Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is maybe one of my favourite games of this year—it’s certainly in the running—which I hope reassures you that I mean this with all the love in the world. It surprises me not one itty-bitty bit that Guillaume Broche, creative director of the game, says he “likes really sad stories”.
That’s per a recent interview Broche had with BehindTheVoice (seen below). Spoilers for the game’s endings to follow.
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Touching on the endings, which the team wrote “at the same time”, Broche says “I really like sad stories, so I knew I didn’t want [either ending] to be really ‘good’, in a way. I wanted some pros and cons in both.”
Said endings, which ask you to choose between saving the canvas (but dooming Maelle to her grief) or dooming the canvas (but saving Maelle from her grief) split my heart in two so hard I wrote a whole dang article about it.
“I like the fact that there is no dialogue,” Broche says, “[it] leaves a lot open to interpretation, and people can project what they want on the ending. I think it’s something that’s really really important.
“But also it’s something we can only do in games, to give a choice to the player … It’s an impossible choice, basically. It’s so complicated, there are so many layers of good and bad … It’s an impossible story. People that are so messed up by grief and tons of other things that they make very wrong decisions for very good reasons.”
That was more-or-less my takeaway when I put my controller down after 60 hypnotised hours (Simon gave me a bit of trouble). The Dessendres are terrible—dragging an entire world full of sapient paint-people rather than get marriage counselling—but do you doom a more-or-less innocent girl to spite them?
As for the endings being completely dialogue-free, Broche says: “I think it was a very bold move that could’ve gone completely wrong. I’m very happy it did not.
“I really like scenes with very very little dialogue—like even the gommage, which is one of the most important, there’s like two lines of dialogue in it. I find it harder, but more gratifying, to do a scene that transmits a lot with as little dialogue as possible.”
Broche also reveals that there were two scrapped ending scenes that didn’t make the final cut. In one, Maelle and Verso basically talked over each other—something that isn’t necessarily bad writing advice in a vacuum. In dialogue, you can convey an argument by having characters talk past each other, since that’s often how shouting matches play in real life. For Clair Obscur, though, it didn’t work.
“I thought it was awesome and very innovative … I was like ‘no no, it’s going to work, trust me’. We did the mocap session for it and I realised it was awful, like very bad.”
Maelle’s ending also had a major u-turn during production, too. When recording it, they went with a newer version of the script—but when that didn’t work, he asked the character’s mocap actors, Charlotte Hoepffner and Maxence Carzola, to learn the old one “on the spot”. He adds: “Massive props to Charlotte and Maxence … I gave them like an hour to learn the text—there are not so many lines, so it was okay. So we just tried the old one, and it was just a thousand times better.”
I’m assuming that, by lines, Broche means stage direction, not dialogue—both Carzola and Hoepffner convey a ton through their body language in the game’s more silent moments. “I’m very happy they agreed to learn the lines, because I think they saved the ending.”
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