Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen Joined the Team After Working in Finance, Teaching Cuban Salsa, and a NASA Experiment: 'Maybe I Can Say I'm a Writer Now'

I was really stoked when, ahead of February's DICE Summit in Las Vegas, I was offered the opportunity to chat with Jennifer Svedberg-Yen, one of the writers of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I already knew Svedberg-Yen had a fascinating story. Past interviews with her talked about her background in finance, how she had barely played video games before signing on with Sandfall Interactive, and how she found the studio incidentally, through responding to a Reddit post.

But even that background that did not prepare me for how wonderfully strange her path to game development truly was.

Svedberg-Yen and I sat down in a busy hotel Starbucks for over an hour to talk about her and her work. We covered not just her finance background but also a five-year period of self-discovery where she taught Cuban salsa dancing, participated in a NASA experiment, and became a licensed EMT. Then, we chatted about the game itself: its themes, its characters, and how she drew them from different aspects of her life, despite having done very little writing (and zero professional writing) prior to her work on the game. And we also talked about her history with video games, which prior to Expedition 33 was barely any at all, and now includes platinuming games like Uncharted 3, Elden Ring, God of War: Ragnarok, and more.

This is a long one. If you're looking for just the big highlights, feel free to click over to a couple breakouts on why Expedition 33 will probably never have a canon ending, and a story on all the silly, internal studio bets the team members lost to one another due to Expedition 33 being so successful. But the real meat of Svedberg-Yen's story is all here, so I hope you'll stick with me and read through it all.

The interview below has been lightly edited for clarity, and has been trimmed for length in a few spots:

IGN: I want to start with you and your background. I read some of the other interviews you've done, so I know you talked about how you didn't play games growing up, you read a lot of books. What did you read?

Jennifer Svedberg-Yen: Where do we start? I loved science fiction and fantasy, but I also liked a lot of the classics. I loved Little Women. I loved Count of Monte Cristo. I also loved The Boxcar Children and Baby-Sitters Club. Read a lot of those growing up. And then I started reading more science fiction and fantasy, and I loved series like Ender's Game and the Wheel of Time series. I used to read The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey. I love her. She was my favorite author growing up, one of my favorites.

After school while I was waiting for my mom to pick me up, I would be sitting in the library and I would just be reading whatever they had, which I read all the Greek and Roman myths. I love just all the different Greek tragedies and things like that…yeah, and Stormlight Archive and Brandon Sanderson books. I actually was really affected by a lot of the books and stories we had to read for school, too. I remember reading Flowers for Algernon in school, and it just broke my heart. East of Eden and all of those things.

So you were always just a massive story nerd.

Svedberg-Yen: I was a huge book nerd. So anytime we went out to go grocery shopping or my mom would take my sister shopping, I would have a book, and I would hide somewhere. My mom would take me to Ross, and I would just go and I'd hide in these circular clothes racks, and they'd be hollow in the middle. I'd just sit there and read, because there aren't exactly chairs that you could go and sit on. My mom and my sister would go shopping and then try and find me in the clothes racks. And I would read in the car way too much, which I think is probably why my eyesight is so bad. I always had a book with me. I used to joke with my mom. I'm like, "Other people's parents want them to read. You want me to go outside and play? Do you know how lucky you are?" So yeah, I was a massive book nerd and TV nerd. I watched a lot of TV.

What TV?

Svedberg-Yen: For TV, I loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I loved Star Trek Voyager. I also really love things like Brothers and Sisters. I loved The Gilmore Girls. I loved Parks and Rec. I loved Brooklyn Nine-Nine, The Good Place. Oh my gosh. And then, I love watching Veronica Mars, season one. So good. Just lots of these things. And then The Expanse was really cool. Battlestar Galactica was very formative, influential on me because that one, I didn't realize initially that it was an allegory for the war in Afghanistan. They tackled so many issues in such nuanced ways with such great characters, great acting. I just fell in love with that whole series and all the characters. That actually was one of the series that made me really want to work in television and tell stories. It seemed so cool that you could be part of a creative team that all come together to jointly create this masterpiece.

So you already had this idea in your head that you wanted to be part of a team and tell stories, but you ended up going into finance. Was that a path that was close to you or did you just choose to do something else?

