Before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 swept The Game Awards, Sandfall was betting it might scrape an 80 Metacritic score

Despite it being a multiple-time game of the year winner and one of the highest-rated games of 2025, Sandfall Interactive only expected Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's Metacritic to hit the 80s.

Speaking to Edge, producer Francois Meurisse explains, "We conducted some mock review six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80. So our official goal towards the end of production was to reach for 85 in MetaCritic, and we did some great extra work and focus in the last months to bounce the quality up." He adds, "we were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 bar of Metacritic was really a great reward for the team. That's where things began to get a little crazy."

Nicholas Maxson-Francombe, art director on Expedition 33 adds, "We were giving each other bets on the Metacritic score. I think most of us were aiming at around 80. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were pretty proud of what we did, but even if sales [had been quite low] we would have been happy."

It may seem mad that the team didn't expect more after seeing how massive it is now, but Tom Guillermin, lead programmer, explains, "It's hard to measure how good [the game] is because you're contaminated by the first versions that you see that are very rough, with robotic text-to-speech instead of acting and that kind of thing."

Meurisse adds, "Part of my job is always 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', so I kind of forbade myself from having too much hope. Much of my work is to manage expectations for the team, so the whole production was making up lots of awful scenarios of how things could go wrong. But it was worth the trouble, because we exceeded by far the best that we could have expected."

Famitsu asks 191 Japanese developers and celebrities their Game of the Year, and yep, it's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33