Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been recognized as the best game of 2025. For the young studio Sandfall Interactive, this is an incredible achievement that was not planned. The French turn-based RPG in the spirit of the Japanese school showed a phenomenal result: 92 points out of 100 from critics and an average score of 9.5/10 from Metacritic users, becoming the highest-rated game in the history of the service.
François Meriss, co-founder of the studio, admitted in an interview that the team was counting on a maximum of 85 points. Six months before the release, trial reviews predicted about 80.
We conducted several trial reviews six months to a year before release and ended up getting expected scores of around 80. Our official goal at the end of production was to reach 85 points on Metacritic. In recent months, we have invested a lot of additional work to improve the quality. We were counting on 85, but exceeding the 90-point threshold was a really great reward for the team.
Part of my job is to always "plan for the worst and hope for the best", so I didn't allow myself to hope too much. To a large extent, this is managing the team's expectations, so the entire production team came up with many terrible scenarios of what could go wrong. But it was worth it, as we definitely exceeded our expectations.
Art director Nicolas Maxon-Francom confirmed that the developers were prepared for the game to remain a niche project:
I think most of us were aiming for the 80s. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were proud of what we did, and even if sales were low, we would be happy.
