Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, the debut RPG from Sandfall Interactive, is already off to a strong start. The studio announced today that Expedition 33 has hit a sales milestone of 500,000 copies sold.
"A milestone for us, reached sooner than we'd ever imagined," the team said in a post on X/Twitter. "Thank you all."
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 went live yesterday, April 24, across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S. It's also a day-one Game Pass game, and despite launching a few days after the shadow-drop of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, the RPG still seems to be making waves. When Oblivion dropped, Clair Obscur's publisher Kepler Interactive even jokingly compared it to "Barbenheimer." The comparison, as it turns out, has been fairly accurate.
Developed by the newly formed studio Sandfall Interactive, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a turn-based RPG that takes heavy inspiration from the genre classics, from Final Fantasy to Persona. It follows a crew of Expeditioners in a fractured, post-apocalytpic world where every year, a giant being called The Paintress etches a new number and erases anyone older than it. The members of the Expedition, the next up on the block, have one goal in mind: travel to the ends of the continent and destroy the Paintress, ensuring she can never paint death again.
The reception of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has been widely positive, sitting at 92 on MetaCritic and 91 on OpenCritic, putting it alongside Split Fiction and Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 as some of the year's most lauded games thus far.
In IGN's 9/10 review of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, our reviewer described it as a "modern RPG classic," wearing its inspirations on its sleeve and painting itself into the pantheon of great RPGs.
If you're starting the adventure this weekend, or maybe already have, be sure to check out our tips for the important things to know before going into Clair Obscur: Expedition 33.
Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.
