Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Turns One Year Old, Hits 8 Million Sales, and Celebrates With New Haircuts

Has it really been a year? Honestly, it feels like it hasn’t been that long since Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 blew up out of nowhere from a French indie studio nobody had heard of and proceeded to absolutely steamroll every major Game of the Year award going. And yet here we are — April 24, 2026 — one full year since launch, and Sandfall Interactive is celebrating with some genuinely good news and, perhaps more importantly, new hairstyles.

Because what better way to mark a one-year anniversary than giving your protagonists fresh dos?

8 Million Copies. From a First-Time Developer. Wild.

Let’s just sit with this number for a second. Eight million copies sold. In one year. For a brand-new IP from a studio that had never shipped a game before. Sandfall Interactive said in their announcement that they’re “thrilled, and honestly still quite overwhelmed” — and yeah, that sounds about right. Because this wasn’t supposed to happen like this. Nobody had Expedition 33 on their radar as a potential monster hit heading into April 2025.

For context, the game crossed 3.3 million in its first 33 days, hit 5 million by October 2025, and has now basically doubled that total over the following seven months. It also launched day-one on Xbox Game Pass and still managed to rack up those raw sales numbers — making it the most downloaded new third-party release on Game Pass in all of 2025. That’s an impressive double achievement: massive Game Pass downloads and 8 million units moved.

The soundtrack numbers are equally absurd. According to the anniversary announcement, the OST has been streamed over 617 million times — climbing to 645 million when you factor in the Verso’s Drafts and Nos Vies en Lumière bonus soundtracks. It scored six number-one spots on the UK Official Album Charts, hit number two in France and Germany, and racked up six top-five spots on the US Billboard Album Charts. For a video game soundtrack. About a French-inspired JRPG. Incredible stuff from composer Lorien Testard.

The GOTY Sweep Nobody Saw Coming

If you somehow tuned out all the Expedition 33 noise over the past year, here’s the quick version: it won everything. The Game Awards 2025 (nine trophies, including GOTY), Golden Joystick, DICE, GDC, and most recently, the BAFTA for Best Game — making Expedition 33 only the second game in history to win all five major GOTY awards, after Baldur’s Gate 3 did it back in 2023. Jennifer English, who plays Maelle, also took home Best Performer in a Leading Role at the BAFTAs, and the game picked up Best Debut Game on top of that.

At GDC earlier this year, Expedition 33 broke the record previously held by Elden Ring for most GOTY wins across awards shows and media outlets combined. For a debut title from an independent French studio, this is the kind of trajectory you’d normally only see in gaming fairy tales.

What’s Actually in the Anniversary Update?

The v1.5.5 patch is light but sweet. The headlining feature is the new first anniversary haircuts for all six playable characters.

Gustave’s anniversary haircut — and yes, I am choosing to believe Sandfall added it specifically to address all complaints about insufficient swirl — is available at the Gestral Merchant near Stone Wave Cliffs. All other character haircuts (Verso, Maelle, Lune, Sciel, and Monoco) are at the Gestral Merchant near Grosse Tête on the World Map. Free to grab, no strings attached.

Beyond the hair, the patch also knocks out a handful of fixes that are genuinely appreciated by anyone who ran into them. The standout is a fix for the Danseuse outfit for Lune and Sciel that was making the character menu — and I love that they used this phrasing in the official notes — “too obscur.” There’s also a fix for rest points that couldn’t be opened when in-world dialogue was active, some collision fixes, and a tidy-up of inconsistent achievement text that caused a brief scramble to correct after it went live.

Nothing revolutionary, but exactly what you want from a care-and-polish update celebrating the milestone.

What About DLC or a Sequel?

Here’s where some fans might feel a little cold water. Sandfall confirmed in their anniversary statement that there will be no major DLC or expansion dropping on the anniversary. Given that their “Thank You” update post-GOTY at The Game Awards — which added a whole new playable area in Verso’s Drafts and a batch of new songs — was such a generous surprise, expectations for the one-year mark were running high.

The good news is that “Clair Obscur” is confirmed to be a franchise name, not just a game title. Creative director Guillaume Broche has said that Expedition 33 is “one of the stories we want to tell in this franchise,” with a sequel or follow-up already being discussed. Whether that ends up being Expedition 34 or something else entirely with a different cast, we don’t know yet — but Sandfall clearly isn’t treating this as a one-and-done situation.

The live concert tour for the soundtrack has also been playing across multiple dates this year, with European legs selling out almost immediately. More dates have been teased. If you missed the initial run, keep an eye out.

Should You Pick It Up If You Haven’t Already?

If you missed Expedition 33 when it launched and you’ve got a Game Pass subscription, it’s already in the library and there’s essentially no reason not to play it. If you’re buying outright, it’s currently 20% off on Steam as part of a weekend deal running through April 27, 2026 — bringing it down to £33.59 from the standard price.

It’s a turn-based RPG with real-time parry and dodge mechanics woven into combat, dual protagonists with wildly different playstyles, a Belle Époque-inspired visual world unlike anything else in gaming, and a story that genuinely lands its emotional punches. The kind of game that people describe as “the reason I still love this hobby,” which is either the highest praise or the most insufferable kind of recommendation depending on your tolerance for game discourse, but in this case it’s both.

If you’ve been on the fence after the mountains of praise over the past year, this anniversary window is a solid moment to jump in. And now Gustave finally has a better haircut, so what’s stopping you?

It’s been a genuinely great few weeks to be a gaming fan overall — Resident Evil Requiem just hit 7 million sales with equally delightful developer celebrations, and over on the Xbox side, there’s a lot of movement happening under new CEO Asha Sharma’s watch — including a Game Pass price drop that’s making subscription deals better than ever. It’s a good time to be playing games.