One of the very best aspects of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is its story, but it turns out that a major part of its plot literally came to the RPG's lead writer in a dream. Be warned, there are some big spoilers ahead for Clair Obscur – proceed with caution if you've not finished it yet.
Speaking in a new installment of the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences' Game Maker's Notebook interview series (below), lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen explains that during development – specifically, at the end of 2020 – creative director Guillaume Broche decided that Sandfall Interactive was "going to start from scratch" on Clair Obscur. This, she admits, left her "sort of annoyed because we had just finished working on the narrative bible for this other story that I spent months on."
However, it was also "really exciting" to come up with something fresh. A couple of inspirations included a French book that Broche "really loved," which Svedberg-Yen explains (without having read it, she clarifies) as being about "a group of people who are going on a mission, on a quest into the unknown." Broche had also seen "some art online that made him think of a large doomsday clock, perhaps like this giantess, and maybe something to do with people dying as the doomsday clock ticks down. And we're like, 'Oh that'd be cool."
It was when the team started to "getting kind of stuck," pondering how this idea could fit together that Svedberg-Yen had a huge burst of inspiration. "Around the same time I actually had been working on this short story privately for myself that was based on a dream that I had, and the dream was about a young woman who lost her mother at an early age, and then later on she discovers that actually her mother is alive. Her mother is able to enter paintings and travel through paintings, and was trapped, and she needed to go into the painting to rescue her mother and bring her back," she explains. Sound familiar?
Svedberg-Yen adds: "So around that time we were stuck, and I realized, 'Oh actually, this story might work with the premise, because, you know, paintings, painters, you know, it might work really well together."
However, it was actually Broche's mother who "gave us the final piece," after having said that the worst thing that could happen to her would be "to lose him, to lose any of her children." Svedberg-Yen explains: "So we thought, 'Oh, that could be the catalyst, that could be the instigating event that really is the reason why the mother went into the painting.' And so the mother became Aline the Paintress, the daughter became Maelle, and then we also added in some more family characters, so the grandfather in my original story became Renoir the father."
It's all fascinating stuff, and it's incredible to think that the story as we know it is literally the result of a dream. Sandfall Interactive has already teased that it has "great ideas for the next game," which makes me wonder how many of those might have been dreamed up, too.
For more games like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, be sure to check out our roundup of the best RPGs and best JRPGs you can play right now.
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