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah, I think it's partially the Asian immigrant family experience. My family, they've gone through a lot of hardship. They've escaped wars. My parents grew up without a lot of resources. And so for them, it was very important to have financial stability. That was always impressed upon me. And my parents, they are entrepreneurs. They started their own business together. So, in high school, I was president of our Future Business Leaders of America Club, FBLA. And I competed in a lot of business events, not to brag, but I was state champion for business law accounting. And so, I guess you could say that I started doing more business-y type things. I went to [University of Pennsylvania] for undergrad where I was in the Huntsman Program in International Studies and Business, which is a joint degree program with Wharton, one of the undergraduate business schools in the US. It just became the path of least resistance, because everybody there pretty much gets funneled into consulting or banking.

Also, those are lucrative roles. My brother and sister were younger than me, and they were going to college, and I wanted to help pay for their college because it's a lot. College is expensive. So that's what I did. I did enjoy it, too, intellectually. I would not say that it was my passion over something I aspired to be. But I went into it and it did pay well, and I was able to help send my brother to college, which I'm really proud of as well. So that's how I ended up in finance.

You were reading and watching shows at this time. Were you also writing on the side?

Svedberg-Yen: Not really. When I was younger, I loved these books and I started thinking like, "Oh, it would be so cool to be an author." I was so impressed by everyone's imagination, creativity, and maybe I just have imposter syndrome or self-doubt, but I was like, "Oh, I could never. I have no idea how they even come up with these elaborate, amazing, wonderful plots. I don't have those skills." I would write for classes and do creative writing and various things. I always enjoyed those. Funny enough, every time I tried to write a comedy, it turned into a sad story.

I did notice a lot of the things that you listed as having read and enjoyed are tragedies.

Svedberg-Yen: Yes. Not all of them. I remember I had a creative writing class in high school or junior high, and I was like, "Yeah, this is going to be a comedy." And it was so sad, and I'm like, "I don't even know where this came from." But yeah, so I didn't really write, write. I mean, I would always like being creative, but it'd be small, little things, different types of things, like dance or a craft or artsy things, music. But writing, it always felt like the really brilliant people write.

I didn't really write, write.I would always like being creative, but...writing, it always felt like the really brilliant people write. I think it was actually after I quit finance because I was burnt out and it was a toxic environment. And there's a whole bunch of other things there, too, that I decided, "Whatever pops into my head, I'm just going to write it down." Things would keep popping into my head. I'd have these very vivid dreams, and I'd come up with stories around them. I just never really wrote them down. And so, I'm like, "I'm just going to write them down, but I don't dare to call myself a writer." I just started jotting down whatever popped into my head. Sometimes it'd be a phrase, just like an opening line or something. Sometimes it'd be an image. Sometimes it would just be a concept or a piece of lore or something. Just started writing things down. And then, I found that when I wrote something down, then it would spark another idea and another idea. And then, I started writing more and more and more. And then, I started actually turning those into small scenes, small stories, story outlines. So it was sort of without realizing it, I was filling up notebooks with just random scribbles of whatever was popping into my mind. But it was not in a very organized or systematic manner. I didn't take a class, which at the time I thought about maybe I should take a class or something to help guide me.

I know from your other interviews you stumbled into Clair Obscur via a Reddit post. I was going to ask what would make you just throw away the finance career and just jump into this, but it sounds like you were already at that point?

Svedberg-Yen: So I graduated in 2004, and I went into investment banking and then into private equity. And I worked in New York and I worked in Hong Kong. I did that for about 10 years. And in the middle, I went to grad school for developmental economics, which is also not related to this at all. Which I do use actually, in terms of thinking about world building, a lot of these things really taught me how to analyze the world around us and how humans are systems, whether it's societal norms or actual political socio-economic systems. And so a lot of that is how I structure world building because I had to learn a lot about it.

So, I did that for about a decade, and I actually became, I guess, fairly senior on that side of things. I was a senior investment professional. And I think at my last finance job, I think I actually invested probably approximately $1 billion of equity in various investments around Asia. However, I struggled with whether to stay in finance, and I tried to leave several times. That's partially why I went to grad school for developmental economics. I thought maybe I could at least use my powers for good. Because I often felt that when I was working in private equity, I was just making rich people richer.

