Guillaume Broche, director at Sandfall Interactive, has said that “Attack on Titan” was one of the clearest influences behind “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” — the studio's breakout role-playing game, which released on April 24, 2025. According to Broche, the anime's narrative depth and its symbolic uniforms shaped both the storytelling and the visual identity of the game. The title itself points to that same sensibility: “Clair-obscur” is French for chiaroscuro, the centuries-old painting technique associated with Renaissance and Baroque masters like Caravaggio, built on stark contrasts between light and shadow to heighten emotional intensity — a visual language the game applies directly to its central mechanic of a world being erased, piece by piece, year after year.
Sandfall Interactive was founded in 2020 by Broche alongside producer François Meurisse and technical director Tom Guillermin, and is based in Montpellier, in the south of France. Broche first sketched the game's core ideas in 2019 while still working at Ubisoft, before leaving during the pandemic to build them out properly with a core team of around 30 developers, working with a budget under $10 million and building the game on Unreal Engine 5 — a modest setup for a turn-based RPG with real-time dodge-and-parry combat, following a group of soldiers marching against the Paintress, a god-like figure who erases a growing number of people from existence every year.
What happened after launch went well beyond anyone's plans. Expedition 33 launched day one on Xbox Game Pass, sold 500,000 copies in its first 24 hours, passed 1 million within three days, and reached 8 million units by its first anniversary in April 2026. Metacritic gave it a 91/100 — the highest user score in the site's history — while Steam reviewers left it at 95 percent positive across more than 100,000 ratings.
The recognition kept building from there. At The Game Awards 2025, Expedition 33 won 9 of its 13 nominations, including Game of the Year, making it only the second game after Baldur's Gate 3 to sweep Game of the Year at all five major ceremonies — the Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the D.I.C.E. Awards, the GDC Awards, and the BAFTA Games Awards. Not every jury was as kind: the Indie Game Awards disqualified it over its use of generative AI during development, handing the award to Blue Prince instead. The anime influence sits inside that same tension — alongside Broche's own attachment to “Attack on Titan,” lead character and concept artist Alain Reynaud has said “Bleach” shaped several of the game's character designs.
Whether the “Attack on Titan” connection was the deciding factor is hard to isolate after the fact. A 91 Metacritic score and a Game of the Year sweep across five ceremonies already made the case for Expedition 33 on their own. What stands out is how directly a French AA studio, working on a fraction of a typical blockbuster's budget, let Japanese pop culture shape a project that ended up outselling and outscoring games many times its size.