Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

Nine Awards at The Game Awards. One Studio's First Game.

When Sandfall Interactive, a studio of roughly thirty developers based in Montpellier, released their debut title on 24 April 2025, few predicted the scale of what followed. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went on to win nine awards at The Game Awards 2025, including Game of the Year, setting a new record for the ceremony. It then swept all five major game award shows, a feat only Baldur's Gate 3 had achieved before it.

Director Guillaume Broche, a former Ubisoft developer, built the project around a specific ambition: a high-fidelity turn-based RPG in the tradition of Final Fantasy and Persona, a genre he felt AAA studios had abandoned. The result runs on Unreal Engine 5, with lighting and rendering that critics described as "dreamily intoxicating." Composers Lorien Testard and Alice Duport-Percier delivered a score so distinctive it topped Billboard's Classical Albums Chart for six consecutive weeks.

The Experience

The game is set in a dark fantasy Belle Époque world where an entity called the Paintress erases everyone above an ever-decreasing age each year. Players lead Expedition 33, a group of volunteers sent to stop her before she can paint again. Combat is turn-based but demands real-time precision: attacks require timed inputs, and dodging or parrying enemy strikes mid-battle rewards players with ability points and counterattack windows.

The cast includes Charlie Cox, Andy Serkis, Ben Starr, and Jennifer English, whose performance won multiple awards. We think the voice work is inseparable from why the story lands as hard as it does.

Who Should Play This

The game is available on PlayStation 5, Windows, and Xbox Series X/S, and launched day one on Xbox Game Pass. It is a single-player experience with multiple difficulty options and a New Game Plus mode. Players who bounced off passive turn-based systems will find the active combat demands genuine engagement throughout.