A true phenomenon, the video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is well on its way to being one of the most notable video games of 2025. But did you know that it was heavily inspired by this other French masterpiece? We'll tell you everything!
Clair Obscur: a very inspired game
Launched on April 24, 2025, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the game that attracts everyone's attention. Produced by the young French studio Sandfall Interactive - created by former Ubisoft employees - and published by Kepler Interactive, the game immerses us in a dark and fantastical universe inspired by Paris during the Belle Époque. With the aim of dusting off the J-RPG genre, characterized by its turn-based combat, the game is not content to be a simple Proust's Madeleine but instead offers more dynamic gameplay, based on dodging and parrying during the defense phases. Some very strong artistic choices, such as the absence of a mini-map, make Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 a rare experience in current video games.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sold more than one million copies three days after its release, and the two million mark was surpassed in just twelve days. A resounding success for an AA game! While the postponement of Grand Theft Auto VI to May 2026 disappointed many players, fans of Clair Obscur are convinced that the Montpellier studio's first game is a serious contender for the 2025 GOTY title. Of course, we join in this collective enthusiasm. In addition to winning over critics and audiences, the game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has found a very positive response from French streamers, including Antoine Daniel, Baghera Jones and Le Joueur du Grenier.
Frédéric Molas and Sébastien Rassiat, the duo behind the channel Le Joueur du Grenier, invited Guillaume Broche (artistic director of Sandfall Interactive) and Alan Reynaud (leed character artist) onto the set of their show Les Termes, broadcast on the secondary channel Le Bazar du Grenier. The opportunity for the two authors to discuss their inspirations for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. While of course, Guillaume Broche's attraction to Final Fantasy VIII and Final Fantasy X - two models of Square Enix's J-RPG - strongly influenced the game's design, the project leader mentions another major source of inspiration for the writing: the literary masterpiece La Horde du Contrevent.
Released in 2004, La Horde du Contrevent is the second novel by the brilliant Alain Damasio, who, with La Zone du Dehors (1999), became one of the pillars of French Science Fiction. Taking up the philosophy of movement established by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, Alain Damasio immerses us in a world swept by several types of winds through the eyes of the different members of the thirty-fourth Horde of the Counterwind, whose mission is to travel the world from west to east, in order to reach the Extreme Upstream, where the source of all winds is found. At once epic, poetic, and philosophical, this science-fantasy novel, awarded the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire, established Alain Damasio as one of the greatest writers of his generation.
Obviously, reading the pitch for La Horde du Contrevent should convince you of this major inspiration for the video game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, in which Expedition 33 leaves the City of Light to go to the Continent to find the Painter, whose mysterious powers allow her to erase all people of the age she draws on a monolith. No doubt Alain Damasio will appreciate that his novel has inspired such talented artists! Remember that the writer is the co-founder of the DONTNOD Entertainment studio, to whom we owe Life Is Strange (published by Square Enix), on which he is credited as a script consultant. In his technocritical essay Silicon Valley, published in 2024, he praised the benefits that certain video games could bring to the development of the human brain, and campaigned for the National Education system to help children distinguish between good and bad video games.
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