At the Game Awards, the top award went to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, an indie game created by Frenchman Guillaume Broch, a former employee of Ubisoft, a major studio. He left the company during the pandemic to create his own game.
Claire Obscur became the gaming industry’s biggest sensation of the year, proving that it is possible to create a popular and fan-favourite video game outside of a big studio.
Claire Obscur received a record 12 nominations in 10 categories and ended up winning nine awards: best game, directing, story, art direction, indie game, indie debut (a game created by a new independent studio) and best acting.
Composer Laurent Testard won the award for best musical score, and Jennifer English won for best acting (she voiced the heroine Mile). Also in this category were the top game of the year?
Pandemic and Dream
In 2019, Ubisoft France employee Guillaume Broch (who has the Assassin’s Creed series, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, Rayman, and Tom Clancy’s, among others) started working on his own project.
The following year, during the coronavirus pandemic, he decided to quit his job and devote himself entirely to creating his game.
“I was bored with work and wanted to do something else,” Brosh told the BBC about those times.
He searched for a team to develop his Brosh game online: on reddit and forums.
Photo by Michael Tran / AFP via Getty Images
In April 2020, Brosh was looking for voice actors on reddit who could record some samples for free.
American Jennifer Swedberg-Yen, then underneath blocked in Australia, was informed regardless of her lack of expertise. I am not a voice actress, this was my only experience, technical other texts she had not had before.
Author photo by Gabrielle Buis/AFP via Getty Images
Composer Lorien Testar Broch also found the music on the internet. He came across the musician on a forum dedicated to indie games, listened to his songs on the SoundCloud platform and called Testar to work on Clair Obscur. Testar had no experience with video games.
I call it the Guillaume effect. He’s great at finding cool people,” Svedberg-Yen told the BBC.
However, Brosch attributes his success to the pandemic and quarantines: all over the world, people were looking for opportunities to express themselves creatively.
‘The same story repeated itself every time,’ he told the BBC.
‘I have a list of 15 people I want to contact and I think – well, probably no-one will answer. And every time the first person says, Yeah, come on, at Ubisoft he worked as a brand manager and didn’t develop games. He learnt how to create games on his own using YouTube videos. You can learn everything on the Internet,” he told the New York Times.
In accepting the Games Awards, Brosh thanked the industry’s “unsung heroes” – “the people who make instructional videos on YouTube – for how to create a game because we had no idea how to do it.”
Photo by Sandfall Interactive
According to Brosh, modern game development tools allowed his studio to create Clair Obscur with few resources and cheaply.
The game’s total budget was less than $10 million. By comparison, Assassin’s Creed: Shadows, released in March this year, cost Ubisoft more than $100 million.
Clair Obscur was released on 24 April 2025, and 500,000 people bought the game on the first day. Within three days, sales grew to the studio neglecting this his favourite genre and he wanted to revive it.
Clair Obscur is set in the fictional city of Lumiere, reminiscent of Paris during the “beautiful era” at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries.
Every year the Artist, some supreme being, draws a number on a monolith – for example, 33 – and all people at that age die instantly. Every year, volunteers from Lumiere go on an expedition to find the Artist and prevent the tragedy from happening the following year.
Photo by Sandfall Interactive
Despite the serious central themes (the loss of loved ones), the game also finds room for humour, including mocking stereotypes about France. Characters can use baguettes as weapons and occasionally fight mimes.
While creating Clair Obscur, the creators were active on social media and talked about the process – this allowed them to gain fans before the game was released.
With us, it’s unclear how,” he added.