If only every random scroll through Reddit was as productive as the one that changed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen’s entire life.  Not too long after ditching the finance world to pursue creative dreams, but in the thick of the COVID-19 lockdown, Svedberg-Yen was wasting away an afternoon on the community forums when she stumbled upon a call from former Ubisoft producer Guillaume Broche for voice-actor help. Broche was in need of a willing and able person to record scratch lines for a game he was developing. Svedberg-Yen agreed to read for two roles — why not? — and immediately had notes for Broche on how to imbue the characters with more nuance. That game was not Clair Obscur. When Svedberg-Yen met Broche, the game designer was originally at work on We Lost, a much smaller, steampunk game set in Victorian England. An avid fantasy reader and writer, Svedberg-Yen sparked to Broche’s vision for a turn-based RPG that incorporated elements of realtime combat, and couldn’t help but offer her thoughts when discussing the characters she might voice. Over the course of months, and from two corners of the world — Broche in Shanghai and Svedberg-Yen in Sweden — the pair developed a narrative bible for the game. But by the end of the creative process, advisors and investors told them the idea wasn’t viable. They needed to go bigger.  “They said, ‘assume you had more resources,’” Svedberg-Yen recalls. “‘Think bigger’ […] We were trying to be realistic and that kind of limited the scope of it. So we went back to the drawing board, and came up with Expedition 33.” The only connections to the scrapped steampunk game and the Belle Époque-inspired RPG they eventually made are a few names — Lune and Maelle both made the cut. Everything else was built up from scratch, Svedberg-Yen says, world-building she says came easy to her thanks to a lifetime of reading. The Wheel of Time books were a major influence, just by the nature of them being expansive and lived in.  “I would say Robert Jordan was definitely a major influence on how I think about epic fantasy, in terms of how he weaves in societies and how social structures affect the citizens that reside within them,” she says. “You follow a lot of the logic of the world in terms of cause and effect. So when I start writing, I always try to think about what is the world that they inhabit? How does that shape who the characters are? Because I do believe that we are a function of all of our experiences, the society we grew up in, the people who are in our lives. The specific things that have happened to us that affect who we are affects how we see the world. And that in turn affects how we think, then affects how we speak and how we react to other things. And as a writer, you need to know how your characters are going to speak and react. Wheel of Time does a fantastic job with that.” Going back to the drawing board meant finding new inspiration, but the aesthetic of French architecture, baguette costumes, and mimes could only carry the new project so far. Svedberg-Yen ultimately found the game’s foundation in her own work, developed out of a short story she had previously written. In the writer’s words, the story was about a young woman “who thought she was an orphan and realizes later on that her mom is actually a painter and can enter paintings, and that her mom was still alive and was lost in a painting, and she has to go and try to save her mom and bring her out of the painting. So that then became the backstory for Clair Obscur.” As much as the pivot away from Victorian steampunk was driven by business potential, none of the development on Clair Obscur was driven by its potential as a long-lasting IP for studio Sandfall Interactive. She says there was nothing coded into the storytelling that would lead directly into a sequel or even a DLC, and that was never the goal. “I think we told the story we wanted to tell based on the characters we had — our story has a beginning, a middle and end,” she says. But she does have reams and reams of lore stashed away, lots of storytelling that didn’t make it into the games, and plenty of other ideas. So maybe “Clair Obscur” — which roughly translates to the contrasting balance of lightness and darkness often referred to as chiaroscuro in the painting world — could become what “Final Fantasy” is to the disconnected games of that franchise? “‘Clair Obscur’ has a lot of symbolic meaning tied to all of the themes within the game. It links very specifically to the emotional journey that the characters are going through, but it’s also broad enough,” she says without, wisely, committing to anything. “So who knows. The world is our oyster. Everything is possible.”