Entertainment Swindon

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 cleans up at The Game Awards with a record breaking nine wins, beating off competition from Death Stranding 2, Nintendo platformer Donkey Kong Bananza, indie games Hollow Knight: Silksong and Hades 2, and medieval adventure Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 to claim the top prize.

French-developed role-playing game (RPG) Sandfall Interactive cleaned up in nine of the 10 categories it was up for, with further wins in best narrative, best music and best performance.

During the awards ceremony in Los Angeles, players also got their first glimpses of two new Tomb Raider games, sequel Control Resonant and a new Star Wars role-playing game.

Clair Obscur is set in a world where a supernatural being known as The Paintress prevents the population from growing past a certain age.

The game, which tells the story of a group of adventurers on a quest to destroy The Paintress, was praised for its emotional narrative and use of old-school, turn-based battles.

Accepting the game of the year award, director Guillaume Broche – wearing a red beret and striped t-shirt in a nod to the game’s strong French identity- said the year had been a “weird timeline” for the studio as he thanked his team.

He also extended thanks to the “unsung heroes” of the industry – “the people who make tutorials on YouTube on how to make a game, because we had no idea how to make one before”.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a 2025 role-playing video game developed by French studio Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive.

In Clair Obscur, the people of Lumiere live in a fractured reality: Every year, a godlike figure they call The Paintress marks a number on a tower far off in the distance, counting down the age at which people will perish into nothingness. You lead the survivors of the latest in a series of annual expeditions that set sail in hopes of destroying The Paintress, none of which have ever come back despite decades of attempts.