The critical and commercial success of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been no secret. Publisher Kepler Interactive and developer Sandfall Interactive believe that it might be down to the fact that the RPG isn’t a particularly long game. In an interview with GamesIndustry.biz, Kepler Interactive’s portfolio director Matthew Handrahan and Sandfall Interactive COO François Meurisse spoke about how the lack of any padding in the title helped make it a 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.”
He continued by calling the game’s relatively short length when compared to others in the genre a virtue, and brought up that even in film, brevity is often celebrated as it helps with the pacing of a story.
“Brevity should be more of a virtue in gaming,” he said. “Something can be better by being shorter – something that’s being discussed in film at the moment. Every film seems to be two and a half hours long, and I think most people are like, ‘Can they all be a bit shorter, please? Because we have other things to do with our lives’.”
Meurisse added on to what Hadrahan said by also bringing attention to the fact that the game’s focus on having fewer things in it of relatively higher quality also helped elevate it. He also brought up how the studio was aiming for a 20 hour game when doing just the main quest, and how players also tend to have other games to play. This brevity, he noted, was important to him as a player.
“From the beginning, we wanted to do an intense and short experience,” said Meurisse. “The first length estimates of the game were closer to 20 hours for the main quest. I think we ended up closer to 30, even 40 hours if you take a bit of time. As a player, there are so many great games out there that I want to experience, [and] what’s important to me is the level of excitement and fun I get from a game, rather than how long it is.”
Since players also tend to conflate the number of hours a game might take to finish with how “worth” it was when it came to its price, Meurisse also dispelled this notion by bringing up a short game like Inside.
“The value that players get from games does not align systematically with the length of the game,” he said. “For example, one of my favourite games of all time is Inside, which lasts about two hours, but it’s one of the most polished, and intense [experiences] – and even life changing for some people.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available on PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. For more details, check out our review.
