Heading into the BAFTA Game Awards this Friday, there’s only one name on anybody’s lips. That would be Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
The indie French game has been a mega hit for developer Sandfall Interactive, clinching it gongs at the Game Awards (where it won the coveted Game of the Year title), the Golden Joysticks and the Developers Choice Awards.
And now, they might be about to win several more – including for narrative, game design, artistic achievement and best performer.
“It’s very, very surreal. It's still surreal,” the game’s lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen tells me. That’s not a surprise: in the last year, the team has even been made Knights of France for their contributions to the French gaming industry.
She, along with the rest of Sandfall, is a Chevalier now – though the fanbase has taken the game to their hearts for reasons that might not have been obvious at first. Namely, its eclectic cast of characters, including the sentient giant plushie, Esquie, whose dialogue has quickly become memefied.
“I didn't realise people would love Esquie’s ‘wee woo’ that much,” she laughs. “That was just me at 3am trying to come up with more relationship dialogue and losing my words. I thought Guillaume was gonna cut it, to be honest, because it was so silly.”
“Some people messaged me and said they actually use it to explain concepts to their children or or their therapist. And I was like, wow, that's, that's cool. That's really cool.”
The game’s wild success is a testament to the quality of the storytelling, though. And Clair Obscur’s story of love, loss and a society decimated by the yearly ‘gommage’ – in which every person above a certain age is disintegrated by the ominous figure of The Paintress – is the work of Svedberg-Yen, in collaboration with Sandfall’s director, Guillaume Broche, and Victor Deleard.
The game came from humble beginnings. Famously, Sandfall is a masterpiece in shoestring budget design: starting out from almost nothing, the studio made Clair Obscur on less than a $10m budget, casting much of its voice cast and even its composer via Reddit.
Svedberg-Yen herself came on board before it even started, when she spotted on a forum that Broche was looking for free voice actors to work on one of his projects.
“The subreddit is literally called, Record This For Free,” she says. “I got cast for this test that he was doing, and then we just started talking, exchanging ideas, and then he was sort of like, ‘Hey, do you want to help out?’”
As the game took shape, the trio worked on the plot, bringing ideas together from Broche’s old notebooks and – of all things – a dream Svedberg-Yen had had once.
“The premise of a countdown, a sort of doomsday clock, and this giant figure who paints something on it came from Guillaume,” she says, while the idea of being able to travel into paintings came from her.
“The third component actually came from Guillaume's mum. He asked her, ‘What's the worst thing that could happen to you?’ And she said, losing one of her children. So we said, ‘Okay, let's make that the catalysing incident.’” Though, of course, we don’t find that out until the end of the game.
Plus, of course, there’s that twist. By which we mean (spoiler alert), the one in which the Clair Obscur’s supposed main character, Gustave (Charlie Cox) is brutally killed by one of its villains, Renoir (Andy Serkis), less than halfway through the story.
“It started off as a joke before we were working on Expedition, and we were kicking around other ideas,” Svedberg-Yen tells me, adding that she doesn’t “really like the idea of plot armour.”
Inspired by Ned Stark’s death in Game of Thrones, she asked Broche, “Why don't we just kill the main character? You love twists so much. Let's just kill him. And he [said], ‘Actually, wait, hold on, hold on. Let's do that.’ I was like, ‘Wait, are you serious?’”
Though it involved hefty quantities of rewriting, it paid off. Gustave’s death is one of the game’s biggest gut-punch moments, tying into the game’s themes of loss, and continuing despite loss.
“I think we all cried while we were writing different drafts of it, because you have to be open to the emotions when you're writing to really do justice to what the characters are feeling and going to say,” she says.
“I cried a lot during writing Gustave’s death and also writing the funeral scene, and then also at the end, with the face-off between Verso and Maelle and the conversations with Renoir.”
That’s the point, though. The game is meant to be difficult to play, which goes doubly for the ending, in which players are forced to choose which vision for The Continent they want to embrace.
This involves taking sides in a duel between Verso and Maelle. And yes – before you ask, neither ending is canon. “They were designed together, both of them in mind, and they are both designed to be difficult, because there are beautiful things that you want in each of these endings, but they each come at a cost. And as a player, you kind of have to choose whose happiness you prioritise.”
With Clair Obscur still riding high on its success, the question of whether there’ll be a sequel is the next hot topic – especially given that the world of the Painters, and the world outside The Continent is barely touched on during the game.
Surely, there’s more than enough material for another title, though Svedberg-Yen resists being drawn on it.
“I can't say anything specific on that,” she says now. “We did map out a lot of the lore and a lot of the background of the world and the backdrop of what's going on. So there is material there. Discussions are happening, of course, but there’s nothing I can share.”
But one thing’s for sure: it’s touched a chord.
“I think I didn't realize how many people would embrace the game so strongly, and because of that shared experience of grief,” she says now.
“I've received hundreds, maybe thousands of messages from people who have told me about some of the difficult times in their lives, about losing people, about being in very dark places, and that the game helped them, help change their relationship with grief, helped change their relationship with themselves in a way, or realize things about what they needed to do and help them move on. I never imagined that our game would have such a meaningful impact on people's lives, and that's something that I'm incredibly humbled by.”
