Expedition 33 Dominates The Game Awards as Sandfall Aims for an 80 on Metacritic

Despite being a multiple-time Game of the Year winner and one of the top-rated titles of 2025, Sandfall Interactive initially anticipated that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would land in the 80s on Metacritic.

In a conversation, producer Francois Meurisse shared, “We ran some mock reviews six months to a year before launch, and our projections were around 80. By the end of production, we aimed for an 85 on Metacritic, and we put in some serious effort in the final months to elevate the quality.” He continued, “While we were hoping for that 85, surpassing the 90 mark was an incredible reward for the team. That’s when things really started to get exciting.”

Art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe chimed in, “We were making friendly bets on the Metacritic score. Most of us were shooting for around 80. We felt it was a solid game and were proud of our work, and even if sales had been low, we would have still been satisfied.”

It might seem surprising that the team didn’t expect more given the game’s current success, but lead programmer Tom Guillermin explained, “It’s tough to gauge how good the game is because you’re influenced by the early versions, which were quite rough, featuring robotic text-to-speech instead of actual voice acting.”

Meurisse added, “Part of my role is to ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best,’ so I tried to keep my expectations in check. A lot of my job involves managing the team’s expectations, so we spent production imagining all the ways things could go wrong. But it paid off, as we far exceeded our best expectations.”

In a recent survey, 191 Japanese developers and celebrities named Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as their Game of the Year.