"Incredibly moved and grateful" – Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's director talks success, "art house" aspirations and the scope of future projects

Since the release of the celebrated and critically acclaimed RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, key members of the development team at Sandfall Interactive have been on something of a global victory tour. The game is indebted to the Final Fantasy series and FromSoftware’s Souls games among others, and now the team have finally met their heroes.

“We met so many inspiring and great people,” director Guillaume Broche tells me, “so many legends of the industry and the games we play and adore. It was always very chill, actually. It was really just about sharing philosophies on how to make games and the games industry in general.”

Broche wasn’t nervous about meeting his heroes. “They’re actually very cool,” he says. “All the big directors we met, and even the smaller ones that we really love, we all speak the same language [of games].”

Indeed, where players have made countless comparisons between Expedition 33 and the iconic long-running franchises it’s inspired by, the developers themselves are supportive of one another. “It’s cool to see that among directors and people who make games, even on a technical level, on the producing level, really it’s about sharing and making the best games possible, and there is no real sense of competition,” says Broche. “It’s more how we can elevate each other to do our job better. And that’s a really great feeling I want to convey, because from the exterior it looks like everybody’s at each other’s throat, but really that’s not the case at all.”