My last position was actually at a firm called CPPIB, which is the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, where we were investing the pension assets for all Canadians. Then I thought, "Okay, at least now my finance is benefiting the average person." And I did really enjoy a lot of it, and I really did enjoy my team, but it does get toxic after a while. It is a very high stress environment. And I decided life's too short, and I couldn't really see myself doing that for the rest of my life. I'm like, "Is this what I'm going to be doing?" I also felt that some of the values were a bit different from mine. I was in Hong Kong at the time, and the lifestyle can be a bit more separated from rich life. I noticed you start getting into a first-class, second-class citizen type mentality in that sort of society, especially in Hong Kong finance. There's definitely this mentality, and it just did not feel right to me. So yeah, for a variety of reasons around 2015, I quit. I was like, "I don't have another job. I don't care. I think I will be extremely sad if I continue this," because I had no life.

I was working, well, at the peak, I was working a hundred hours a week, but that was earlier on in my career. But even towards the end, I was still working 70, 80 hours a week, I'd say. You just can't have an actual life. And so I said, "Bye, I'm moving back." The fortunate thing about being in finance is it gives me some options. So I thought, "I'm just going to explore."

Because one of the things I find very strange in terms of how we structure society is that we expect young kids who are 16 to figure out what they want to do for the rest of their lives and choose a major when you have no idea what that means and what real life work actually is. So I thought, "This is my chance. I'm just going to explore random things." I actually took five years off. This was from 2015 to 2020 where I was just doing random stuff that I liked, whatever I liked, but I never had time for. So that included martial arts. I started dancing again. I used to do a lot of dance, but I stopped, and then I started again.

Which martial arts?

Svedberg-Yen: I did Muay Thai, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Krav Maga. I did a lot of hip hop dance, Bollywood. I also did salsa including Cuban salsa. In fact, I taught Cuban salsa for a while. I did a lot of yoga. I did a yoga intensive thing. I did a NASA experiment where I was an analog astronaut. It's called the HERA program. They actually had several different programs. But ours was being locked in a module for two months, and we simulate a mission to an asteroid and back. It was me and three other people. It was really cool. But it was in a tiny, tiny place. It was really cool. And I had such great crew mates.

Not to make assumptions, but it sounds like after working in finance for so long, you were financially stable enough to do this?

Svedberg-Yen: Yes. And also, I live a very simple lifestyle. I pretty much only need food for myself and my dog, rent. I mainly just buy books, although mostly I go to the library, because I want to support libraries. And Netflix subscriptions. And notebooks. I buy lots of notebooks. But other than that, I don't really spend much money on many things. So with that, and living frugally and stuff, I think that was something I was fortunate enough to be in that position where I could then go and explore and just do random things.

And see a Reddit post and respond to it.

Svedberg-Yen: Well, the NASA thing was a Reddit post, too.

Wow.

Svedberg-Yen: It was on the NASA subreddit. That was the first year they opened it up to non-NASA people. And they look for people who have similar backgrounds to astronauts. So graduate degrees in a STEM field who are older and who have some life experience, work experience. And you have to go through a whole application process, psych exams. They flew me out there, and I think I did a four-hour psych evaluation. But that was really cool. That was one of the coolest things ever.

I periodically do this in my life, because I had actually done this earlier, right before grad school. I took a year off, because I didn't know what I wanted to do. And during that time, I took an architecture-intensive course, which is where some of the terms come from in the game. Gestrals are from gestural drawings. Axons are from axonometric drawings. And Renoir used to be, not in the game now, but used to be, originally the concept for him was as an architect. But we changed his backstory later. But all of that came from this architecture program that I had been in. I competed in World of Dance in New York, back before it was a TV show. It was not the TV show, but the in-person competition. I competed with a dance crew. I did hip-hop dance. Yeah, random stuff. I was also a licensed EMT, but not practicing EMT in the state of New York.

Sure, why not!

Svedberg-Yen: So you can see I'm very, I have a lot of different interests. Very ADD, I guess you could say.

A Renaissance woman.

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah, I like that. That's great. But I just find that there's so many really cool, interesting things, and that's what I love, is just learning new things and just understanding the world around us. So anyway, fast-forward during this five years, that's when I met my husband, and we moved to Australia for his work and around that time…was COVID, I was bored. I was taking improv classes and also some acting classes for fun, because there was an acting school right down the street from us. And then COVID hit and things started locking down.

Svedberg-Yen: I saw a Reddit post from Guillaume [Broche, creative director]. I think at the time he was at Ubisoft, and he was teaching himself how to use Unreal. And he was doing sort of a technical test. So he posted on the subreddit Record This for Free, looking for free voice actors. I honestly don't think he got that many auditions. He says he did. I'm like, "I don't know if you did," because he cast me for two roles in this thing. And we just started talking.

