How to cure the emptiness after Expedition 33 – seven games from fans of the French JRPG

There's a particular kind of hangover that no amount of sleep or water cures. The game ended months ago, credits rolled long since, and characters that technically don't exist still cross your mind.

The worst part is that everything you play afterward feels flat. People usually suggest picking up a book in these situations, especially if you need a good story, but gamers rarely reach for that solution.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from Sandfall Interactive launched in April 2025 and picked up the top prize at The Game Awards by December, leaving behind a trail of players who openly admit nothing else hits the same way anymore.

One player put it pretty bluntly – recommend a game with a story that actually means something. Doesn't have to be a masterpiece, doesn't have to be sad, just something that leaves behind more than emptiness once it's over. They'd finished The Witcher III, liked it, but it didn't land nearly as hard.

The first thing that comes up in these conversations is Yoko Taro's NieR: Automata and NieR Replicant. And here's a caveat worth stating honestly – both games make you pay for their existential highs with a fairly exhausting price tag. The side quests in Automata are brilliant in places, but they're delivered through backtracking across empty areas, and the combat, with all due respect to PlatinumGames, feels functional rather than exceptional by 2026 standards.

Fans themselves suggest a working compromise – set the difficulty to easy, skip most of the side quests, and run through the main story in about seventeen hours. The final sequence in Automata makes it worth the trip.

Final Fantasy deserves its own mention. Sandfall game director Guillaume Broche has repeatedly cited Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X as inspirations, and openly admitted the parry and QTE systems draw from Sekiro and Super Mario RPG. So Final Fantasy X isn't some abstract recommendation here – it's basically a close relative.

Trying to work through the series starting with the first entry is a trap, though. The games aren't connected by story, and grinding through FF I and FF II tends to cause burnout right around the point things start getting good. It makes more sense to start with IV, VI, VII, IX, or X, and save the older entries for later if the enthusiasm holds up. On the modern side, there's Final Fantasy XVI, where Clive is voiced by Ben Starr – the same actor behind Verso.

The second wave of recommendations works differently. Outer Wilds from Mobius Digital isn't an RPG and isn't really about story in the traditional sense – players explore a tiny solar system stuck in a twenty-two-minute time loop, and all the progress exists only in their head.

There's technically no leveling, no combat, no dialogue trees, but when it comes to people crying during the credits, this game holds its own against anything. The overlap between Outer Wilds and Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fans, despite completely different genres and aesthetics, comes down to something simple: both games revolve around how to live knowing everything ends.

Disco Elysium falls into this same category, with its fractured detective-alcoholic consciousness, along with Mouthwashing from Wrong Organ – a short psychological horror about a cargo spaceship crew that's best played with zero prior knowledge.

Then there's the heavy hitters: Baldur's Gate 3 (Larian is currently working on a new Divinity, roughly aiming for the end of the decade), Cyberpunk 2077 along with the Phantom Liberty expansion – the game moved past its rocky launch state a long time ago – Red Dead Redemption 2, the Last of Us duology, and A Plague Tale: Requiem with one of the most brutal endings in recent memory.

On the smaller end, there's Nine Sols, a Taiwanese "Taopunk" metroidvania with Sekiro-style parrying.