Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a great game, but the turn-based RPG genre has seen its fair share of detractors over the decades. After all, the game’s major inspiration, Mistwalker’s Lost Odyssey sits at a great-but-underrated 78/100 on the platform.
As it turns out, the team at Sandfall Interactive were hyper-focused on what Metacritic score their debut game would achieve. While the team were confident it would be well received, no one expected that it would cross the 90 mark and become one of the best-rated games in history.
In an interview with EDGE Magazine, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 producer Francois Meurisse revealed that the game’s mock review period—where expert games critics are paid to review early builds to generate an expected wide reception—pulled in good numbers, but nothing record-breaking.
“We conducted some mock review six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80,” the producer told the magazine. “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.”
“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.”
The game’s art director explained that the small team behind the game were “giving each other bets” on what the RPG’s overall Metacritic score would be. Needless to say, everyone’s bets were passed by the actual review scores from the wider critic audience.
“I think most of us were aiming at around 80,” art director Nicholas Maxsom-Francome said. “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.”
The team behind the title explained that it was hard to actually judge how successful the game was early on. Game development requires a lot, and pre-release Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 builds had text-to-speech instead of actual voice acting and placeholder assets that misconstrue the quality of a finished product.
The game’s producer explained that the game’s critical and financial performance “exceeded by far the best that we could have expected”. Even with a Game Pass launch, which the team has praised for giving the game such rampant popularity, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has become a major hit, and Sandfall is already prepping for its next release.
