Despite the fact that this is repeated game of the year winner and one of the highest-rated games of 2025, Sandfall Interactive, that you could expect. Chiaroscuro: Expedition 33Metacritic will be released in the 80s.
Speaking to Edge, producer Francois Meurisse explained: “We did a test run six months to a year before release and ended up with an expected score of around 80. So our official goal by the end of production was to reach 85 on MetaCritic, and we've done a lot of extra work and focus on improving the quality in recent months.” He adds: “We were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 Metacritic bar was a really big reward for the team. That’s where things started to get a little crazy.”
Nicholas Maxson-Francombe, art director on Expedition 33, adds: “We bet each other on Metacritic scores. I think most of us were aiming for 80. We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were very proud of what we did, but even if the sales [had been quite low] we would be happy.”
It may seem crazy that the team didn't expect more after seeing how huge it is now, but Tom Guillermin, lead programmer, explains: “It's hard to measure how well [the game] it's because you're infected with the first versions you see, which are very crude, with robotic text-to-speech instead of actions and things like that.”
Meurisse adds: “Part of my job is always 'plan for the worst, hope for the best,' so I kind of stopped myself from hoping too much. A big part of my job is managing the team's expectations, so the job was all about creating a lot of horror scenarios for how things could go wrong. But it was worth the effort because we far exceeded the best we could have expected.”
Famitsu names 191 Japanese developers and celebrities “Game of the Year” and yes, it's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
