"Chiaroscuro, trouble with erasure, courberaaaaa Eiffel..." Yes, like millions of players around the world, this sweet melody has probably been haunting your mind since the end of April. And that's normal, since Clair Obscur Expedition 33 is undoubtedly THE game of the moment. From its announcement to its release, this first title by Sandfall Interactive has certainly fascinated the video game industry, which has consequently given it a very warm welcome. And the latest figures shared by the studio prove it once again.
Clair Obscur Expedition 33 reaches a new milestone
Indeed, just nine days after reaching one million copies sold, the Montpellier team can now congratulate itself on having doubled its score by reaching the two million mark. A certainly impressive result for this turn-based JRPG developed by a small team with an atypical history. Because for those who don't yet know the anecdote, if Sandfall exists today, it's partly because its founder, Guillaume Broche, was bored with his job at Ubisoft in the middle of COVID-19.
And this is just the beginning of a series of beautiful coincidences, which led Clair Obscur to become the hit we know today. In an interview with the BBC, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, the game's narrative director, explains, for example, the unexpected way in which she found herself associated with the project. "I saw a post from Guillaume on Reddit asking for voice actors to record something for free for a demo. I thought to myself: 'I've never done this, this sounds pretty cool.' So I sent her an audition.".
Result: after being cast for a while to play a character in the game, she ended up rising to the point where she was given responsibility for writing it. In an equally unexpected way, it was through Soundcloud that Lorien Testard, the composer, was recruited. He had never composed for a video game before. "I call it the Guillaume effect," Svedberg-Yen says, laughing. "He's really good at finding the right people." Broche, more modest, believes that he benefited from "enormous luck".
A development philosophy that pays
This nevertheless contributes to making the game's production all the more impressive. Especially when you consider that the core team was only made up of around thirty people, with a limited budget. But on this point, the studio director has no regrets. "Projects of this type – new IP, original story, new characters – are very difficult to carry out in a large company" he confided to Pouce Café. "A project like this would have taken 25 years to complete in a big company, and I don't have that much patience," he adds.
"We also wanted to do things our way and create an atmosphere. That's the very essence of this game: creating an atmosphere. And I think if we succeeded, it's also because we did things well," he concludes. And you only have to look at the game's Metacritic score to realize this. With a user rating of 9.7 for more than 9,000 reviews posted, Clair Obsur is now the highest-rated game in the aggregator's history. So we are indeed dealing with a real success story.
Source: BBC, Pouce Café, X
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