The Making of the Year’s Most Acclaimed Game

In 2020, at the height of the Covid pandemic, Guillaume Broche was like millions of others around the world.

“Bored in their job and wanting to do something different.”

Working for French gaming giant Ubisoft at the time, he had an idea for his own project – a role-playing game inspired by one of his childhood favourites, the classic Japanese series Final Fantasy.

That would become Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 which, five years later, has become a sensation.

It sold one million copies in just three days, topped Spotify viral charts with its soundtrack, and even won praise from French President Emmanuel Macron…

But one of the most remarkable things about it is the story of how it was made – a tale of random Reddit messages, “massive luck” and an unusual approach to game development.

Expedition 33 is set in Lumiere, a fictional world overshadowed by a huge monolith bearing a glowing numeral on its face.

Each year an entity known as The Paintress emerges and lowers the number by one, causing everyone of that age to vanish, and the game follows a group on a quest to destroy the mysterious being.

It’s an intriguing set-up for an epic tale, but the game’s aesthetic, inspired by 19th-Century France, and its old-school turn-based battles also set it apart.

But the conventional wisdom when Guillaume began was that players didn’t want something like that.

So, five years ago, he started to recruit people for his passion project, firing out messages on Reddit and online forums to potential colleagues.