If you had any gripes with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 winning awards in any independent game category out there, then you’ll rejoice to know that’s no longer the case. According to several media outlets, the game developed by Sandfall Interactive has lost both of his accolades — Indie Game Debut and Best Indie Game — and the culprit of it is AI.
Well, not “AI” per se, but the studio’s decision to rely on it during the game’s development process. You see, way back in July 2025, while giving an interview to El Pais, Clair Obscur’s producer, François Meurisse stated: “We use some AI, but not much. The key is that we were very clear about what we wanted to do.“
Now, between the original report and the actual nomination and award-delivering ceremony, a bunch of time had passed — and in between those, Sandfall Interactive did put out a statement claiming that the supposedly AI-generated assets were pre-made assets, not fully created by any chatbot through text prompt. In fact, they said that any and all assets were minoritary, either had no part or a small, unassuming part in the final game and they all came from Unreal Engine’s marketplace.
Not that it helped: concerns over the use of AI — creating assets or not — grew over the months to a point where, even after the game’s winning the aforementioned awards, they were taken away, and the game was disqualified over violations of the basic ruleset imposed for nomination.
Granted, these are not “the” Game Awards (TGA) — the Indie Game Awards (or IGA) has another organization behind it — but still, given that they have “Indie” in the name and both “indie” categories were awarded to the same game only to be rescinded, this is kind of a big deal.
As to where things stand now, Blue Prince has been named the winner of the Indie Game Awards’ Game of the Year category, while the best debut category now lists Sorry We’re Closed as its claimant.
Now, as any backlash is concerned, there is no sign of the game’s popularity slowing down over this. At the game and studio’s official social media profiles, there’s complete silence over the matter — both accounts on X, for instance, still date their most recent post on December 20, celebrating the game’s most recent accolades.
Same goes for IGA, whose official X/Twitter account, ironically, is from the nominees for the aforementioned categories, before delivering the award itself, when the whole thing hadn’t happened.
It behooves to remind everyone, however, that Clair Obscur still made a killing, nabbing most category awards it was nominated to — including Game of the Year at TGAs. In fact, they announced additional content for free after winning.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is available for PC, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S|X.
