Sandfall Expected Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 To Score In The 80s

Before Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went on to dominate The Game Awards and secure multiple Game of the Year wins, the team at Sandfall Interactive was setting far more modest expectations for its critical reception. Despite becoming one of the highest-rated games of 2025, the developers initially believed the game would land somewhere in the low-to-mid 80s on Metacritic.

Speaking with Edge, producer Francois Meurisse revealed that internal mock reviews conducted six months to a year before launch pointed toward scores around 80. As a result, the team’s official late-production goal became reaching an 85 Metacritic average. Meurisse explained that extra effort and polish during the final months helped raise the overall quality, but even then, breaking into the 90s felt beyond reach.

Meurisse said the team was hopeful about hitting that 85 target, but surpassing the 90 mark on Metacritic ultimately came as a major surprise. According to him, crossing that threshold felt like a significant reward for the entire studio and marked the moment when the game’s success truly began to feel overwhelming.

Art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe echoed those sentiments, noting that the team even placed informal bets on the game’s Metacritic score. Most developers, he said, expected it to settle around 80. While they were proud of what they had created, expectations for commercial performance were also cautious, and the team would have been satisfied even if sales had been relatively low.

Lead programmer Tom Guillermin explained why it was difficult for the developers to accurately judge the game’s potential during development. He pointed out that being exposed to early, rough builds—complete with placeholder elements like robotic text-to-speech—can distort perceptions of quality and make it harder to see how strong the final product will become.

Meurisse added that his role often requires preparing for worst-case scenarios while hoping for the best. By intentionally limiting optimism and focusing on managing expectations, the team spent much of production imagining how things could go wrong. In the end, however, those precautions proved worthwhile, as Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 exceeded even the most optimistic outcomes Sandfall Interactive had realistically envisioned.