Clair Obscur: Expedition 33’s lead writer had apparently never played a video game before writing it

There is a belief that appears to crop up within the games industry that to work in it, you must be wholly aware of everything in it. You must live, breathe and die by games! That doesn’t always result in interesting games though, sometimes it’s actually quite useful to have outsiders come in to bring other perspectives. Admittedly that occasionally results in writers from the film industry waltzing in thinking it’s a one-to-one transfer, which is admittedly not great. But other times you get Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, whose writer, as it turns out, had not played a single video game in her life before writing it.

Lead writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen recently spoke with Lits Play (thanks, GamesRadar) about some of her influences, but also her experience with games before working on Clair Obscur. After being asked about if she liked genres like RPGs prior to joining the writing team, Svedberg-Yen said, while laughing, “So, I have to admit, before this I did not play any video games because I grew up in a very strict Chinese household and I’m the oldest. At the time video games were very expensive, so I didn’t have any exposure to [them]. I went to the library and I read books.”

Svedberg-Yen went on to explain that before she joined developer Sandfall, she generally played tabletop games like Dungeons & Dragons. Then after she joined, she figured she needed to do her “homework,” so along with her husband (who did play games), she started off with the Borderlands series. “Now we have two TVs, two PlayStations, we sit side by side. I am a trophy hunter, I have platinumed Elden Ring, God of War, God of War: Ragnarok. I guess you could say I play quite a lot of games these days,” she said.

If this lack of game influence from her side is a bit befuddling, it is worth noting that director Guillaume Broche did co-write it with her, who more famously is a Final Fantasy aficionado. In terms of her own influences, Svedberg-Yen brought in a lot of classic sci-fi books like Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series, particularly on the world building front, as well as the magic systems in Brandon Sanderson’s works.

For any budding game writers out there, take this as an important lesson! Games are sort of eating their own tail at the moment by only being inspired by other games, but the best works out there always draw from every wellspring they possibly can.