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The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is not only a strong GOTY contender, it’s also a massive commercial success. Studio the development team and publisher Kepler Interactive announced that this title exceeded five million copies sold, this is in spite of it being a day-one release through the Game Pass service.

Its success came as a surprise to Sandfall. I firmly believed that we'd create a solid title garnering some average commercial success,” a key executive explained.

The CTO and lead programmer pointed out the game's critical score, now standing at 93, was “maybe the biggest shock to the studio relative to our early predictions and the final result turned out to be. Once it was published the entire team were cheering loudly. The energy was electric.”

The positive reception resulted in Sandfall developing a complimentary expansion for the game featuring fresh areas, foes, along with challenging bosses, reportedly will release sometime soon.

That said, despite the game's evolution, it's unlikely the team will expand. We've built an excellent group with a strong creative director who has a great vision for the project and also for new ideas. Our goal is to maintain the human scale that led to our success and do maybe major titles sequentially,” the executive noted.

The size of Sandfall generated significant conversation when the game came out. Some developers, like Hideo Kojima, looked at the development group as the model for game development. While Sandfall was and is indeed a small team versus large developers, a quick look at the title's staff list reveals many individuals were involved; Sandfall hired a team in Korea handling movement and effects, for example.

“Some hiring will occur a bit more certainly should there be a future production surge in upcoming years,” the executive said. “Yet I picture rather a creative atelier of a few exceptionally gifted creators that can make artistic collaborations.” He noted that Sandfall’s vision as a company “is more to maintain the successful elements that made this achievement possible originally.”

Despite being not the right time to say specifically about future projects — believe me, I attempted to learn more — the team does know their essential identity. “Turn-based gameplay, I think it's in the DNA of what we built,” they said. “The timing isn't right to be able to tell our next interests, however, it's crucial to adhere to our creative core with [a] strong narrative universe plus innovative play that excites us.”

They added that Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 started with the visionary “work[ing] on his dream game. And hopefully that philosophy we can continue with upcoming games.”