Now's The Perfect Time To Play 2025's Game of the Year
Tomorrow Comes for the year’s most celebrated studio.
It was a big night for Sandfall Interactive. Not only did the studio’s debut game, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, sweep the 2025 Game Awards, it also shadowdropped the game’s biggest update yet all at once.
Expedition 33’s Verso’s Drafts update adds a wave of new features worth returning for, including a new playable level, new enemies and bosses, an Endless Tower mode for testing players’ battle acumen, a long-requested photo mode, new languages, and new music for the game’s already stellar soundtrack. The update is also a godsend for handheld PC players, as it adds quality of life improvements for portable systems, resolution upscaling, and official Steam Deck verification.
The update is completely free, working as a celebratory victory lap for the new studio and its millions of fans.
“As our team celebrates this unforgettable evening, we want to raise our glasses and celebrate with you,” the team wrote on Twitter after the awards.
Expedition 33 took home nine of its 11 nominations last night, including the night's top prize, Game of the Year. It also won Best Game Direction, Best Narrative, Best Score, Best Independent Game, Best Art Direction, and others. It beat out some stiff competition across the many categories, including Hollow Knight: Silksong, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Hades II, and Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, becoming the most awarded game in the show’s 11-year history.
The turn-based RPG was a hit the moment it came out. Its brilliant active-time battle system and extraordinary fantasy story made it an odds-on favorite to win big at this year’s award show in Los Angeles. It earned universal acclaim when it was released last April, including a 10/10 review from Inverse. Despite being developed by a French team, Expedition 33 is a loving send-up of classic JRPGs like Final Fantasy and Persona. In fact, Expedition 33 director Guillaume Broche gave the creator of Final Fantasy a glowing acknowledgment during his acceptance speech for Game of the Year.
"And I'll extend a personal thank you to an important man in my life, Mr. Hironobu Sakaguchi, who made me fall in love with games and inspired me to become a game dev,” he said at the end of the night.
What also made Expedition 33 a standout in 2025 was its unorthodox development cycle. The New York Times reported this week that the game cost under $10 million to make. At a time when the industry’s biggest titles like Spider-Man 2 and Call of Duty cost publishers hundreds of millions of dollars to produce, Expedition 33 represents a gold standard for a sensible and sustainable approach to game development, without sacrificing the quality typically associated with triple-A gaming.
If you haven’t picked up Expedition 33 yet, now’s a perfect time to do so. Sandfall has dropped the game’s price across all digital storefronts by 10 percent, meaning you can play one of the year’s best for just $40. It’s an easy recommendation, even before Sandfall added all these new features to the game.
As for what’s next for Sandfall, the developer shared earlier in the year that they would like to build on the game’s universe in some way. Most surprisingly, Sandfall said it has no plans to expand the team, sticking with its core group of developers.
