Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won Game of the Year at The Game Awards on December 11, 2025, at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles. Sandfall Interactive made it. Kepler Interactive published it. I checked the official winners page and the December 18 recap The Game Awards posted under its own name. Both give the same top line. I am not going to invent a vote total, because they did not publish one for the trophy.
The same official recap lists the rest of the night’s haul. Best Game Direction. Best Narrative. Best Art Direction. Best Score and Music. Best Performance. Best Independent Game. Best Debut Indie Game. Best RPG. That is nine awards, counted from the list The Game Awards wrote down. I am leaving it as a list. If you want a record claim, wait until they print the word record. They printed the categories instead.
Jennifer English. Lorien Testard. A First Game.
Best Performance went to Jennifer English as Maelle. The official nominees page puts her over a field that also included her own castmates Ben Starr and Charlie Cox, plus Erika Ishii, Konatsu Kato, and Troy Baker. Best Score and Music is Lorien Testard. Those are names The Game Awards attached to the wins. I am not going to turn them into a speech I did not hear them give.
The Game of the Year field around it, on the official page, is Death Stranding 2: On the Beach, Donkey Kong Bananza, Hades II, Hollow Knight: Silksong, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance II. Expedition 33 is the debut that beat that list. Kepler’s launch trailer is still the cleanest official look at what the jury was judging: a Belle Époque fantasy about a Paintress who paints a number, and an expedition that walks toward it anyway.
April 24 Was the Ship Date. December 11 Was the Night.
The game launched April 24, 2025, on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC. That date is on the official site and on the Kepler trailer page. Eight months later it was the one they called at the Peacock Theater. The Game Awards’ own December 18 note is about the show as much as the winner: 171 million global livestreams of the full broadcast, up 11 percent from 154 million in 2024, with authenticated viewer voting over 123 million. Those are show numbers. They are not a tally of how many people ticked Expedition 33. I am not going to pretend they are.
Sandfall is a French studio. Kepler is the publisher on the winners page. The official site still frames the pitch the same way it did at launch. “Lead the members of Expedition 33 on their quest to destroy the Paintress so that she can never paint death again.” The art direction award is the one that will make sense to anyone who has stood in that first city and watched the number change. The debut-indie win is the one that should bother every publisher that spent 2025 explaining why a first game cannot look like that.
The primary sources are The Game Awards’ Game of the Year page, the Best Performance page, and the December 18 recap. The trailer is Kepler Interactive’s launch cut. Watch @thegameawards for the North American show account, and keep expedition33.com as the studio’s own page. Nine awards is what they listed. Game of the Year is the one at the top of that list. I do not have a vote count, and I am not going to write one.