Was this like a preliminary Exhibition 33, or was this something else?

Svedberg-Yen: No, it was something else. It was for another game called, "We Lost," which was a Victorian England thing. It was a mashup of a contrast of Victorian England steampunk with some futuristic elements. It was really cool. But it was perhaps a little bit more complex and had a lot of disparate elements in it. But that was what we initially were working on. And there were two characters there. We kept the names of the characters. So it was Lune and Maelle. Lune there was more like Gamora from Guardians of the Galaxy. And she was a survivor of this war. And Maelle was a ghost girl who was sort of half zombie-ish, faceless.

So I originally was just recording things for free. I'm not a voice actor though. That was my one and only time doing voice acting. I just thought it'd be fun. And over the process of that, we started talking. First, we talked about the dialogue that he wanted me to record, because he wanted the character a certain way. And since I'm a native English speaker, I offered to maybe I can help jazz up the writing a bit, the dialogue. And then we started talking about the story, and it was really cool. And I got really excited. We were just throwing ideas around. And so he's like, "Hey, do you want to help me maybe write part-time?" And, "Sure, why not? I'm not doing anything, COVID."

So we did that, and I think we worked on that story for about four months. And then around that time, Guillaume, Tom [Guillermin, CTO] and Francois [Meurisse, COO] started up the studio. They all left their jobs and took a leap of faith. And at that time, we also had Nicholas [Mason-Francombe, art director] and Lorian [Testard, music]. Four of the six of us had no game experience. It was only Tom and Guillaume who actually worked at Ubisoft.

Four of the six of us had no game experience. It was only Tom and Guillaume who actually worked at Ubisoft. At this point, had you still not played a video game ever?

Svedberg-Yen: No. I watched my brother play. My brother loved playing stuff. I watched him play Zelda. I think I had briefly played... You know when you're with friends, you play some fighting games? And I think I briefly played a little bit of Final Fantasy X that my roommates had in college. But no, I think the only game that I really had played was Portal. But that was the only game, really. Other than that, it's just Candy Crush or Clash of Clans, or what was it, Infinity Souls, or something? Mobile stuff.

So yeah, around that time, I think we were talking to some investors and advisors, and they were sort of encouraging us to be more bold, that you don't have to overly constrain yourself with your story, because we were trying to be more mindful of limited resources. So trying to make it something that was more realistic.

And is it still, at this point, We Lost?

Svedberg-Yen: We Lost, yeah. And that's why most of it was all just zombie folks who don't talk and don't do anything. Because we're like, "If we only have a team of 6 or 12, we can't really do too much." But there were some advisors, investors who encouraged us to think bigger. And Guillaume called me one day and is like, "Hey, we are going to reboot and start from scratch. What do you think?" At the time, I was like, "We just spent four months putting together this narrative bible of all these things." I spent so much time trying to think through what the ending would be. And then I was like, "We're just shelving it?" But then I thought, actually no, it'd be cool to start something from scratch, and then I'd be part of it from the very beginning. So I said okay.

We just started brainstorming a bunch of things and just kicking around a ton of ideas. And he was inspired by this... He had this flash of insight when he saw some painting.

What was the painting?

Svedberg-Yen: It actually didn't even have anything to do with any of this. It was just sort of like a fawn-like creature with pointy legs in the sand. It literally was nothing, but that somehow jump-started his brain, and he thought of the idea for a monolith and this countdown and some sort of giant paintress or giant lady who writes a number and the number counts down every year and people die. And we thought that was a really cool hook. As soon as we landed on that, we're like, "Okay, that hook definitely is better than the other hooks we were contemplating."

But then the question is, "Why is this happening? Who is she?" Because it's just the premise. We don't have the actual story yet. And we were kicking that around for so long. We were brainstorming. I'm like, "Who is she? Why is she doing this?" We came up with a lot of different ideas and nothing really felt satisfying.

Around the same time, I had a dream, and I started writing that dream, turning it into a story. The dream was about a young woman whose mother passed away when she was four years old, very young. And she grew up thinking she was without her mother. And then when she was in her twenties, she met her estranged grandfather and discovered her mother might still be alive. When she went to visit her grandfather, she saw this painting, and she could feel it, something in the painting, and she felt the painting almost come alive. As she investigates this, she realizes her mother could also do the same thing, that her mother could bring portraits, paintings to life. And that her mother was actually trapped inside a painting, and she wanted to go into a painting and bring her mother back. And to do that, she had to go find the children of other painters, and together go into these paintings and rescue their parents. And there was a whole plot about why their parents were stuck there.

