Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has emerged as one of many large hits of 2025, due to its mixture of turn-based gameplay and souls-like components, in addition to robust storytelling and wealthy artwork path. The sport has a distinctly French vibe to it–thanks to it being visually influenced by France’s Belle Époque artwork movement–but early in its growth, Expedition 33 was initially set in a steampunk world that was populated with supernatural enemies.
“This recreation was very completely different. The gameplay would have been related, however the story was fully completely different. It was set in a steampunk Victorian England with zombies, aliens, and varied issues,” narrative lead Jennifer Svedberg-Yen defined to The Gamer.
After Expedition 33’s buyers inspired developer Sandfall Interactive to assume larger, this led to the sport being rebooted totally. The studio had been engaged on Expedition 33 for six months at this level, and the brand new path was impressed by a portray that recreation director Guillaume Broche appreciated and a brief story with inventive themes that Svedberg-Yen had written.
The ultimate spark for Expedition 33’s new path was Guillaume’s mom, who helped present the “catalyst” for the story. From there, all of the items fell into place as Expedition 33’s crew polished the story and recruited an all-star solid of actors to voice the sport’s characters. Whereas the sport does depart some room open for a possible sequel, Svedberg-Yen added that Sandfall Interactive is now centered on fine-tuning Expedition 33 and addressing any bugs. That does not imply that the studio is not enthusiastic about producing new content material, however “it is in all probability not going to be for some time” Svedberg-Yen mentioned.
Sandfall Interactive not too long ago dropped a patch that addresses a number of points within the recreation. The patch has additionally drastically decreased the ability of the favored Stendhal construct, however savvy gamers can nonetheless use it to inflict absurd quantities of injury on robust enemies. Expedition 33 has up to now offered over 2 million copies since launch, and its official soundtrack can also be doing fairly properly on the streaming charts.