Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has shaken up the gaming industry and shown AAA studios in 2025 that even small teams can create great and high-quality games. A developer with 34 years of experience pays respect to the comparatively young team.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a game that will likely be remembered for a long time. On one hand, because of the high quality in terms of gameplay, story, world, and music, and on the other hand, because it comes from a manageable team.
In many ways, Clair Obscur feels like an AAA game, but it is more like AA. Nevertheless, the game has shown, together with other strong titles from 2025, such as Hades 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong, or ARC Raiders, that even smaller teams can play in the big leagues and are sometimes even better than the major players.
Adrian Chmielarz, a developer who has been in the industry since 1992, has already gained a lot of experience with games like Painkiller, Gears of War, or The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. He is currently working with a small team on Witchfire, but he has recognized the great achievement of Clair Obscur and now pays his respect.
“I don’t know what to believe anymore”
What does the developer say about Clair Obscur? In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Chmielarz spoke about the game and especially about the team from Sandfall Interactive:
Last week, I learned that the people behind Expedition 33 hired many newcomers, people who have never developed a game before. And now my worldview is shattered, and I don’t know what to do.
Although the studio is led by Chef Guillaume Broche, a developer with several years of experience at Ubisoft, parts of the team are said to have been relatively inexperienced.
Here we have a game that looks like an AAA title to me; it is phenomenal in every respect. It has a profound story, deep gameplay mechanics, great graphics, and sound. It is a very cohesive product. And then you hear that the core team consisted of 30 people, half of whom were newcomers. And I think to myself:
I don’t know what to believe anymore.
In addition to the core team of about 30 people, other external individuals also worked on the game – they all needed unusual prerequisites, however. One of them was that they should not be industry veterans but rather young people with little prior experience.
What else does the developer highlight? Clair Obscur is a game full of smart decisions, especially from a designer’s perspective, Chmielarz says. As an example, he mentions the enemies that do not have faces and therefore do not need facial animations – requiring less effort.
The cutscenes also resemble more of a theater play, where characters only interact with each other but hardly with the environment. This makes it easier to create high-quality cutscenes.
Overall, Clair Obscur is a game that is full of clever ideas and thus appears larger than it actually is. To achieve this, one must know how games work, according to Chmielarz. The team led by Game Director Guillaume Broche has obviously understood this. Chmielarz was with us in an interview: “The next 5 years will be painful for the giants” – How a 27-person team is currently demonstrating on Steam what Ubisoft and Co. are failing to do.
