Noughties-style JRPG Clair Obscur wants to recapture the glories of Lost Odyssey, with a touch of Devil May Cry

I do like a combat system that resembles an overflowing dressmaker's draw, full of bouncing rubber thimbles and coils of bunting. While it's not quite as chaotic and entangled as say, Disgaea, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is one of those games. I'd call it "baroque", but that would be out of synch with developer Sandfall Interactive's stated influences: the new RPG takes place in a molten and fragmented fantasy world based on the Belle Époque or "beautiful era" of late 19th century France. Your job as player is to stop a sorcerous Paintress from painting everybody over a certain age out of existence. We'll circle back to the plot, though. First, the excessively ornate battlin'.

There are some more generic, overarching fixtures: a turn order bar on the left, character portraits down bottom right, and an action point gauge tucked snugly under your active character's nose, with commands radiating out from their torso, Persona-style. But each character is sort of playing their own version of the game. Dapper hunk Gustave has a rakish mechanical arm that can be overcharged to unlock various mega moves, as with Nero's gauntlets in Devil May Cry. Floating barefoot mage Lune can generate Stains (cf the painting premise), a custom resource which may be alchemically combined with her standard ice, fire and lightning spells. Kiddy fencer Maelle changes stances as she performs skills, shuffling between sets of buffs and weaknesses. You'll want to ensure she's in the right stance for the occasion, especially during pattern-based bossfights.

And then there are the quick time events tethered to those attacks and abilities, which reward the punctual-fingered in different ways: adding a bonus thwack to a combo, strengthening a heal, or softening the damage received. Wash that down with some shamelessly bolted-on ranged combat - characters can shoot at enemies in third-person to expose weak points. It's fairly giddy stuff, all the more so when you try to explain it using the in-game vocabulary of "Nevrons" and "Luminas". (The PRs included a glossary with our screenshots. Thanks, PRs.)

Clair Obscur might sound quite experimental, and it is, but it's also deeply nostalgic. The game counts among its influences some pretty specific RPGs of the mid-noughties - works of both convention and ambition like Blue Dragon and Lost Odyssey, which came about thanks to Microsoft and Xbox's quixotic assault on the Japanese home market. I remember that period in game design broadly as one of expansionist tinkering with the fundamentals of turn-based combat. Projects such as Valkyria Chronicles attempted to thread the needle of real-time elements in Final Fantasy-style chessgames, so as to win over Johnny Actiongamer. Much as I like Valkyria Chronicles, I'm not sure anybody ever pulled it off.

Clair Obscur is once again trying to smoosh those approaches together, though as Sandfall Interactive's cofounder and creative director Guillaume Broche is careful to remark during my hands-off demo, the QTEs aren't forced on you. You can tailor your characters in certain ways to minimise the need to match any prompts. Still, it sounds like you'll be missing out on something integral if you do so. Amongst other things, if you combine certain gear and upgrade paths with QTE parries, there's the possibility of a no-damage run. The progression elements are heavily larded with jargon, but seem familiar: there are the usual stats to upgrade, plus the gleaning of skills from Pictos items, allowing you to use them without having that Picto equipped.

Mechanics aside, Clair Obscur wants to rediscover the look of games like Lost Odyssey. Broche suggests, not wholly convincingly, that there's a shortage today of Japanese RPGs or western-made "JRPGs" that try for a photoreal aesthetic. "We're coming from our own love of high fidelity turn-based games, which hasn't been done since Lost Odyssey, like realistic turn-based, I feel there is a big hole in the market," he says.

Not that Clair Obscur is exactly "realistic", beyond its preference for naturalistic human bodies and attire. It unfolds in a rotted, blossoming, level-based universe that sometimes feels like it's set deep beneath the sea, and sometimes, like it's happening in the vicinity of Bloodborne's astral hunting lodge. The setting is as gorgeous as it is putrid, a place of both sublime monstrosity and folkloric whimsy, where you'll meet ghouls with fissured gabs in mazy mahogany palaces, and trade blows with creaky puppet merchants to unlock more potent wares.

The world has a pervasive wetness to it, like it's only recently been oiled and set by the aforesaid Paintress - who serves, of course, as the game's archnemesis. Each year, she daubs another number on her Monolith, causing everybody that age and older to perish. Gustave, Lune and Maelle, all 32 or younger, form the latest of several human expeditions of decreasing seniority who are trying to put a stop to this. You'll discover the remnants of previous expeditions as you explore, resting up at their abandoned campsites and learning a little of how they failed.

It's a novel narrative premise that could skew either tragic or goofy. Tragic, in that this is could be a timely story about escalating entropy in which children must puzzle out the prospect of their own mortality, decades ahead of schedule. And goofy, in that it risks becoming a joke about western thirty-somethings spotting their first gray hair, realising that they are no longer the springiest of chickens, and falling into an existential funk mirrored by the disorderly worldbuilding.

There's a touch of memoir to it all. "Why 33?" Broche says. "Because I'm turning 33 next year." But there's also a more calculating element of audience symmetry. Broche adds that "the generation of people who grew up with JRPGs are older now, so I really wanted to have something not too teenagery, which I think has already been done a lot - something more mature".

Speaking as a glum-faced member of Expedition 39, I think we can get more "mature" than this. But Expedition 33's casting remains a nice departure from the high school student or runaway princess protagonists of games like Persona and Final Fantasy, while its engagingly overcooked combat has me thinking fondly of my old Xbox 360, dreaming beneath my bed. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on Clair Obscur. In the shorter term, who's up for some Lost Odyssey?