Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 isn’t the first videogame to have a compelling story or an in-depth narrative—you and I both know this—it does, however, feel like an vital milestone on the road to getting everyone else to take the medium and (more importantly the people who make it, mocap actors included) as seriously as they deserve to be.
So agrees Andy Serkis, who voiced Renoir in Sandfall’s brilliant RPG, in an interview with Variety: “I’m so thrilled for these guys, because I love the idea of [Expedition 33], and I love the visual of it. I just thought it was beautiful.”
It’s not surprising to hear Serkis be so vocal, mind. Not just because he’s been in videogames before (most of them Lord of the Rings tie-ins, but hey) but also because he’s one of Hollywood’s most well-known mocap actors—a process a lot of videogame actors have to go through.
Personally, there’s a little cynical old man in my heart that shakes his fist whenever the concept that videogames are suddenly art comes up—they’ve been art forever—but I’ll put that little guy in my soul’s retirement home where he belongs for now, given Serkis’s full-blooded enthusiasm for the medium.
It is nice to see that we’ve come a long way from the days of Neil Newbon, who received all the laurels he deserved for his role as Astarion in Baldur’s Gate 3, getting told he wasn’t a “real actor”. We’re not in a post-snobbery utopia yet, though. As recently as 2024, you had an Amazon Games CEO saying that “for games, we don’t really have acting”. Obviously untrue, but as long as folks with more money than sense believe it, they’ll act as if it is.
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