Whether or not it actually wins the award come December, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is the Game of the Year. No 2025 release has sparked so many long-lasting conversations usually reserved for tentpole releases like Grand Theft Auto or Zelda. It has been gaming’s main character for months, standing in as a shining example of what a modern video game should rise to.
Yet for all the mainstream conversations that it has generated, so few of them actually seem interested in Clair Obscur. Instead, Sandfall Interactive’s critically acclaimed RPG has been submitted as evidence in on-going litigations against what gamers paint as a stale industry in need of new blood. While there are meaningful conversations to have about what game studios can learn from Clair Obscur’s success, the way that it has been weaponized and reduced to a piece of confirmation bias in any landscape-shaping argument it fits into leaves me hungry for more substantial dissections of the games we love.
It was clear that Clair Obscur was going to be a big talking point when it launched in April to a wave of glowing reviews. Critics and fans hailed it as a generational RPG that revitalized turn-based combat, delivered an emotional story, and crafted an astonishing original world. “Game of the Year” talk came fast, which is par for the course when a new game breaks the 90 mark on Metacritic. But the watercooler chats didn’t stop there. Soon, mainstream conversations yearned to place it in a broader gaming landscape. Its originality was painted as a shining light in a sea of perceived “AAA slop.” It wasn’t just a good game, but a blueprint for how a boring industry could be saved. Even this very site opined about that immediately following its release.
That over-the-top idea only ballooned as the months went on. Sandfall Interactive’s slim team size became a talking point. Articles popped up that praised the studio for creating such an accomplishment with only 30 people — a figure that was quickly debunked once critics started adding up all the external developers involved. That didn’t stop the disingenuous factoid from setting the stage at Summer Game Fest, where host Geoff Keighly used the number to sell the idea that he was presenting viewers the future of video games. Tons of trailers for smaller games followed, with Keighly often pointing out how many people made them as an indication of quality.
My growing frustration with that trend reached a boil this week thanks to a different debate that Clair Obscur has been unwittingly roped into. For years now, some RPG enthusiasts have lamented the death of turn-based games. That anxiety seemed to come most from franchises like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest experimenting with real-time action. Clair Obscur is a loud and proud turn-based game, which made it the perfect spoiler candidate for an industry abandoning a classic way of play. Never mind the fact that turn-based gaming hasn’t gone away. Octopath Traveller 2, Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth, and Metaphor: ReFantazio (a game that released just last year to similar praise) have all proved that major studios are still very much invested in the subgenre.
And yet, the narrative persisted. It all came to a head during a Square Enix investors call, in which the company reaffirmed its commitment to turn-based games and acknowledged Clair Obscur’s existence in the process. According to Automaton, those typical business responses were mistranslated and blown out into a larger story: Clair Obscur’s success had convinced Square Enix to start making more turn-based games. Finally, the video game industry was saved. Mission accomplished!
Every conversation like this is so riddled with holes that you couldn’t get them across a puddle, yet they are inescapable. Fans want it to prove their long-standing theories about the video game industry right and treat its success like an irrefutable data point in every argument. It’s not a new phenomenon either; this cycle tends to happen with both successes and failures. Baldur’s Gate 3 inspired a wave of talking points about what players actually wanted from games. That line of thinking was met with backlash from developers who cautioned against using a very specific win as a crusade. Black Myth: Wukong became a rejection of Western ideology. Concord was viewed as proof that live service games are dead.
I both understand where this comes from, because I’m as guilty of it as anyone. It’s fun to search for meta-narratives in the things we care about. I’m a football fan (go Pats) and I love nothing more than creating a story out of a Super Bowl matchup. This year’s clash between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles became more exciting to me when I viewed it as the Chiefs needing the win to finally prove they were every bit as good as the Tom Brady era Patriots, but they’d have to beat the giant killers who previously thwarted Bill Belichick at the big game. That added stakes to a matchup I wasn’t invested in, even if it was imaginary. This sort of meta-breakdown of video games follows a similar line of thinking. Sandfall Interactive becomes the Eagles circa 2018 in this story.
As harmless as that can be in small quantities, its forced nature has become unbearable when trying to navigate conversations around Clair Obscur. It’s not enough for it to be a great game. It has to be a masterpiece. It has to be a counterpoint to everything we don’t like. It has to be the savior of the RPG genre. What’s ironic is that none of those hollow platitudes actually tell us anything about the game itself. Engagement with what Clair Obscur actually has to tell us has taken a backseat to imperfect armchair analysis.
That’s a shame, because there’s meat on that bone. Clair Obscur asks us to think about how we, as a species, push on in the face of mass grief. It’s a story of sacrifice, where expedition after expedition fights in the face of extinction. Many die for that cause, but their sacrifices aren’t in vain. Each one helps the next party get a little closer, asking us to rethink success and failure in the context of long-term collective action. It’s a thematic cousin to Death Stranding and its sequel, games that stress the importance of human connection as a means of making the world easier to navigate in times of crisis.
Perhaps that’s just as much a reason why Clair Obscur is resonating with players as the fact that it’s turn-based or made by an indie studio. There’s a familiar trauma in it, as the fictional Gommage and its impact on the world can be connected to the Covid-19 pandemic. We just went through – and are still going through – a period of mass suffering. Those wounds are fresh. I still remember seeing the pop-up morgues on the streets of Brooklyn. I remember watching the infection rates fall and then spike again, ripping any hope I had for an ending from me. I remember how hopeless it all felt. But I also remember how many people put in hard work to stop it together. Even if some people refused to do their part, many masked, stayed home, kept six feet apart, and anything else they could to stop the spread. It was a collective effort built on selfless sacrifice. I feel all that fueling Clair Obscur’s emotional resonance. It begs to be discussed, because what is the point of something being a generational classic if we take nothing else from it?
One of the only meaningful conversations I’ve had about Clair Obscur came before it was out. I had been playing it alongside our reviewer, Tomas Franzese, at the time and we dissected its themes together in isolation. We both cooled on it significantly in Act 3, taking issue with its sudden pivot into a meta-reflection on the nature of art and its role as an escape from grief. It felt like a betrayal on its more human focus earlier on; a needless swerve into a piece of art evaluating its own importance. It was a memorable discussion that helped crystallize where I felt Clair Obscur worked best and where it ultimately fell apart.
I hope that discussions like that become more common as the hype settles down. Just as I felt turned off by the “art about art” pivot in Act 3, I am similarly bored by the tedious talk about how Clair Obscur is changing the industry. None of it does anything to honor Sandfall Interactive’s vision, even if it is designed to gas the studio up. Real engagement comes from critics like Ian Walker and Kenneth Shepard, who respect the game enough to interpret what it has to say. It comes like podcasts like Girl Mode that aren’t afraid to criticize where the story is ineffective.
If you love Clair Obscur, really talk about it. Not what it represents, but the actual game in front of you. If you find that you don’t have nearly as much to say about it as you do its influence, maybe it’s worth questioning whether you love the game or just the idea of it.
