CLAIR OBSCUR: EXPEDITION 33 Lead Writer Says She Approached the Game Like an HBO Drama, Not an RPG

One of the biggest reasons Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has completely dominated the conversation in 2025 comes down to its storytelling. The game is awesome and the stortelling is beautiful.

The game has already cleaned up at the Golden Joysticks and The Game Awards, and at this point its constant award wins are basically a running joke online. What makes that success even more interesting is that the person leading the narrative never set out to write a traditional RPG.

Award-winning lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen recently opened up about her approach to the project, and it turns out her mindset was far closer to prestige television than game design.

In an interview with Edge’s Knowledge newsletter, she reflected on how the team’s lack of traditional game development backgrounds actually shaped Expedition 33 into something special.

“I think it obviously has challenges, because we're new. [But] we were able to bring in our own tastes and our own perspectives that we'd built up through life outside of gaming, and bring the best of other worlds into the game.”

That outside perspective became a massive strength. Without rigid expectations about how an RPG story is supposed to work, the team felt free to push ideas that might normally get shot down early in development. She continued:

“A lot of times, we didn't know what we didn't know. There are some things that [other] people wouldn't even think about, but for us we can just [say], 'Yeah, why not?' and challenge each other.”

Svedberg-Yen admits that games weren’t her reference point at all, saying she “never really played videogames,” and instead leaned heavily on books and television, particularly large-scale genre storytelling.

“I love science-fiction and fantasy epics which have massive, immersive worlds and vibrant societies, so I took a lot of that and put that into the backdrop of the game.”

That influence shows in every aspect of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, from its dense lore to its character-driven emotional beats. The goal wasn’t about stats and systems at first, it was creating good storytelling, drama, pacing, and relationships.

She explains, “I didn't think of it as writing an RPG. I thought of it almost like writing an HBO drama.”

That mindset helps explain why the game feels so different from most modern RPGs. It plays like a long-form narrative where combat and mechanics support the story instead of the other way around. It’s cinematic, intimate, and often wonderfully uncomfortable.

In a year packed with major releases, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 standing at the top is the result of a creative team that wasn’t afraid to ignore the rulebook and tell the kind of story they’d want to watch, read, and live inside.