Counting Down to Your New Obsession—Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

The phrase “your number’s up” takes on new significance in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the enthralling debut game from Sandfall Interactive. In this innovative RPG, a mysterious entity known as The Paintress awakes each year, and brushes a number onto an ancient monolith—instantly everyone of that age disappears, forever. The number decreases each time; if The Paintress can’t be stopped, who will be left? Expedition 33 sets out to stop the clock.

Guillaume Broche—CEO of Sandfall Interactive, and creative director for Expedition 33—and Tom Guillermin—CTO of Sandfall, and lead programmer on the game—clocked in at Intel Gaming Access to tell us about their ingenious take on the classic race against time. “Our game started as a solo passion project for me,” Guillaume tells us, “[and] over time we’ve built the studio up to around 30 or so developers, all with a vision to create something special and unique with our debut game. It takes place in an original fantasy world inspired by Belle Époque France. Players take on the role of members of Expedition 33—a group setting out to destroy the Paintress when so many expeditions have failed before.”

So the stakes are high to begin with, just how we like it. And there’s more than just time running out to draw players in. Guillaume explains: “I think fans can look forward to three main things with our game: A story with great emotional depth, brought to life by a really talented voice cast in both English [led by Charlie Cox from Daredevil: Born Again and Jennifer English of Baldur’s Gate III] and French [including Alexandre Gillet, who also voices Captain America in the French-language dubs for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Adeline Chetail, the voice of Ellie in the francophone The Last of Us]. Gameplay that innovates on the classics we love, like with our reactive turn-based battles or the deep character building and customization we offer. And a world that is completely original, beautiful, and immersive.”

Belle Époque translates as “beautiful era”, and this world is, as Guillaume promises, utterly beautiful, but the expedition soon moves beyond what is familiar as they seek out the monolith. This is no tourist trail, in other words; and the game as a whole is full of surprises. “I was inspired by many different JRPGs from my youth, like classic Final Fantasy titles,” Guillaume says. “[And] when working on the game a few years ago, I was also playing games by From Software like Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I figured ‘I wish RPGs had the same parry and counter mechanics like From Software games’, which is how the original idea for our reactive, turn-based battles came about. With our battles, players can freely take their time to strategize their next move and consider enemy weaknesses like a traditional turn-based RPG, but their offensive actions are enhanced by real-time commands and QTEs. Similarly, when defending from enemy attacks, you can freely dodge, parry, and counter every attack in the game. We made a system that feels really rewarding for this—learning enemy patterns over time by dodging before you master the timing and nail parries and counters feels amazing, and I think it’s something that really sets apart our combat from everything else. You can even complete our whole game without taking a single hit of damage. I’m really looking forward to the community challenges our fans will create to push the game to its limits.”

Embracing the genre while pushing the limits is what Sandfall is all about. A team of 30 isn’t a skeleton crew, but this is hardly a bare bones game, either; Tom steps in here to tell us more. “[Our team] is quite small if you compare it to the scope of the game. In the tech team, we try to make the most of every day at the studio, finding the right balance between developing new game features, supporting the rest of the team on content creation, and diving deep in technical topics.” For this, Sandfall needed performance to keep pace. Tom continues: “During battles in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you will have to dodge and parry enemy attacks in real time. We took special care in optimizing battle areas to make sure fps are stable, and ensure smooth gameplay at all times (because nobody likes to miss a parry because of a hitch!). On the first run on PC, the game automatically runs a quick benchmark to automatically adjust the graphics settings based on your hardware. Still, we also know the importance of allowing players to fine-tune graphics settings (I personally tend to spend a lot of time doing that when I play on PC!), so we did our best to expose quality settings for Unreal’s rendering features.”

That fine-tuning brought Sandfall to Intel. “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is our first game, so it is our first collaboration with Intel,” Tom says. “As game developers, we obviously do spend a lot of time looking into—and tuning—upscaling technologies. Those are very important for us to ensure smooth gameplay at all times, and in Expedition 33 there are many situations that are known to be demanding for upscaling technologies, in particular when foliage is present in the background, which can get noisy if upscaling is too aggressive. We can be quite picky when it comes to choosing which upscaling tech we use so our game is at its best at all times. It can also be quite a challenge to cater to the various types of configurations PC gamers have, but overall Intel® Xe Super Sampling (XeSS) definitely has been our go-to choice in a number of configurations. Because of the performance and the image quality, XeSS proved to work particularly well for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and we’re very happy to provide support for it.”

Well, we’re happy to know that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 will be revealed, in all its complex, questing glory. Gamers, begin your countdown to April 24th when all will become… clear.

Pre-purchase Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on Steam