Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was released a year ago today on April 24, 2025, and instantly became one of the most talked-about and beloved games of the generation. It exceeded all expectations on its way to becoming a massive surprise success story. But, looking back, maybe that instant success shouldn’t have been so surprising.
When developer Sandfall Interactive first revealed Expedition 33 in 2024, it caught the attention of tons of people, landing on many lists chronicling the most anticipated games of 2025. (Let me put on my hipster hat for a moment and stake my claim that I was excited for Expedition 33 from the very beginning). Work on a film adaptation started before the game was even released.
Fast forward to today, and Expedition 33 has been showered in praise from both critics and fans. It’s sold very well, especially for a debut project from an independent team. It’s garnered a truckload of awards. And, perhaps most importantly, star Charlie Cox has finally played it.
Let’s take a look at how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 got here.
The beginnings
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive was founded by Guillaume Broche, Tom Guillermin, and François Meurisse, the first two of whom had worked together at Ubisoft. Their studio had humble beginnings as Broche posted to Reddit to 2020 looking for people to record for a demo and trailer. “If this project takes off, we will probably want to keep working with you for the rest of the project as a member of the team,” he wrote, and that’s exactly what happened.
Writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen saw the post, was cast as a female lead, and eventually switched roles to become the lead writer. Composer Lorien Testard was similarly found on a forum; Broche enjoyed the music Testard posted to SoundCloud, and brought him on board. With art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe also joining, the six-person kickoff team got to work.
The launch
Expedition 33 was revealed during the June 2024 Xbox Games Showcase. It received a release date in January 2025, around the same time as the film adaptation was announced. As a minor miracle in the games industry in the 2020s, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was released less than a year after it was revealed, and was never publicly delayed. (On the other end, Pragmata, for example, was delayed multiple times and released almost six years after its reveal.)
Expedition 33 was a day-and-date Xbox Game Pass release, which no doubt helped the game gain momentum; it was the “biggest new third-party game launch” on the service. Critics adored it, with Polygon’s review from Isaiah Colbert calling it “a game in which innovative combat meets a unique, original story that dares to challenge and inspire, even when all hope seems lost.” Alongside fellow AA darling Split Fiction, Expedition 33 grabbed hold of the Game of the Year race right away. It never let go.
The little things
Expedition 33’s tale of grief and its metanarrative around the creation of art weren’t the only things people loved about it. Its trust in the player and lack of spoon-feeding information were praised at launch. We also fell in love with its Gestrals, the paintbrush-like little dudes who just want to fight, and admired Lune’s bold choice to go barefoot. Esquie, the wine-filled adorer of rocks, quickly became a fan-favorite and helped balance out the game’s darkness. The expeditioners’ mottos, like “We continue,” were viewed as reflections of what the game was all about.
Players didn’t just enjoy its story, but its gameplay too. Expedition 33 added some stress to traditional turn-based battle by way of a good parry, letting players turn defense into offense. Its somewhat overwhelming Lumina and Pictos systems allowed for any number of builds to tackle the game’s toughest bosses (who some of the developers haven’t even bested). Finding synergies between how characters complement each other in combat was part of the fun, even if some of us stuck with our tried-and-true strategies. Players enjoyed tinkering with how to best trivialize fights and deal billions in damage with Maelle, even after she was nerfed.
The fans
People fell for Expedition 33, and they fell hard. Plenty of fan art popped up, some beautifully depicting the game in the increasingly popular HD-2D art style. Cosplayers had a field day with Expedition 33 costumes, and the most confident among them cosplayed as the naked Expedition 60 troupe. One person just wanted to bring home an Expedition 33 art book, but it was confiscated by government officials who thought it was an ancient relic. Sandfall Interactive announced a free “thank you” update in October for fans, who then quickly theorized it would feature an evil Esquie boss fight (they were right, in a way).
Other fans engaged with the game in funny and unique ways. One YouTuber completed it without dodging or parrying (Maelle would be disappointed). Another player spent eight hours and 10,000 parries to take down a tough DLC boss. Others waged war on Metacritic to fend off a surge of Cory in the House meme reviews.
The Charlie Cox saga
Among the folks surprised by the runaway success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was its (first) leading man, Charlie Cox. He played Gustave, the protagonist for the opening hours of the game. He didn’t play the game at launch, calling himself not much of a gamer, and getting showered with praise made him feel like a “total fraud.” The Daredevil: Born Again star was surprised by his award nomination at The Game Awards, and was quick to reroute praise and credit towards Gustave’s mo-cap actor, Maxence Cazorla.
Fast forward to just last week, and Cox revealed he had finally played “a bit” of the game and that he was “not very good” at it. At least now his costars can stop getting asked about if he’ll play Expedition 33 or not.
The insights
The developers at Sandfall Interactive weren’t shy about sharing what went into making this game. Lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen told Polygon about the origins of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s story, including how its major plot twist was born out of a short story she had previously written. She shared how the iconic “wheee whooo” scene manifested, as well as how NASA served as an inspiration for the game’s characters.
Lead programmer Tom Guillermin and producer François Meurisse spoke with Polygon about how the team made Expedition 33 as French as possible, and shared how they crafted that heartbreaking prologue. At the 2026 Game Developers Conference, Guillermin and senior gameplay programmer Florian Torres explained how Unreal Engine played a huge part in crafting the game.
The controversies
With success came controversy. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had one of its awards rescinded because it had launched with AI-generated background assets that were then quickly patched out. No one seemed to notice much, but quotes from Meurisse about the studio’s minimal AI usage made the rounds when Baldur’s Gate 3 developer Larian Studios found itself in hot water over AI, putting a spotlight on Expedition 33 in the midst of award season. Director Guillaume Broche confirmed that the studio had experimented with AI tools, but “we didn’t like it at all. It felt wrong.” He said the studio removed anything AI-generated in the game, and everything in Expedition 33 “is human-made.”
Sandfall Interactive also took some heat when an author claimed he received an order from the studio’s legal team to cease selling his graphic novel of a similar title. Sandfall wanted a “fair solution,” and quickly found it; they worked with their legal team to withdraw that order, and the author was able to continue selling his book.
The awards
Even with one Game of the Year award rescinded, nothing could stop Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s dominance at award show after award show. With its recent GOTY win at the BAFTA Games Awards, it swept GOTY awards at the Big Five awards shows. One of those was at December’s The Game Awards, where it earned Sandfall a record nine award wins. Its cast has also brought home some hardware, like Jennifer English (Maelle) and Ben Starr (Verso) winning performance awards at the Golden Joysticks and English taking home a BAFTA.
The team at Sandfall was also knighted by France’s Ministry of Culture, which might be the coolest honor of all.
The future
After selling more than 8 million copies of its debut title, sweeping up awards, and building up a dedicated fanbase, where does developer Sandfall Interactive go next?
Broche has previously said Clair Obscur is the franchise name, and Expedition 33 is “one of the stories that we want to tell in this franchise. […] [W]hat is sure is that this is not the end of the Clair Obscur franchise.” So, don’t be surprised if you see future games from Sandfall set in this world. But game development takes a long time, and ideas change along the way. The team at Sandfall might want to go in a completely new direction with a new IP — who can say?
“It’s a bit too early to be able to tell what will interest us, but it’s important also to stay true to the DNA of [the] studio with [a] strong narrative universe and the interesting gameplay that excites us,” Guillermin previously told Polygon. They don’t plan to scale up as a studio and instead intend to “keep the human scale that worked for this game and do maybe one big game after another,” Meurisse said in the same interview.
After the success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Sandfall has the freedom to do whatever it wants next. We’ll have to wait and see what path it chooses.
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