TLDR: Gaming hasn't gotten boring, developers have been held back, and this game is a love letter to what's possible when you let developers do what they do best.

Also, stop reading the review and just buy the game already. Best to go in blind to this game and just experience it.
No, really, just go buy it. This is the first game I felt the want to 100%.

For a long time, I thought my depression was getting worse, that I was falling away from hobbies left, right, and center, and it was hitting a new low where even video games couldn't keep me entertained for years now. I've struggled over this, thinking that I was just doomed to not enjoy games anymore while all of my friends find endless hours of fun with new titles and old haunts.

After playing Expedition 33, I realized that my enjoyment of games hadn't disappeared, that my depression hadn't ruined my ability to love video games like I had when I was younger. It made me realize that we've just had a lot of slop games fed to us by publishers over the years. It's been easy to accept those sloppy games, there's so many parts of a whole that make a game what it is. Some games have great mechanics, while others have amazing immersion and others tell an amazing story. That being said, games aren't just gameplay, music, visuals, voice actors, story, or their atmosphere. They are a cohesive whole of all those parts. How good each of those parts is can contribute to how high a game can go, or how far it falls short of expectations.

Those parts and any other part you can think of aren't the only things that make up a game though. There is one other thing that can make or break a game as a whole. A keystone in the arch that can take even the best individual bricks of the strongest and most beautiful materials that one can find and cause it to collapse into an ugly mess. This one thing can turn a game that has an amazing story, mechanics, art, music, and still leave you wondering why something feels like it's still missing. The game is amazing by any view and all of those parts are polished and shining, so why does it feel incomplete?

That last piece of the puzzle is developer passion.

Expedition 33 has that passion. It shows in the story with how close you get to the characters. It shows in how the story they want to tell doesn't pull any punches, and treats you like an adult, not hand holding you like a child. It shows in their choices for the mechanics of gameplay, where they take notes from some of the greatest turn-based RPGS of all time, then carefully adding their own twist in a way that doesn't disrespect the things that made the genre great before. It shows down to every piece of music, art and character with the developers letting their culture bleed into everything that you can see and hear.

These developers were once cursed by gamers everywhere. The French division of Ubisoft was one of the worst, and that's saying something given how far Ubisoft has fallen into the gutter and dragged their IPs with them. My belief publishers have been holding back developers has been with me for quite a few years now, and now we have proof. These devs made the right choice to split off from Ubisoft.

That being said, people still didn't expect much from them. We've seen people have marginal success breaking off into their own studios when they leave a large publisher, but never a groundbreaking success.

I am glad that we were proven wrong here. For a first game that a studio released, this couldn't have been better.
This game is a work of art and a love letter to what good games could be if publishers let their developers do what they do best and just make the games they are fully capable of making.

I have a feeling that this game might just be the turning point that the gaming industry needs. Sandfall truly made a gem of a game, and this gem is easily going to be one of my favorites for a long while to come.