If you’ve finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, you probably have some strong opinions about the game’s multiple possible endings. I feel like saying anything more about that at the top of this article would be irresponsible, but this is a story about one of the game’s writers saying that developer Sandfall Interactive is not going to “canonize” one ending over the other, even as they work on future games set in the same universe.
As such, from now on, I’m going to talk as if you have beaten the game and seen at least one of the two endings. Huge spoilers for the ending of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 below the video! Read on at your own risk.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 offers two possible endings no matter how you choose to play the game or how much side content you do. At the end of the game, you can choose to control Maelle or Verso in a single battle against the other, and winning it gets you the ending of whichever character you picked. Already tragic enough, neither of these endings are very satisfying ones. Verso’s ending offers emotional catharsis for both characters admittedly, but at the expense of the lives of most of the rest of the cast you’ve come to love up to that point. Maelle’s keeps everyone alive and kicking, but at the cost of multiple people’s free will and, arguably, Maelle’s own life and sanity. The choice is rough, but also very much in keeping with who Verso and Maelle have shown themselves to be in the game up to this point.
But that does beg the question: which of these endings in the “real” or canon ending? You could argue that it doesn’t matter, and it’s up to the player, but developer Sandfall Interactive has confirmed it’s working on another game in the same universe. It seems likely that at some point the story of any future game they make could brush up against the consequences of one choice or the other. And if that happens, they’ll have to pick which option is the truly “canon” version. Right? Right?
Wrong, says writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen in an interview I conducted at DICE Summit last month. “We are not going to pick one,” she told me. When I pushed, asking if they’d truly never choose, she replied: “Never say never, but there is no canon ending there. It is a Schrodinger’s ending.”
Expedition 33’s two tragic endings were apparently settled on by the writers early in the development process, according to Svedberg-Yen. They knew they wanted Maelle and Verso to fight, she says, and neither of them really care much for “storybook” happy endings.
“I think that was almost like an unspoken agreement,” she continued. “We never even considered really a true, happy ending. I think there was maybe a happier one possibly. You can see also in the way that the endings are edited, that one has a slightly more uplifting tone and one has a slightly darker tone. That was a choice that Guillaume made in terms of just having a little bit of shading there. But from my perspective, narratively, both are equally valid. Both are both good and bad. And it really just depends on whose perspective, whose good or whose happily-ever-after you are prioritizing.”
I guess at least that means Verso’s ending gets to continue being canon in my own, personal mental lore.
We spoke to Svedberg-Yen on a number of other subjects, including the wild, winding road she took to becoming a writer on Expedition 33, the emotional inspiration for each of the main characters, and the silly bets her colleagues lost because the game did so well. You can read our full interview with her right here.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
