Expedition 33 Publisher Says Brevity Should Be More of a Virtue in Gaming

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 officially reached another important sales milestone today, having surpassed 3.3 million units sold 33 days after launch. The turn-based JRPG created by Sandfall Interactive and published by Kepler Interactive is one of the biggest surprise hits of 2025 so far. It has received unanimous acclaim from critics (getting a 9.5 score from us) and fans, too.

Today, GamesIndustry.biz published an interview with Kepler Interactive portfolio director Matthew Handrahan and Sandfall Interactive COO and producer François Meurisse. Among various things, the two credited the game with not dragging on for too long and challenged the view that longer games are better.

Matthew Handrahan: One of the things that’s great about Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is it really respects the player’s time. It gives them plenty to do, and it gives them plenty of satisfaction, but it isn’t arbitrarily 500 hours of gameplay. It’s impactful because it’s scoped correctly. […] It doesn’t have any sense of bloat or extraneous things that are put there just to make it larger and larger and larger.

Brevity should be more of a virtue in gaming. Something can be better by being shorter – something that’s being discussed in film at the moment. Every film seems to be two and a half hours long, and I think most people are like, ‘Can they all be a bit shorter, please? Because we have other things to do with our lives’.

François Meurisse: From the beginning, we wanted to do an intense and short experience. The first length estimates of the game were closer to 20 hours for the main quest. I think we ended up closer to 30, even 40 hours if you take a bit of time. As a player, there are so many great games out there that I want to experience, and what’s important to me is the level of excitement and fun I get from a game, rather than how long it is.

The value that players get from games does not align systematically with the length of the game. For example, one of my favourite games of all time is Inside, which lasts about two hours, but it’s one of the most polished and intense experiences – and even life changing for some people.

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