It's no secret that Sandfall Interactive's Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been a major success, all-but-solidfying that the studio will have a spot among the top-echalon of game developers at this time. Not only has the game reached a million sales, not to be confused with players, which is no doubt more because the game is on Game Pass, but it also has a movie in the works alongside game adaptation-focused studio Story Kitchen, which is also working on a film alongside Toys"R"Us.
You may remember, on the day of release, the title saw a peak of 51,000 concurrent Steam players. Since then, though, it's ballooned up to well over 100,000. This sharp peak could attributed to the weekend where more people had time play the turn-based action RPG. This feat actually puts its peak player count beyond The Witcher 3, Metaphor: ReFantazio, Divinity: Original Sin 2, War Thunder, EA Sports FC 25, Red Dead Redemption 2, and more.
Obviously, Sandfall's action RPG took inspiration from big name RPGs like Final Fantasy, Lost Odyssey, and Persona, giving the game a twinge of standing out among among the rest. The studio has losts of nostalgia for those games, as said in an interview last year.
“At Sandfall Interactive we all have a love for JRPGs like Final Fantasy, the Tales series, Lost Odyssey, and Persona with its awesome UI, rhythm, and dynamic camera. We all have a lot of nostalgia and love for these kinds of games, but also want to see something fresh done with the genre.”
Meanwhile, their storytelling was inspired by French fantasy novel La Horde du Contrevent while also singling out Attack on Titan as an example of stories about "venturing into the unknown."
“In terms of narrative, we also took inspiration from a French novel called La Horde du Contrevent, which is a fantasy novel about a group of explorers traveling the world. In general, stories about venturing into the unknown despite incredible risks, like the anime/manga Attack on Titan, have always been very appealing to me.”
In terms of the real-time elements mixed with turn-based combat, you can blame games like the Souls series, Devil May Cry, and NieR, for that.
Sandfall Interactive is led by Guillaume Broche, a former associate producer and narrative lead at Ubisoft alongside lead programmer Tom Guillermin, who acted as a gameplay programmer at Ubisoft.
You can play Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5, and it is on Game Pass.