I love that the origin story is that the two sides of the Clair Obscur story came at it from different angles and met somewhere.

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah. And then we smushed it together. And then, the unifying part was actually from Guillaume's mom because he asked her, "What's the worst thing that can happen to you?" And she said, "Well, losing one of you." Losing one of her children. So that became the catalyst that merged the two. The reason why the parents, the mom went into the canvas was because she lost her child. And then that sort of brought everything together. That was the birth of Expedition 33.

If I'm working on a video game, I should play video games, too, because I got to do my homework. So I started playing a lot. I don't mean to keep harping on this, but I'm really curious. Did you end up playing games after you got into this team, and what did you play?

Svedberg-Yen: At that time, we were in Australia and I'm like, "Oh, if I'm working on a video game, I should play video games, too, because I got to do my homework." So I started playing a lot. The first games that I played, I think were the ones that came with the PlayStation. So we played Sackboy: A Big Adventure, and I was moving the controller all over the place, and my husband was just laughing his ass off. And then we played Borderlands 3 together, and that's where we discovered I'm a loot goblin, because I pick up every single piece of loot…And then I started getting into more and more games, I started playing Hollow Knight, which I love, Elden Ring, which I love. And the other thing I discovered is that I am an achievement hunter, so I like to platinum games. I have platinumed Elden Ring.

Wow, you went from zero to a hundred on this.

Svedberg-Yen: I platinumed God of War 2018, God of War: Ragnarok. I platinumed Uncharted 2, Uncharted 3. I just played Spider-Man: Miles Morales. I love Civilization 6. So fun. We played hundreds of hours. Tears of the Kingdom, I played hundreds of hours in it. I love that game…I loved Helldivers 1 and 2. They're so different. I like them both quite a lot. I am very annoyed though, because I'm one trophy away from platinum in Helldivers 1, because it's one that you have to grind out. You have to kill a lot more enemies. But nobody really plays Helldivers 1 anymore. So you go in and the maps are... You don't have as many options. Sackboy, also, I have one trophy left. I'm so irritated because most of Sackboy is very accessible to the average gamer, and it's not like I'm super good at it. I just am persistent. But that one last trophy is so hard.

This list that you've just gone through is a really interesting cross section of video game storytelling, everything from Elden Ring that does these sort of vague things in item descriptions to Tears of the Kingdom that has this sort of loose vignette structure that can go in any order. And then you have stuff that's very... Uncharted is basically like watching a movie. Did that shape your perspective or change how you thought about writing in any way?

Svedberg-Yen: No, because most of this was after we had already done most of the script. Most of those games, I think I started playing around the middle, towards the middle and late part of writing the script. Actually, I played Uncharted after Expedition came out. But I think for me, it was more just understanding how games traditionally do narrative and all the different ways that you can do narrative, because there's not just one way. And understanding side quests and dialogue and some of the pain points players might have when you want to skip things, when it might feel disruptive and when it might not. So it helped give me more context. Because before, I would just come in, I was coming at it from a TV and film perspective and not from games. So I think playing a lot of the games helped me contextualize it and fit it in.

My understanding of how most big studios do it, is there's a couple of people in charge of the shape of the narrative, and then you have individual writers who are doing things like item descriptions or character dialogue and stuff. But it sounds to me like for you all, everybody just did everything?

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah. Well, it was primarily me and Guillaume. We wrote the main script for the main path, and then we had our quest designer, Victor Deleard, who's really wonderful. He's a quest designer, and he also contributed writing on Nevron side quests, and also for a lot of the Gestral dialogue. So he was responsible for those specific sections together with Guillaume. The two of them worked on those. But the main path, and everything other than that, I guess, Guillaume and I worked on together, the journals, the relationship dialogues and the main story.

Understanding it's collaborative. Is there any particular element of just the entire game that you're very attached to or that feels like very much a signature for you or that this bit of it was your baby?

