What started as Guillaume Broche’s personal project has been nominated for 12 Game awards, sold more than 2m copies and been praised by Emmanuel Macron as a ‘shining example of French audacity’
T
he record-breaking 12 nominations at the Game awards this year was beyond the wildest dreams of Guillaume Broche when he first began inking out Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 as a personal project while working at Ubisoft.
Before selling more than 2m copies, the narrative-driven roleplaying game with “a unique world, challenging combat and great writing” was a technical demo called We Lost. It was Broche’s appetite for risk and a few hopeful Reddit posts that would create the game’s world of Lumiere and its struggle against the Paintress.
“I was doing like eight hours per day after work and not sleeping at all for a few years,” Broche says. And while he would be joined by Tom Guillermin on the programming side and Francoise Meurisse as producer, the next few members of the nascent studio – Lorien Testard, lead composer and Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, lead writer – would only come to Clair Obscur by chance, via social media.
