This article was originally published on December 19, 2025 - read the full issue

In the next edition of Edge, available from December 24, we crown the winners of 2025. As you might expect, Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 fares well in our rundown, and in acknowledgment we talk to several key members of the development team about how they achieved such success.

In this preview extract from Edge 419's full-blown eight-page interview, we hear from Guillaume Broche (creative director), Lorien Testard (composer), Jennifer Svedberg-Yen (lead writer), Michel Nohra (lead game designer) and Nicholas Maxson-Francombe (art director).

Is it fair to say that the reception the game received wasn't what you expected?

Guillaume Broche: It was completely unexpected from pretty much everybody. 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 something very personal. So the fact that this worked so well, pretty much instantly, this was the thing where we were like, 'OK, this is one hundred times what we were expecting'.

Lorien Testard: It was way beyond what I expected. It was magical from the start. To have all the wonderful players and all the bonds we share with them, it's something that I couldn't imagine.

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen: What hits me the most is how deeply the players are engaging with the game and the story and the art and the music. People message me all the time saying that it has fundamentally changed their relationship with grief. It's helped a lot of people see things in a different way, and perhaps realise they need to start moving on, or how to start moving on. And so many artists and writers told me that our game inspired them to start again. It lit up their world, and the juices started flowing again. That's an impact I would never have predicted.

What's the secret of the game's success?

Guillaume Broche: Every team is very different and we built our processes on the way we work, depending on the talents we had at our disposal. So I think the secret is to adapt the game to the team you have, and not the other way around. And mostly, it's not about processes, it's making a game that you want to play. It's contradictory, but [try to] not care too much about the players, because if you care about your game, it means you care about the players ultimately. The best way for me to care about people is to make something that is sincere. If it feels human, [even] if there are little flaws here and there, it's forgivable. It just has to have a strong soul and identity.

Michel Nohra: We started playtesting very early on, even before I joined. There were a lot of playtests internally. We gave a lot of feedback to try to take care of our features, our content, and then [we did] external playtests. Family, friends – everybody was playing the game and giving us feedback. Because we felt like we were trying to do something new, it was hard to get references from other games in terms of how difficult it should be, and the pacing of the story – that kind of stuff.

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen: I think the pieces really work together, because we really let ourselves be influenced by each other. Art influenced story, story influenced art, music influenced story and art – there's a lot of cross-pollination of ideas. There was a lot of back and forth, and we elevated each other. I really feel that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Did it help that some of the core team didn't come from a game development background?

Nicholas Maxson-Francombe: For sure. My first job was in the show industry, [working on] Cirque du Soleil and those kinds of extravagant shows, which have a totally different way of visualising things. I think implementing that into our game was definitely, in my eyes, something very unique at the time.

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen: I think it obviously has challenges, because we're new. [But] we were able to bring in our own tastes and our own perspectives that we'd built up through life outside of gaming, and bring the best of other worlds into the game. Also, a lot of times, we didn't know what we didn't know. There are some things that [other] people wouldn't even think about, but for us we can just [say], 'Yeah, why not?' and challenge each other.

I never really played videogames before joining the team. My source of writer's references was mostly TV series and books, so I drew heavily from those in terms of how they think about narrative, how they think about character development, how they drive the plot forward, how they do world building. I love science-fiction and fantasy epics which have massive, immersive worlds and vibrant societies, so I took a lot of that and put that into the backdrop of the game. I didn't think of it as writing an RPG. I thought of it almost like writing an HBO drama.

Many of the new staff you hired were quite young. Why was that, and how did that inexperience affect the game?

Michel Nohra: [The younger staff] didn't have any expectations about how a studio should be run and how a game should be made, and they brought fresh ideas that were very valuable for the rest of the project. So it ended up being a good decision, but it was also kind of by force, because it's almost impossible to hire any senior people if you don't have the money, which wasn't there at the beginning. It's important to note that [while] there were a lot of juniors, [there were] also some senior people that were able to create the right processes for us, and for the juniors to be able to produce as much as we produced in the end, and to have that much quality.

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen: The team is very intellectually curious and proactive. It might be a little bit slower initially, there might be a few missteps here or there, but I think we learn very quickly. I think of it like an RPG, in the way we are levelling up our skills continuously. The other thing that we bring in from other industries [is that] sometimes we just ask our service providers [such as dubbing studios and language teams], 'What would make your life easier?' And a lot of them told me that nobody else really does that. Several of our partners have told us we're unicorns in the industry because we just asked them. We try to be as organised as we can and just communicate.

Will Sandfall Interactive's next game be a larger-scale production?

Guillaume Broche: No, I think it's good to have limitations when you are creative. It's the best way to be the best version of yourself. We could scale up now we have a lot more money, but I would say it's not tempting for us, because even the management team and myself, we'd have to be hands-on and doing things for ourselves. We love making games more than we love managing, so we want to keep doing that. These past five years were some of the best of my life, and I want to be happy like that again.

This article was originally published on December 19, 2025 - read the full issue