Svedberg-Yen: I'd say maybe the emotional arcs and the nuances of how each character's emotional journey is and how they respond in any particular situation. When we look at an emotion wheel, you can have maybe some large categories of emotions, but then you can subdivide them into smaller and smaller emotions. And a lot of times with our characters, they're feeling many different things. They're feeling conflicting things. They're feeling things at the surface and also below, things they might not want to acknowledge or things that they're trying to hide about themselves or hide from themselves. And so, trying to find a way to be able to deliver all of that nuance in an efficient way tickles the logical side of my brain and also the literary, emotional side of my brain, the empathy side. So trying to figure out how to find the right words in each moment to really get at the real deep feeling, and not just a surface level feeling, but really the depth inside.

Trying to find a way to be able to deliver all of that nuance in an efficient way tickles the logical side of my brain and also the literary, emotional side of my brain. For a lot of that, I tried to find parallels in my own life that I could pull from. Because for me, because I'm not really officially trained or anything, the only way that I could really do it convincingly is if I actually knew that feeling, then I can write it. And so, I can sit in that feeling, feel all of it, and then try to find the words that this particular character would say given their path and their personality. For instance, with Maelle, I drew a lot from my own childhood and teen years feeling very lonely and feeling like I don't really belong, I don't really fit, that there are just some things about the world that I just don't seem to understand that everybody else understands. And just feeling lost and not feeling like any place is really home for me.

For Lune, I pulled a lot from my own experiences being the eldest daughter. Lune is not an eldest daughter technically, but she's an eldest daughter in spirit. And so a lot of that focus on not letting people down, on focusing on the mission, on being very passionate about things, but you also have to be very problem-solving and figure things out. For that, I drew a lot from my time in academia and in grad school. And I also drew from my time in finance and leading teams there and having to get things done, but also feeling imposter syndrome the whole time.

Also, a lot of the family dynamics in terms of feeling like you need to continue the work of your parents or to continue their expectations, to live up to their expectations. My parents were pretty good though. I don't want to make people misunderstand. My parents were wonderful and they supported me in a lot of different ways and were very loving. But there still are some pressures especially, and the feeling of the functional things you need to do as an eldest daughter to take care of the whole family, which translates into Lune's obsession with needing to complete her parents' work to save society. So I drew a lot for myself from those experiences for her.

For Sciel, I drew a lot from my thirties where I had gone through a traumatic experience leaving finance and made a big life change, and I met my husband. And so Sciel was a lot of the parts of me from after I left that environment. And I was just exploring and trying new things. It felt like I was in the bonus overtime period of my life. I worked hard. I did what I had to do. That life is over, now I have a new life. And part of that was, you'll notice Sciel also changed trajectories from being a farmer. She quit that after her husband died and she started the school.

And for Sciel and her relationship with her husband, I drew a lot upon when my husband and I would be traveling away from each other, and not to sound dramatic, but those early times it felt I was always really sad and missing him. I channeled missing him into how Sciel feels about her husband and how Aline misses Verso. And a lot of those things about you're just so aware of the negative space of the spaces that they inhabit. The shoes are empty, because his feet used to be inside of it. The jacket feels empty, but his body used to be inside it. The little hollow in the bed. All of those are just what I was feeling when I was missing my husband. And I would channel that in. Or I would channel feelings that I had from losing my grandfather and things like that, and how people want to give you condolences, but nothing really helps.

And Renoir, a lot of the things that Renoir says are loosely based on what my mom says. Like the idea that, "I'm your parent, so I don't need you to like me, but I need to look out for you even when you are not willing to look out for yourself. And if that means you don't like me, that I'm not your friend, then I'm going to choose that because I care most about you." Those kinds of concepts, this idea that we're a family and wanting what's best for your family.

You care about somebody so much: where do you draw the line between respecting their autonomy and trying to save them from themselves? One of the central ideas is that you care about somebody so much: where do you draw the line between respecting their autonomy and trying to save them from themselves from bad choices or things that you think are going to hurt them? And I feel that that is something that we all go through as we adjust our relationship with our parents from childhood to adulthood. We have to redefine that relationship. And then later on from adulthood to when our parents get really older and we then have to take care of them, we're constantly evolving that relationship. And that's something that I was very cognizant of as my parents are getting older. That central idea of, can you make decisions for other people, even though you're doing it for them? When do you have to let go and say, "This is their life and these are their choices, and I have to respect that?"

