Expedition 33's early levels are "badly designed," says Gears of War legend, but the game is still "mind-blowingly impressive"

Scooping up a colossal 12 nominations and nine wins at The Game Awards, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has etched itself into the history books as not just a seminal RPG, but a fresh take on the classic JRPG (J'RPG) formula. It's a game that many of us, including People Can Fly and Astronauts founder Adrian Chmielarz, have been thinking about a lot over the past few months, and as I discuss triple-A fatigue with the industry veteran, he calls it his personal "game of the year."

Chmielarz currently heads up the team over at The Astronauts, who you may recognize from The Vanishing of Ethan Carter and, more recently, Witchfire, the high-octane dark fantasy shooter. Before that, however, he worked on hits like Painkiller, Bulletstorm, and Gears of War, and has spent years building classic IPs from the ground up. When I ask him why he thinks Expedition 33 grew to be this year's biggest success story, he says that there are "elements [he] understands," but there are "some that [he doesn't]."

"The one I understand is that [Sandfall] really didn't have to spend a lot of time on AI," he says. "There's no pathfinding, there's no navigation of 3D spaces for enemies against your NPCs, so that's much easier. Then they do these fairly static levels - you can observe their evolution, because the first levels are actually kind of old school; I would even go so far as to say that they're kind of badly designed. But, by the end of the game, they're large and spectacular - it's clear they were learning as they were going.

"What I also understand but appreciate is how unhinged [Sandfall] is," he laughs. "The French actually cooperate a lot with Japan when it comes to animation, so when you go to a French bookstore, you see entire floors dedicated to comic books - in their case, more graphic novels than comic books. [There's] that imagination that they still cherish. I'm super, super happy to see a Japanese game, but made by Europeans - usually it's the other way around [where] the Japanese guys [make] games in the European style, like Silent Hill. That was fascinating.

"The thing that I do not understand is how they managed to put so much production value into this game - these cutscenes are just world class, absolutely triple-A. Sometimes the biggest studios don't have this quality," he muses. "They weren't working on the game for that long, all things considered. So when I look at the team and at the timeline and at the quality, I really do not know. I would buy the creative director (Guillaume Broche) a bottle of wine and have a really nice chat with him to steal some secrets. But what they've done is, to me, mind-blowingly impressive."

Expedition 33 is my personal game of the year, too, partly because of its gameplay, but largely because of its storytelling. Beautiful from start to finish and brought to life by an all-star cast, it really is the most exciting game I've seen in years. Now that the new thank you update is live, I can't wait to return to Lumiere.