"'Here is existential pain, live with it'": Expedition 33 actor Ben Starr says the JRPG's powerful story "represents so much of the reason why I continue to play games"

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 owes its spectacular success to burning love, says Verso actor Ben Starr in an interview with GamesRadar+ and Future Games Show during the Golden Joystick Awards 2025. It "was made with love, and it was made for a very specific audience, and it just turns out that the audience for this game was bigger than people thought."

"As a huge fan of RPGs, a person who was raised on these things – what an amazing thing to have a game that is so widely loved, and celebrated, and represents so much of the reason why I continue to play games," Starr continues. "It's the reason I'm in games. And I think it's a timely story."

With characters hopeful for salvation as often as they are forced to despair, Expedition 33 is a storm "in a very specific way that asks incredibly hard questions, and it doesn't give you an answer, and it doesn't resolve," Starr says.

"It basically says, 'Here is existential pain, live with it. Ask yourself questions, go out in the world and see how you feel about it,'" he continues. The JRPG's angst is familiar to its most dedicated players, who perform the ultimate act of devotion: wearing a beret.

"If you go to a convention you'll see thousands of people – I mean, literally, hundreds of people – in berets," says Starr. "Every time any person who says, 'OK, this game affected me, I'm going to spend hundreds of hours making something, and allowing this to empower me as a person, and I'm going to walk up to the convention dressed like this because Maelle empowers me, or Sciel gives me strength, or Lune's loss is my loss,'" Starr says, addressing director Guillaume Broche and writer Jen Svedberg-Yen, "that's the power of what you guys have created."

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Jennifer English says it was "hard" playing two characters in the RPG: "I had to find the subtlety of it being the same but different."