While Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been seeing quite a bit of success, especially in light of its recent victories at The Golden Joystick Awards 2025, creative director Guillaume Broche doesn’t believe that this will change much for studio Sandfall Intearctive. In an interview with GamesRadar, Broche spoke about how this success doesn’t necessarily mean that the people behind the game will change as human beings.
Rather, he noted that the studio will continue to work how they have been working so far, with the goal of making the kinds of games with “stories that move people”.
“I feel like dramatic changes don’t necessarily mean that we have to change dramatically as human beings,” said Broche. “What we want to do is exactly what we wanted to do when we started the game. It’s just [to] make games that are really honest and true, and write stories that move people and really connect people emotionally, and that’s what we are going to keep doing moving forward.”
As for whether or not this means that Sandfall Interactive might start growing larger than its current headcount of over 30 employees, Broche noted that there are no such plans for now. He said that the studio works together well as a small team, so changing would be unnecessary.
We don’t want to grow too much as a company,” he said. “We work well as we are now, as a small team, and we want to stay like that, because we are very happy, and why change?”
With that in mind, however, Broche also spoke about how Sandfall Interactive will take the lessons it learned while developing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with it into future projects. This includes “mistakes we made”, and how the studio wants to avoid making those same mistakes. He went on to talk about the emotional response and capacity to move players that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 had, and how the studio wants to continuing making games that can doing so in the future as well.
“But the most striking thing, for us, and the real reward in our hearts, is the emotional response to the characters, to the story, how much people embrace the characters and they helped them get through tough moments in life,” Broche continued. “And I think that’s why art exists in general, to create an emotional response and be something that moves people, and that’s what we want to keep on doing.”
Broche had similarly spoken about how the studio didn’t really expect Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to get the massive response that it ended up getting. Rather, he noted that the studio was focusing on the idea that “it’s going to be cool”, rather than thinking about how “it’s going to be big.”
“I think that people don’t really realise that now [Clair Obscur: Expedition 33]’s become big, but before the launch, it was not supposed to be big and I think we all felt the same thing,” he said. “It’s like ‘it’s going to be cool.’ It’s not going to be big, ‘it’s going to be cool’. And what’s happening today is, as we say, nobody understands what’s really happening.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
