Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. How a Small Studio Revived the JRPG
A new era for strategy games.
Just ten years ago, turn-based role-playing games (RPGs) seemed like a relic of a bygone era. They lived on in the memory of gamers who grew up on Final Fantasy and Pokemon. At the time, the market was dominated by fast-paced online shooters, and calm, deliberate battles seemed pushed into the past.
By combining classic mechanics with active real-time response, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 drew the industry's and players' attention. It's a classic turn-based Japanese role-playing game (JRPG), inspired by the atmosphere of France's 'Belle Époque' of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Its mechanics blend familiar turn-based combat with a demand for quick real-time reaction.
Guillaume Broche, creative director of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, has described how Final Fantasy once took a more realistic, grounded approach to the turn-based genre, something no one else is really doing anymore, and that this is exactly the space he wants his team to occupy, he said in an interview for The Guardian.
The debut game from the 33-person French team Sandfall Interactive received glowing reviews from critics, and at least five million copies have been sold since its April release. The project earned high scores on Metacritic and OpenCritic, and its peak concurrent player count on Steam reached 145,000.
The World of Clair Obscur: Atmosphere and Plot
The game's city architecture is filled with symbols of decay: cracked facades, warped metal structures, and empty streets create a sense of a world gradually fading away. Instead of familiar urban harmony, the world is filled with machines frozen in time and twisted elements made of obsidian and gold. Corruption also spreads through the magical paint called 'Chroma'.
The plot unfolds in a city suffering from the Gommage — a mysterious event during which people who reach a certain age vanish without a trace. The age of the victims decreases every year — at the start of the game, it's just 33, threatening society's very survival. A mysterious being called the Paintress paints a new number on a monolith each year, determining who will disappear this time.
The player leads Expedition 33, which includes protagonist Flora and her team: the courageous veteran Boris and inventor Lili. Their shared goal — is to stop the Paintress and break this fatal cycle of disappearances.
Details, Mechanics, and Strategy: How the Game Works
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is built on attention to detail: characters' memories, brief dialogue, environmental reactions. Each character has their own backstory, motives, and distinctive combat style. Interactions between characters directly affect gameplay — improving relationships, for instance, can unlock new abilities and deepen the storyline.
The game's combat system combines the classic turn-based JRPG approach with active real-time response. During enemy attacks, the player must dodge, parry, or counterattack at the right moment. The game borrows somewhat from Persona 5's layered mechanics, where every action is the result of strategy.
The world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is designed without traditional maps or guides. This choice forces players to pay attention to small details in the architecture, signs, or sounds. The hero moves from one flag left by previous expeditions to the next, reminiscent of 'bonfires' in Dark Souls, unlocking shortcuts, secret rooms, signs, and notes not shown on a main map.
In one mansion, for instance, players can find an old painting that opens a secret room with a story clue and upgrades.
How a Team of 33 People Made a Game That Captured the World
The idea for the game was born in 2020, during the pandemic lockdown. At the time, Guillaume Broche, who was working at the French game publisher Ubisoft, decided to take a risk — leaving his stable job to found the studio Sandfall Interactive together with fellow Ubisoft alum Tom Guillermin.
Before that, Guillaume had gone through a long career path: he'd been assistant creative director at Ubisoft, an Xbox One brand manager at Microsoft, and later worked on the games Ghost Recon Breakpoint, The Division 2, and Might & Magic.
Broche has described wanting to create something that would recall the games he played as a kid, while still feeling contemporary — with its own signature style and soul, he recalled in an interview with the BBC.
Sandfall Interactive's story began in Guillaume Broche's apartment. In the middle of the pandemic, he started messaging random people on Reddit, looking for like-minded collaborators. One of the first to respond was Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, who was in lockdown in Australia at the time.
Svedberg-Yen has described seeing a Reddit post where Guillaume was looking for voice actors to record a few free lines for a demo, thinking she'd never done anything like it before but that it sounded interesting, and sending him a sample recording, she recalled in an interview with the BBC.
At first, she was cast as one of the main heroines in the game's demo, but Svedberg-Yen later became the team's lead writer. It was Jennifer who helped shape the game's world — its tone, rhythm, and poetics — and she also handled the project's translation into different languages.
Jennifer has described everyone on the team pitching in wherever needed, even outside their usual roles, calling it an incredible team of mostly young specialists who are so dedicated and talented that it shows in every detail.
After Sandfall received funding from publisher Kepler Interactive, the team grew to 33 people, most of whom were found just as randomly as Jennifer had been. In just a few years, Sandfall transformed from a small group of enthusiasts into a studio discussed by leading media outlets worldwide.
Music, Emotion, and the Actors Who Brought Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to Life
Immersion in Clair Obscur's refined world comes not just from the visuals, but from the music too. The soundtrack was composed by Lorien Testard — a composer who posted his own tracks on SoundCloud. Guillaume Broche found Testard on an indie game web forum, listened to his songs, and invited him to compose for Expedition 33.
Life after release turned into a whirlwind for Testard. The composer is set to embark on a major orchestral tour running into next year. According to Sandfall Interactive, tracks from the game have already been streamed more than 333 million times across music platforms. The soundtrack climbed to the top of the Billboard Classical and Classical Crossover charts, staying there for more than 10 weeks.
The voice cast includes Charlie Cox (Netflix's Daredevil), Andy Serkis (The Lord of the Rings), Jennifer English (Baldur's Gate 3), and Ben Starr (Final Fantasy XVI).
From Strategy to Art
Critics call Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 'a breath of fresh air for the JRPG genre,' while users call it 'the most emotional game of the decade.' In the Steam comments for Expedition 33, one player wrote the following.
The player described it as a rare case where you can proudly tell your parents that time spent gaming actually enriched you spiritually, saying that despite never having played this genre before, finishing the game left them feeling as if they'd just been to the opera.
The game raises philosophical questions: about choosing between reality and illusion, about loss, and about the meaning of struggle. These questions surface in the central conflict, where the expedition must decide whether to break the century-old, fatal cycle of disappearances set by the Paintress.
In a world where people increasingly seek escape in virtual spaces, Clair Obscur is a reminder that even in fictional worlds, we all want one thing — to be heard and understood. Perhaps that's the secret to its success. As that same user later added, deepening their thought.
They wrote that Clair Obscur isn't just a turn-based RPG, but something like reading a great book or watching a powerful film, leaving you wanting to sit in silence and think once the credits roll.