With Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 developer Sandfall Interactive having previously spoken about the benefits of keeping a project’s scope narrow, the studio has also been giving the same advice to other developers. One of the recipients of this advice was “Soulframe” Liang—the director of upcoming action game Phantom Blade Zero. Speaking to GamesRadar, Liang revealed that the advice he got from Sandfall Interactive was to “cut things” and “polish the rest” rather than to keep adding things to the game.
Liang got this advice from the studio right after The Game Awards 2025, where the developer had walked away with many awards, including Game of the Year, for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. “Pressure is good,” Liang said. “I talked with the team behind Expedition 33, they had a lot of trophies last night.” As for approaching Sandfall Interactive for advice, he said, “One of the most important and interesting things [Sandfall Interactive] told us was that for the last nine months, the most important thing is to delete things. To cut things [from the game] and to polish the rest.”
He went on to refer to this as being “a good idea,” and that “I will take that advice.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche had spoken about keeping the scope of the game narrow, and how it helped development as well as in garnering a positive critical reception on launch. He spoke about this when he was asked back in October how development on the game would have been affected if the studio had unlimited resources.
“I don’t think we would have wanted to radically add unnecessary content or change the overall scope of our game though – I think part of the reason some fans enjoyed their time with our game was how we tried to respect the players’ time by not artificially padding out the game time excessively,” said Broche. “In some ways, having a limited budget and resources is helpful to narrow down the scope of a title and distil the vision to the core elements that make it great, and maybe having unlimited scope and budget would’ve made it a less engaging game for our players. It’s hard to know!”
The studio’s COO François Meurisse and publisher Kepler Interactive’s portfolio director Matthew Handrahan had also spoken about how the lack of padding in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 helped to make it successful release.
“One of the things that’s great about Expedition 33 is it really respects the player’s time,” said Hadrahan. “It gives them plenty to do, and it gives them plenty of satisfaction, but it isn’t arbitrarily 500 hours of gameplay. It’s impactful because it’s scoped correctly. […] It doesn’t have any sense of bloat or extraneous things that are put there just to make it larger and larger and larger.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was released on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S earlier this month. Check out our review for more details. In the meantime, also check out the release date trailer for Phantom Blade Zero, which is coming to PC and PS5 on September 9. Nintendo Switch 2 and Xbox Series X/S players will unfortunately have to wait for at least 12 months after release to play the upcoming game, however.