were shaped. In this way, Clair Obscur is not just a story we play—it is a myth we inherit, participate in, and retell.It does not end at the credits; it begins again each time someone tells it their way.

7. Colliding Worlds

**Mythological Parallel:**Myths are not merely stories—they are tools for meaning-making, frameworks that externalize complex inner realities. They expose us to other worlds so we can better inhibit and prepare for ours. They transform grief into seasons, fear into monsters, identity into lineage. They do not need to explain the world in scientific terms, but reflect our emotional and cultural relationships to it to transmit knowledge or lessons.

As Mircea Eliade writes in Myth and Reality, myth is “an absolute truth, a sacred history,” not because it happened in measurable time, but because it still happens—again and again, within us and around us.

To serve this purpose, myths frequently invoke dual or layered realities. In Greek mythology, Persephone lives half the year in the underworld and half above, embodying both death and rebirth in a single cycle. In Sumerian myth, Inanna descends into the realm of death, is stripped of her identity, and returns transformed—a passage that is psychological as much as divine. In Hindu philosophy, Maya casts the material world as illusion—not false, but impermanent, a veil drawn over deeper truths..Japanese mythology also embraces blurred boundaries between realms. The spirit world (Yōkai, Kami, or Yomi) often coexists with the visible one, accessed through forests, mirrors, rituals, or dreams. These two realms are not opposites, but interwoven layers of meaning. Identity, fate, and memory are shaped in their overlap.This idea of dual realities as a source of truth, not contradiction, continues in the fiction of Haruki Murakami, whose characters move fluidly between symbolic and literal worlds—underground libraries, parallel cities, dreamscapes. In Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84, and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, there is never a final answer to “which world is real.” What matters is how the characters change—what they carry back.

In these myths, we may get distracted wondering what was real; but what myths offer us is the truth of how characters grow, transform, and act. The tool of colliding worlds is a powerful way to do so, and the reality of worlds is unessential to this purpose. 

Clair Obscur’s Execution:

In myth, dual worlds reveal truth and consequence through conflict. They offer a way to explore what cannot be said plainly through contrasts and conflict, true to the name of the game.. Clair Obscur follows this lineage by introducing a collision of worlds: the Canvas, and what I call Belle Époque Olympus. These two realms exist in tension, not to confuse, but to illuminate.The Canvas and Belle Époque Olympus are not simply fantasy layers—they represent competing realities we all live with: the world as it is, and the world as we need it to be to survive our losses. 

Worlds Collide… Worlds are Born 

The final act of the game is focused on Belle Epoque Olympians and their tribulations. This sets the stage for two sets of  mythic thesis and antithesis. Belle Epoque Olympus is shown to be a world of control, denial, and conflict. An injured girl sits alone in her room despite her family’s apparent power, only called for when her older sister needs a chore. The broken gods of this world are selfish - putting their definitions of love and family above all else.Their eternal scheming between factions serves as a frame story (Writer vs. Painter) for the game. It also is an interesting illustration of this world, there is no peace in Olympus. The Canvas, despite being a fractured world, is one of hope and endurance. The people of the Canvas have created systems to grieve and build a better world. Demonstrating capabilities that Renoir and Aline do not have.  To quote the expeditioners’ motto: “For those who came before, and for those who come after.” The Canvas achieves a scale of humanity not seen in Belle Epoque Olympus. 

This brings us to our next thesis and antithesis. Aline cannot accept loss, so she retreats into this world of possibility. Renoir, unable to accept his wife’s retreat, becomes the opposing force—he seeks to unmake the illusion, believing destruction is the only path back to truth and a salvaged family. Both are powerful, tragic expressions of grief—but locked in opposition, they generate only collapse. Neither can fully comprehend the cost of their struggle on those within the Canvas. Alicia—reborn as Maelle—becomes the mythic synthesis. She inhabits both worlds, having lived two lives in both Olympus and the Canvas.  Her rebellion at first may seem to be a simple re-enactment of Aline - a defense of the Canvas world and a rejection of Belle Epoque Olympus. However, this duality is indeed what she rebels against in her ending. She fights against Aline’s sorrow-built world that leaves no room to grow, heal, or evolve. Simultaneously she rejects Renoir’s single vision for what the family should mean. She is equally made of two worlds—and chooses the one in which she can create anew. That decision—claiming authorship and rejecting erasure—is Maelle’s mythic act of creation. 

Seeking Truth, Not Reality when Worlds Collide 

 In Act 3, players learn the Canvas is a painted creation—an artistic refuge shaped by Aline, a grieving goddess, who reshapes her broken family through Chroma. For some, this twist echoed the controversy around Star Ocean 3, where a similar reveal led to questions like, “If none of this is real, why should I care?”

Instead of questioning whether the Canvas is “real,” we might ask: what kind of truth does this story reveal? In myth, truth is not verified through a lore guide or explicit exposition, but through the power to shape belief, emotion, and action.The game is not trying to explain metaphysics of Chroma. Of course no mythological world is “real” beyond the brief moment it glimmers in our minds; but in the game world both are certainly real. This  is a continuation of mythic traditions spanning ancient and modern myths. In myth, the relationship between creator and created isn't confined by any single vision of objective reality—myths are about meaning, transformation, and the reflection of the self. 

The Canvas is shown as a world of humanity and consequence.The Canvas is where characters live, die, love, and grieve. Consequences in the Canvas have weight - as players we feel them and we see the characters impacted by them. The prologue is already steeped in emotional consequence: a son’s last fight with his father, a romance lost to despair, masked children watching their parents vanish. The road to the monolith is surrounded by corpses and journals that cry out: We were here. 

