Sandfall Did Not Expect Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to Score Above 85 on Metacritic

In a recent interview published by Edge, Sandfall producer François Meurisse said that the team expected Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to reach a score between 80 and 85 on Metacritic, but they never imagined the strong critical success the game later achieved.

“We conducted some mock review six months to one year before release, and we ended up with expected scores of around 80,” Meurisse explained. Those were already very good results, but they pushed the team to improve even more during the final phase of development.

“So our official goal towards the end of production was to reach for 85 in MetaCritic,” the producer said, referring to the target the team had set for critical reception, with the average score expected to settle around that number.

A Result Beyond Expectations

“We did some great extra work and focus in the last months to bounce the quality up,” Meurisse said. “We were hoping for that 85, but passing the 90 bar of Metacritic was really a great reward for the team. That’s where things began to get a little crazy.”

Nicholas Maxson-Francombe, art director of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, shared the same view. “We were giving each other bets on the Metacritic score. I think most of us were aiming at around 80,” he said.

“We thought it was a pretty decent game. We were pretty proud of what we did, but even if sales [had been quite low] we would have been happy.”

Lead programmer Tom Guillermin also explained why it was hard for the team to judge the game’s quality early on. “It’s hard to measure how good [the game] is because you’re contaminated by the first versions that you see that are very rough, with robotic text-to-speech instead of acting and that kind of thing,” he said. This made it understandable that Sandfall did not have a clear picture of the final quality.

“Part of my job is always ‘plan for the worst, hope for the best’, so I kind of forbade myself from having too much hope,” Meurisse added. “Much of my work is to manage expectations for the team, so the whole production was making up lots of awful scenarios of how things could go wrong. But it was worth the trouble, because we exceeded by far the best that we could have expected.”

Meanwhile, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is winning awards across the industry, including Game of the Year and several other prizes at The Game Awards 2025.