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2025 was an excellent year for videogames. We got Arc Raiders, Battlefield 6, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and of course, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a game that I in no way expected to love as much as I did. But it seems as if its success was a surprise for more than just myself, as its developers over at Sandfall reflected on its whirlwind ride (via Edge magazine issue 419).

"We conducted some mock reviews six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80," François Meurisse, co-founder, COO, and producer, said. "So our official goal towards the end of production was to reach for 85 in Metacritic, and we did some great extra work and focus in the last months to bounce the quality up. So we were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 bar of Metacritic was really a great reward for the team. That's where things began to get a little crazy.

"Part of my job is always 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', so I forbade myself from having too much hope. Much of my work is to manage expectations for the team, so the whole production was making up lots of awful scenarios of how things could go wrong. But it was worth the trouble, because we exceeded by far the best that we could have expected."

Expedition 33 ended up with a Metacritic score of 92 and a user score of 9.5 based on 25,495 reviews. "We were giving each other bets on the Metacritic score," art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe said. "I think most of us were aiming at around 80. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were pretty proud of what we did, but even if sales [had been quite low] we would have been happy."

But it did sell. In fact, Expedition 33 sold a lot. Shipping over one million copies in just three days, despite being on Game Pass, it was one of the most successful games we had the pleasure of playing last year.



"It was completely unexpected from pretty much everybody," Guillaume Broche, CEO and creative director, noted. "What really surprised us the most is how much the narrative and cinematics and story resonated with people. This is the thing that's hardest to quantify, because it's always...Read more: Full article on www.pcgamer.com

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