Expedition 33 wins GOTY, again, at the GDC Awards

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has dominated yet another awards ceremony. At Thursday’s Game Developers Choice Awards, held during the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Sandfall Interactive’s role-playing game won five awards, including Game of the Year.

The other awards Clair Obscur won were Best Debut, Best Visual Art, Best Narrative, and Best Audio.

Blue Prince, the indie puzzle adventure about exploring the ever-shifting rooms of a sprawling mansion, won two awards: Best Design and the Innovation Award.

Clair Obscur has now sealed four of the Big Five gaming awards, with Game of the Year wins at the Golden Joystick Awards, The Game Awards, the DICE Awards, and the GDC Awards. That already puts it in the rarefied company of games like God of War, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Elden Ring.

If Sandfall can complete the run with a win at the BAFTA Games Awards in April, it will be only the second game to manage this feat, after Baldur’s Gate 3. BAFTA has been known for going rogue in its Best Game category as often as not, but Clair Obscur does lead the pack on nominations there, too.

The GDC Awards are voted on by a panel of industry professionals and the editors of Game Developer. Here’s the full list of winners.

• Game of the Year: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Best Debut: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Best Design: Blue Prince
• Best Technology: Death Stranding 2: On the Beach
• Best Visual Art: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Innovation Award: Blue Prince
• Best Narrative: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Audience Award: And Roger
• Best Audio: Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Social Impact: Consume Me
• Lifetime Achievement Award: Don Daglow (veteran designer of Neverwinter Nights, active since the early 1970s)
• Ambassador Award: Rebecca Ann Heineman (trailblazing designer and coder, co-founder of Interplay, who died in 2025)