Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Director Says Fans Still Haven’t Unearthed Every Secret

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is hiding a few more tricks up its sleeve, and according to game director Guillaume Broche, players haven’t found them all yet. Broche is staying silent on specifics, but he’s adamant: “There are still a few things, yeah.”

Fans have already picked the game apart, picking up on intentional and surprisingly unintentional secrets. But Broche remains tight-lipped. “Maybe they have been found, but I haven’t seen anything about it,” he told Eurogamer. “I don’t want to say them because they won’t be secrets anymore.”

Final Fantasy Nods, Card Games, and Better Builds Than the Devs Expected

It’s not all smoke and mirrors. Broche confirmed that Final Fantasy inspirations can be found in the game, most obviously in Gestral Village, where NPCs play “Double Dyad cards.” That’s a tip of the hat to Triple Triad from Final Fantasy 8, but Broche says the connections are broader than a simple Easter egg: the overall “vibe” of Square Enix’s heavy hitters shaped a lot of the design thinking at Sandfall Interactive.

The game’s combat system was another intentional playground. Broche actively encouraged players to experiment and find “broken builds,” hoping to see everything from wild combos to elusive no-hit runs. He’s no stranger to the mentality: as a Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice speedrunner himself, he knew what the community would bring, and they didn’t disappoint. “They destroyed the game very fast. My personal speedrun record was broken in one week, maybe even less,” Broche said. His expectations were “very high,” but he admitted, “they are up to my expectations.”

The player base didn’t stop at speed. They even forced the developers’ hand. “We did patch an ability that was a little too strong,” Broche revealed, but the rest of the wild builds remain. He’s happy with that: “It’s exactly what we made the system for.” Some strategies players found weren’t even on the dev team’s radar. “People found crazy builds that even I didn’t really think about.”

When Fans Discover Your Old Prototypes

A different, more personal secret also came to light, one Broche genuinely forgot about. Before release, an early trailer for the game surfaced on Reddit. It turned out that Broche had posted it during the earliest days to hunt for voice actors. Suddenly, the community had a peek into Sandfall’s “underwear drawer.”

“It was like everybody entered my room and saw my underwear,” Broche joked. “I completely forgot that it was still accessible.” He took it in stride, though, appreciating the rare chance for fans to see “real behind-the-scenes footage of games in general, like the very first prototypes that very often look terrible.”

Sandfall Interactive’s CTO and lead programmer, Tom Guillermin, saw the moment as a positive. Revealed prototypes, he said, help “demystify” the process, especially for aspiring developers or fans. “Great games are not great from the beginning,” Guillermin pointed out. “It’s maybe good for the industry and also for the hobbyist as well.” The game fans are playing now is the same one that started in that early, rough Unreal Engine project, just “upgraded iteratively.” That transparency, rare as it is, builds a new kind of trust and hope for future devs.

Sandfall isn’t just sitting on its secrets, either. The next update for Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is coming soon, introducing fresh quality-of-life features and some new story scenes. Broche sums it up as “a bit of whee and a bit of whoo”, which sounds about right for a game that’s already turned expectations upside down more than once.