Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is an upcoming turn-based RPG by French studio Sandfall Interactive. Leading up to it April 24 release, game producer and studio co-founder François Meurisse spoke about some of the games that were influential in designing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Speaking to GamesRadar at GDC 2025, Meurisse revealed that early Final Fantasy games, along with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice were huge sources of inspiration.
While the turn-based combat of the game being inspired by some of the earlier Final Fantasy titles might be quite obvious, the Sekiro influence comes in with regards to how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 handles the player’s defensive options. Players can time button presses in order to parry incoming attacks, essentially turning the game into a turn-based take on Sekiro‘s parry-centric gameplay.
“Those are big childhood games for Guillaume [Broche], our game director,” Meurisse said, talking about Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, and 10. “He wanted to have like kind of feeling that he imagined would have remained in modern Final Fantasy-like games, if they had kept doing turn-based stuff. But he mixed also lots of different inspirations. Definitely Final Fantasy and JRPGs are the preeminent gameplay heritage we have. The defense system is more inspired by Sekiro and From Software games. It has this kind of rhythm element and a more real-time component in it. More skill-based.”
Meurisse also spoke about other inspirations, including from indie deckbuilding games that make use of unique mechanics, like the strict constraints on mana that can be used to play cards in indie card-based roguelite title Slay the Spire, for example.
“There are also lots of different smaller inspirations,” said Meurisse. “For example, the idea of having action points for skills in the battles is more inspired by deckbuilding games than having the usual like magic points scores or mana in RPGs.”
While games by Japanese developers may have had a huge influence on Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on the gameplay side of things, when it comes to visuals and aesthetics, Meurisse said that the studio didn’t want to mimic anime or manga art styles.
“The gameplay is from a heritage of JRPGs, but from the very beginning, we wanted to make our own game with our own art inspiration,” Meurisse explained. “On the art style in particular, we didn’t want to mimic Japanese games, making more stylized manga-like or anime-like graphics. We wanted to make some art direction that was based on our own influence. That’s how we came up to do this early 20th century Belle Époque inspiration with art deco elements mixed with high fantasy. We had a few iteration on that to try to find our own uniqueness in the art, but it really helped us to build our own difference.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. PC players that are curious about the game can check out the PC requirements that were revealed back in January. In the meantime, check out the latest trailer from earlier this month that showcases one of the game’s characters, Gustave, who also happens to be voiced by Charlie Cox of Daredevil fame.
