2025 Belonged to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 - Mike's Musings ✨ @expedition33

There is a terrific "How it started/How it's going" meme going around contrasting Sandfall Interactive head Guillaume Broche's initial, charming, kickstarter appeal on reddit with an image of him accepting every award known to man at last weeks Game Awards.

I’m not sure anyone involved with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 expected to walk away from the ceremony with their arms full of trophies, but here we are. Game of the Year, best Debut, Art Direction nods, critical darling status cemented, and a room full of developers looking faintly annoyed that a relatively small French studio just strolled in and stole their lunch money.

As noted in our own glowing review, Clair Obscur is the first game from Sandfall Interactive, a studio that, until very recently, was mostly known for not existing. Founded by former Ubisoft developers, the team hovered somewhere in the “AA but dangerously competent” space, reportedly numbering in the few dozens rather than the hundreds.

No vast satellite studios. No eighteen-hour mocap shoots for incidental NPCs. No decade long development hell. Just a relatively small team, a very clear vision, and the audacity to build a turn based RPG in 2025 and assume people might still care.

They were right.

Critical reception was, frankly, obscene.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 PS5 Review 10/10 "I’m Terrible at Clair Obscur and I Love It" ⚔️ @SandfallGames #IndieGame #GameDev

I am comically bad at RPGs. Something about having to look at percentages and statistics during my leisure time just shuts my brain down. The lizard brain takes over, and I pour everything into strength—because obviously, swinging a sword the hardest is the best way to fell a mountain-sized Elder God.

I’m even worse at turn-based combat. I’ll inevitably end up with a team of glass cannons who get wiped out if someone sneezes on them—and they can’t even do that much damage because I didn’t bless their weapons with the Scrotum of K’Narl fifteen hours earlier.

I tried Baldur’s Gate 3, based solely on the enthusiastic response to its narrative and rich characters, but the combat was a brick wall I couldn’t surmount. It’s always humbling when the loading screen stops saying “You can change the difficulty at any time” and starts saying “Why don’t you have a nice lie down instead?”

Enter Clair Obscur: Expedition 33—the first (I repeat: first!) game from French developer Sandfall Interactive, and the latest critical darling trying to woo me back to a genre that routinely makes a fool of me.