Sandfall Interactive showed up during Xbox's January Developer Direct with a lengthy segment on its debut game, Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, that included the upcoming RPG's release date. Expedition 33 will launch on April 24, for Xbox Series X|S, including Game Pass; PlayStation 5, and PC via Steam and Windows.
The new Expedition 33 trailer highlights how Sandfall is attempting to balance dark themes and lighthearted touches in this tale of confronting one's own death. It takes place in a world where fear rules. A sorceress known as the Paintress turns a dial one number closer to zero every year, and anyone whose age matches the number dies. Groups of would-be heroes venture out to find and stop her, and while none have succeeded, the lack of hope doesn't stop the latest band -- Expedition 33 -- from trying.
It's not all grim, though. The team added lighthearted moments and characters to keep Expedition 33's themes from getting too heavy, including a bloodthirsty philosopher who joins the party. In a twist on Final Fantasy's Blue Mage, which learns enemy skills by battling them, this philosopher can imitate enemy behavior by wielding parts of their bodies.
There's also a floating giant who acts as the party's airship and carries them around the world map. Airships were once common in RPGs, but fell out of use in the late 2000s. Sandfall said Expedition 33's map borrows some of the team's favorite features from classic games such as Golden Sun and Final Fantasy, with special treasures and particularly challenging enemies tucked away for players to discover.
Sandfall wants Expedition 33 to inspire the sense of adventure and drama in modern players that classic RPGs kindled in them, though they favor innovation over nostalgia. Art director Nicholas Maxson-Francombe said in an Xbox blog post that he wanted to give Expedition 33 a fresh visual style not usually seen in fantasy settings.
"I just wanted to get out of the stuff that we've just seen a million times -- science fiction, to space, or zombies, all that kind of stuff," Maxson-Francombe said. "Most of the research [I did was into] ceramic textures [and] those shapes really inspired me to come up with the enemies that we see in the game."
Sandfall is taking a similar approach to Expedition 33's turn-based battles, which, among other things, use timed inputs to increase a skill's effectiveness or to parry an incoming attack.
"We didn't want the game to just be a pretty face," Guillaume Broche, Sandfall's CEO and creative director, said. "We wanted it to be like a game that feels like a real game. So every character has their own playstyle and you can really play them in a lot of different ways -- but they also feel very different from each other, and they all have their unique mechanics and their unique skill tree."
Each character unlocks hundreds of passive skills that players can activate as they see fit for customization combinations of their own making.
Sandfall will share more details about Expedition 33 in the weeks leading up to its release date.