The Canvas is full of vivid personalities—expeditions with identity and grit, journals filled with fear, sarcasm, tenderness, and hope. These emotions are rendered with as much care as those in the Dessendre Family of Belle Époque Olympus. This emotional symmetry steps over any need to ask which world is real; we are shown that all characters caught up in this tragic story feel and are fighting for their future. The dual realities serve a clear mythic structure. Belle Époque Olympus is the realm of grieving gods—fractured, obsessive, unable to move on. The Canvas is the world of survival—mortals caught in a decaying creation, building meaning from its fragments. The gods mourn. The mortals endure.

Both gods and mortals alike experience consequence - and regardless how we may interpret lore and metaphysics, the consequence faces by the characters prove their reality. Lune and the people of the Canvas don’t ask if they’re fake; fake is a concept we bring to the narrative from outside of it. Nowhere does the narrative posit the veracity of any mortal of the canvas or whether their world is a real one. Instead, from the game’s opening we are shown a world that is deeply damaged but also fully alive. Reality established through consequence is drawn from the central question each mortal in the canvas faces: what they can do with the time they have left to give their life meaning. a question we can all ponder for ourselves .

When the Player’s World Collides with the Canvas

Finally, we cannot forget our own role. When we play Clair Obscur, we enter a world outside our own. We leave behind reality and step into a painted world filled with memory, longing, and myth. That act mirrors the very themes of the game. And perhaps this is the final parallel: we, too, enter the Canvas. We, too, leave our lives—perhaps bored, grieving, adrift—and enter a myth. Not because we believe it is real, but because we hope it might be true. And Clair Obscur gives us something myth has always offered:Like Alicia, we inhabit a place that isn’t “real”—but we bring ourselves to it. We grieve, reflect, grow, and share our versions of the story with others. That’s what myth does. That’s what it has always done. The Canvas may be painted, but so is every myth. What matters is not how it was made, but what it made us feel—and who it helped us become.

8. What can we learn from the end of the world   

Mythological Parallel:

Across global mythologies, the end of the world is rarely final. Instead, it signals a transformation. Myths do not merely explain how the world began—they tell us what happens when it ends. These stories do not simply warn—they reveal what a culture fears most, values most, and hopes for in the aftermath.

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök foretells a brutal end: gods perish, the sky burns, the sea swallows the land. But from the wreckage, two humans emerge and a green world begins anew. In Mayan cosmology, we are the Fifth Sun—preceded by four failed worlds, each destroyed by its own imbalance. In the Hebrew Bible, the flood annihilates civilization, but offers Noah a covenant of future resilience. Hindu Yuga cycles describe epochs that rise, decay, and collapse—each followed by renewal. Even in Buddhist cosmology, entire realms dissolve into emptiness before taking new shape.

These are not just tales of punishment. They are frameworks for understanding collapse, and often, manuals for how to live through it. They remind us that endings are not failures—they are the conditions for new beginnings.

Clair Obscur’s Execution:

The world of the Canvas is not thriving—it is dimming. The Gommage, the annual erasure of the aged, is not an act of divine wrath—it is a slow countdown to extinction. Unlike a flood or a fire, this collapse is not loud. It is quiet, cyclical, and devastating in its mundanity. No one knows how many years remain exactly, and how old the last group of humans will be. 

Some residents of Lumière fall into despair. Others choose pleasure over purpose, building families young to maximize time, or embracing the present with no future in mind. Many drift into resigned fatalism—expeditions grow smaller, more pragmatic. Some treat this age as the last, planning only for survival. Why fight fate when the end comes softly, predictably, year by year?

This story telling reflects a wide degree of responses to slow decline - and the narrative and characters are expertly written in the context of the game. For nearly 70 years loved ones have been vanishing and expeditions have failed. The world is torn asunder. Each year, following the gommage (and farewell to loved ones) the expeditioners choose to set out in an attempt to end the gommage once and for all. The characters are written with a sense of dissociation and optimism with equal measure. They bound from tragedy and tears to finding levity along the journey. The Canvas—and the myth it tells—is not about avoiding the end. It’s about living through it, with intention, and choosing creation even in grief’s shadow. While the parallel world (Belle Epoque Olympus) and the Dessendre family show us what happens when we cannot work through collapse; when we give in to grief rather than to hope. The game teaches us, as myths always have: mourn loss and collapse but carry hope for rebuilding and work for tomorrow.

Concluding Thoughts

If ancient myths asked how the world begins and ends, Clair Obscur asks of us how we go on living after our world breaks—and what we are willing to do to rebuild it.

It does not answer these questions plainly. It offers no grand revelations, only fragments: layered mysteries, unfinished griefs, and quiet choices that shape the future. It does not fall into the traps of many other games or shows with convenient or simple endings.

There are no great evils here or true villains. The world of Clair Obscur is shaped by wounded people (gods and mortals alike) struggling to grieve and live their agency. The forces that shape the world are not cosmic laws, but familiar human urges: remembrance, refusal, longing, guilt, and hope.

 Like the myths of old, these forces collide, crack, and flow through the lives of those who must endure them. And perhaps, like in our own world, they shape everything: from how we mourn those we've lost, to how we imagine the faceless architects of policy and war - these are people, too, trying to carry something forward created from thier own emotions and traumas.

My most vivid memories of Clair Obscur are not the battles, but the quiet truths: the son’s last words, the grief etched in murals, the journals scattered across a fading world. These were the moments I stopped playing and simply listened—to the myth, the world, and the people trying to live within it.Because in the end, Clair Obscur is not a myth you watch. It is a myth you walk through, slowly, painfully, and process in your own way. And maybe myths like this give us the some wisdom to heal and hope in a way the Dessendre family could not.