Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 completely blew my expectations out of the water. Its story and combat quickly became all-consuming—I sank 13 hours into it over just one weekend. But the best part of this French RPG has to be its soundtrack, which is apparently all thanks to just one composer.
Lorien Testard had never worked on a videogame before (via BBC) and was discovered by Expedition 33's director, Guillaume Broche, on Soundcloud. He then proceeded to make the entire score, comprising 154 songs and clocking in at an impressive, and slightly terrifying, eight hours and nine minutes long.
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But it seems like it was meant to be from the very beginning, as Broche says that they were just on the same wavelength. "When we discussed the game for the first time, we had exactly the same references," Broche says in an interview with the BBC. "We loved the same thing. We watched the same things. The discussion was so fluid."
I pretty much have the soundtrack running all day on Spotify, with my favourite song being Monoco's theme, because who doesn't love listening to jazz while fighting bosses? The album has since passed 1.5 million track streams and was the number one selling album on Bandcamp last week.
"I call this the Guillaume effect," the lead writer, Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, says. "He's very good at finding really cool people."
Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years.
Guillaume Broche
Broche also managed to find his lead writer via unconventional means. Svedberg-Yen initially applied for a voice acting role via Reddit. "I saw a post on Reddit by Guillaume asking for voice actors to record something for free for a demo," Svedberg-Yen says. "I was like: 'I've never done that, it sounds kinda cool', so I sent him an audition." The audition obviously went well as Svedberg-Yen was actually cast as a major character in an early version of the game, but after a couple of rewrites and role switches, she then became the lead writer.
Broche seems to think the two factors helped massively in his bid to fill roles in the development team: Covid-19 pushing more creatives to display their art online, and a healthy dose of luck. "It's always the same story," Broche says. "I have a list of 15 people to contact, and I'm like 'Okay, I'm probably going to get maybe no one at all', and every time, the first one is like, 'Yeah, let's do it'."
Finding an outstanding composer via Soundcloud and a clearly very talented lead writer on Reddit isn't just impressive, it's also a great way to cut costs. Expedition 33 has managed to rival games worked on by hundreds or thousands of devs with much more money.
"We have, I think, an amazing team, mostly of junior people, but they are so incredibly invested in the project and talented," Broche says. "Somehow it worked, which still makes no sense to me after all these years."
