Charlie Cox has finally played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—a bit
I don't expect every actor to play the videogames they're connected to, and have a lot of respect for the way Walton Goggins just straight-up said he hasn't played Fallout and won't play Fallout. Good for him. You don't want to join us down here in the pit, spending the rest of our lives trying to convince people Fallout 2 wasn't as good as the first one. Get out while you still can.
When Charlie Cox admitted he hadn't played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, even though he voices Gustave in it, that seemed fair enough to me. It's a 45-hour JRPG with a frankly quite divisive ending. You don't need that in your life while also trying to maintain Daredevil's abs.
In a more recent interview with our comrades at GamesRadar, however, Cox said he finally got around to playing it. A bit. "Not the whole thing," he added. "I haven't completed it." He's seen the impressive introductory area, though. "I've played the opening bit for a while and kind of walked around and met the people and garnered the information and all that kind of stuff. Not very well."
Cox highlighted how different Clair Obscur felt when compared to the videogames he grew up with, like Goldeneye, Mario Kart, and FIFA 98. "They weren't, like, stories that were so carefully carved out and created over the course of a game with the level of detail and the way in which information is received. It's not just all spelled out—you discover these things as you go on through the game," Cox said.
It must be an uncanny experience, playing a videogame as a character you've provided the voice for. "It didn't really feel like me... I didn't really think of it as me, I thought of it as Gustave."
Though he didn't say whether he'll go back to play more, I suspect Cox won't be collecting all the achievements any time soon. He seemed sensibly incredulous when he said, "there are people who've played it, there are people who've completed it, there are people who have 100%ed it, which—as far as I could work out—is 50-plus hours, maybe 100 hours, sometimes, of gameplay." Honestly, that is too much, and he's right to say it.
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