Expedition 33’s sweep of every GOTY award was an astonishing coup

But for a while there, in the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank on a warm Friday evening, it seemed like an upset was on the cards. Category after category, Clair Obscur kept losing. Artistic Achievement went to Death Stranding 2. Performer in a Supporting role, where Expedition 33 had two nominees, went to Dispatch‘s Jeffrey Wright. Game Design went to Blue Prince. Music and Narrative — categories Clair Obscur had dominated at every other awards ceremony — respectively went to Ghost of Yōtei and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2.

I was in the room, and a palpable tension was rising in the audience, dressed in its black-tie finery. It seemed BAFTA was about to send developer Sandfall Interactive home empty-handed, and deny Clair Obscur a clean sweep of the Big Five game of the year awards. Drama!

Then, at the end of the ceremony, a sudden turn. In quick succession (interrupted only by a richly deserved Game Beyond Entertainment win for Despelote) Clair Obscur won Best Debut, Performer in a Leading Role for Jennifer English, and finally, Best Game. Each win got an even bigger reaction from the industry crowd. It was thrilling to watch.

On one level, this was just good pacing and stage management by BAFTA — a way to inject excitement into an expected result. But it was also fitting. By making the audience wait for Clair Obscur‘s recognition, BAFTA reminded us of just how extraordinary Sandfall’s achievement is — something that, during its processional sweep of every prior award ceremony, it had become easy to forget.

When the game was released just one year ago, it was barely conceivable that Clair Obscur would run the GOTY table as it has; apart from anything else, Grand Theft Auto 6 hadn’t been delayed into 2026 yet. However, reviews quickly suggested Sandfall had something special on its hands, and as the year progressed, most other potential competitors melted away. By the time of The Game Awards in December, Clair Obscur was the locked-in favorite for Game of the Year, and there was nothing especially surprising about its record-breaking nine wins there — nor its subsequent sweeps of the DICE Awards and the GDC Awards.

Only, if you stop to think about it, surprising is exactly what it was. An indie game had never triumphed at The Game Awards before. Nor had a studio’s debut release. Nor had a game that had such relatively modest promotion; in the months before Clair Obscur‘s release, most players had no idea that it existed. The Clair Obscur phenomenon was built by critical acclaim and word of mouth, and by a genuine hunger among players for freshness and authenticity in a gaming arena dominated by risk-averse publishers wielding big budgets.

The Sandfall team’s inexperience — and the outsider status of its small, indie-studio-backed publisher, Kepler Interactive — make its domination of the awards season unprecedented. But it was not completely without signifiers.

Image: Sandfall Interactive/Kepler Interactive

In particular, there was Baldur’s Gate 3, the only other game in history to complete a sweep of the Big Five. Unlike Clair Obscur, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a big license (Dungeons & Dragons), is a sequel in a storied series, and was made by a seasoned developer, Larian Studios. But Larian, too, was operating outside the commercial epicenter of the industry (Baldur’s Gate 3 is self-published). And, like Sandfall, Larian aimed to restore authenticity and specificity to an RPG genre which, over the previous decade or two, had begun to lose its identity as it melted into the world of AAA action-adventure games. (Sandfall might not have felt the need to make Clair Obscur if Final Fantasy games hadn’t switched from turn-based to real-time combat.)

Clair Obscur‘s awards triumph is no less astonishing or uplifting for being expected — or it shouldn’t be, anyway. The fact that it was made by a green studio on a relatively small budget makes it a great story. But the real reasons it won everything were its resonant story, memorable characters, the considered bite of its game systems, and above all, the feeling that it existed because its developers felt a powerful creative need to make it.

Clair Obscur was made with love and received with it. It’s a one-off, but its wild success is far from unrepeatable; I suspect we’ll see more of its kind run away with the GOTY narrative in the coming years, GTA 6 or no. We’ll be lucky if we do. But I wouldn’t bet against it.

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