Nestled between the crowd-pleasing guns and gore of Xbox’s 2024 summer showcase, was an eyebrow-raising, painterly role playing game. As its party of grimacing adults urgently sprints across a shimmering, surrealist landscape, a voiceover depicts a world terrorized by an omnipotent being called the Paintress. Each year, she daubs a new descending number on a distant monolith and everyone of the corresponding age disappears. With 60+ expeditions meeting a grizzly end, it is now up to the oldest remaining humans — the 33 year olds — to try and reverse their realm’s futile fate.
After Doom: The Dark Ages and Gears Of War E Day’s carnal thrills, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s existential journey offered something refreshingly abstract. The 30 strong team at developer Sandfall Interactive took inspiration from both classic RPGs and Belle Epoque-era Impressionist painters, aiming to make a refreshingly French take on Final Fantasy. It was this lofty ambition that attracted some big name voice talent to this relatively modest game.
“I immediately was drawn to the visual style, the world-building, the characters… just the themes behind the story,” says Andy Serkis, the voice of Clair Obscur’s Renoir. “Before I even became an actor, I was a painter, so there are lots of connections there.”
While getting the voice behind Gollum and Star Wars villain Snoke is a win in itself, he wasn’t the only Hollywood talent drawn to Clair Obscur, with Daredevil’s Charlie Cox also signing on for the role of Gustave. While Hollywood stars appearing in games is nothing new, the RPG’s intriguing themes and naturalistic script coax refreshingly earnest performances from the Hollywood duo, who fit in seamlessly alongside some of gaming’s hottest talents.
“They are not tourists in this game,” Ben Starr, voice of Clive in Final Fantasy XVI and Verso in Clair Obscur, says of Serkis and Cox’s impressive in-game performances. “They are doing some heavy emotional lifting, and they are doing it with a huge reverence to the craft.”
It was the determination of teenager Maelle, who volunteers to embark on Expedition 33 well before her allotted time, that drew Baldur’s Gate 3 actor Jennifer English to the role. “I fell in love with her bravery. As soon as I got the script, I read it like a novel and I don’t think I stopped reading it to breathe,” says English. “[Maelle] is so young, and yet has this emotional depth, which we do as teenagers. We look back at our teenage selves in a surface way, but just remember the depth of your emotions. For me, it’s all about the storytelling and the character and I just knew, instantly, that I wanted to play this role.”
“They are doing some heavy emotional lifting, and they are doing it with a huge reverence to the craft.”
“It’s a fascinating exploration of mortality,” says Starr, on why Clair Obscur’s existential themes resonate. “I was obsessed by that Friends episode where Rachel turns 30 and that’s the end of her life. I think as a person who was born in 1988, that idea of mortality when you turn 30 was huge. A lot of people who saw [Clair Obscur’s] first trailer went, ‘Wow, dead at 34? I’d be dead.’”
Despite lacking the budget of Final Fantasy or other blockbuster RPGs, Clair Obscur manages to punch above its weight with a unique blend of turn-based and real time combat that compliment its narrative ambition. “I cannot believe what this team has achieved,” reflects Starr. ”This really is a small production filled with passionate people. I think [Sandfall interactive] really wants to show you that small teams can make big experiences and have a big impact.”
With Cox riding high on Daredevil: Born Again, and Serkis’ equally-storied career giving him the freedom to pick his projects, it was Clair Obscur’s compelling characters that enticed the Hollywood actors. For the regularly villain-playing Serkis, he felt an affinity for the morally-ambiguous, mysteriously age-defying Renoir.
“I don’t believe in the concept of evil,” reflects Serkis, on why he enjoys inhabiting morally murky roles. “As a storyteller and as an actor, it’s your job when investigating a role to think about the character in a way where you can present them as a human being. With many of the darker characters that I played, it’s about saying, what are the layers of the character, the subtext? With Renoir, you get a sense that he is a malevolent force, but there’s some very extraordinary revelations about what he is and how he’s become that way.”
This is far from Serkis’ first experience in games. He has spent decades being one of Hollywood’s mo-cap and video game champions, which included lending his voice to Ninja Theory games Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. “I remember the first time I put on a motion capture suit in New Zealand back in 1999 and thinking, this is an extraordinary digital costume,” Serkis says, recalling how misunderstood motion capture was when he first crawled across the set for The Lord Of The Rings. “It’s what it’s like going through the looking glass, because it means you can suddenly play anything.”
“There was an awful lot of looking down from the lofty heights of the film industry on the video game industry.”
That experience inspired him to found his own motion capture studio called The Imaginarium. Serkis has been fascinated by the idea of interactive storytelling ever since, determined to use video games as a teaching tool for future generations. “I started working on the concept of the Imaginarium after Odyssey to the West,” Serkis says. “The idea was to create a place where you could explore next generation storytelling, and one of the first things I remember writing down as a business brief was that I would love to create the entire canon of Shakespeare plays as video games.” While Serkis has yet to adapt Shakespeare into games, Clair Obscur is already being adapted for the big screen, with the entertainment company behind the Sonic the Hedgehog films working on a live-action film.
For Serkis, after so many years of working across games and film, seeing video games finally get mainstream recognition as a storytelling medium has been a moment of personal pride. “The video game world and the film world were so separate back when I first came across it and there was an awful lot of looking down from the lofty heights of the film industry on the video game industry,” reflects Serkis. “Whereas now the opposite has happened, all the big franchise movies that are made totally rely upon video game technology for pre-visualization and virtual production. So it’s had this fantastic kind of emergence.”
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launches April 24th on the PS5, Xbox, and PC.