…Another idea that was part of this, beyond it being personal, I also drew a lot from how I think about the world around us, particularly with COVID, with political things. There's this idea also of, what is the duty that we owe to each other in society? And this idea that when we choose our own happiness, sometimes that means it hurts other people. But do we really take into account how our choices impact others? A lot of times when we say, "Yeah, we are all in the pursuit of happiness," that's great. But, whose happiness? And sometimes there are conflicts, not because people are bad, but just because they have different priorities about what they need to do or because inevitably, your choice will impact somebody else. That's why we don't have a happy ending. We don't, because there is no such thing as a perfectly utopian, efficient outcome where nobody is worse off and everybody is better off. That's an ideal. That's so often that's not what actually happens.

I'm jumping ahead a little bit here, but I did want to eventually ask about the ending because it is...well, unsatisfying endings aren't a brand new thing, but in video games they're maybe less common. Especially in games that give you some sort of choice on how you approach that ending. There's usually a good ending and then maybe a bad one or some that are not quite as good. Rarely have I ever seen you make a choice and there just isn't a "good" one at all. How cognizant were you of that context going in?

Svedberg-Yen: Guillaume and I settled on that pretty early, actually. I think very early on we knew we wanted Maelle and Verso to fight each other. And we knew we wanted two different endings. I don't think either of us like happy endings. It just feels a little too storybook. I think both of us were more in the brutal Game of Thrones, life is hard, that kind of mentality.

So I think that was almost like an unspoken agreement. We never even considered really a true, happy ending. I think there was maybe a happier one possibly. You can see also in the way that the endings are edited, that one has a slightly more uplifting tone and one has a slightly darker tone. That was a choice that Guillaume made in terms of just having a little bit of shading there. But from my perspective, narratively, both are equally valid. Both are both good and bad. And it really just depends on whose perspective, whose good or whose happily-ever-after you are prioritizing.

Was there anything that was left on the cutting room floor during writing that you wish you could have kept?

Svedberg-Yen: There is, but I can't tell you.

Okay, I know you are not going to get into what you all are working on next or anything like that, but you guys already confirmed that this is part of a bigger universe. There's more going on. We get to see tiny glimpses of it in the actual story. How much of the broader world of Clair Obscur did you guys map out while you were working on Expedition 33? Did you just have this whole universe that we didn't see in the background?

Svedberg-Yen: It was mainly focused on the world within the canvas. We had a lot of history mapped out and a lot of other stories mapped out. And actually, a lot of detail around Expedition Zero, about what Verso's journey was and how things went. So that is what we had really fleshed out a lot of. In part, because I feel like it's necessary to have that as a foundation before you write the actual story. It's sort of like when you're painting on a canvas, you don't want to just paint in the square. You want to paint all the way past the edges so that you have a full picture, right? For that, I needed our world to be all the way past, not just the story, but beyond the story, so that the story itself had no holes.

For the broader universe, we had some large-stroke ideas of when we talk about the writers. Again, I don't like to write stories where I don't have the answers to certain things. So I did have, at least in my head, a idea of, but it's not canon. But yes, there were some ideas that we had discussed. And I think Guillaume's ideas probably were different from mine as well in terms of specific details around the writers and what's happening outside the canvas, what's happening with Clea. She's off fighting her solitary war. What's she doing and what does the world look like? Are there other factions? We have writers, we have painters. What about the other arts? We have stuff there. And also some of the sub-disciplines within art, painting is just one of them. Sculpture, like various other things. So thinking through, how does the magic system work, how can you use the magic, and how does it tie to painting and how does it tie to each of these people? What's the backstory for Aline and Renoir? How did they meet? What was going on in their childhood? What adventures have they gone on? So I had sort of an idea in my mind about all of those things. And I think Guillaume also had different pieces of that as well. So different pockets of stuff mapped out.

There is no canon ending there. It is a Schrodinger's ending. Speaking of canon, you've said that both endings are equally valid. Are you ever worried that you're going to have to come up to a point in future games or future work where you're going to have to pick one to be canon?

Svedberg-Yen: We are not going to pick one.

Never?

Svedberg-Yen: Never say never, but- But there is no canon ending there. It is a Schrodinger's ending.

You've already talked quite a bit about some of the overarching themes, but tell me a little bit more about the things that you were wanting to say regarding just creative expression in general.

Svedberg-Yen: I think one of the key pieces probably would be the idea that there's a piece of your soul inside this painting that is powering the painting. I do believe that that is very much true for most forms of expression because you are expressing a particular point of view and it's your own. And whether or not we really are cognizant of it, we are leaving an imprint of ourselves and our particular point of view at this particular point in time. This is a physical manifestation for that. Renoir gets philosophical in his journals and in one of his messages is one of the pieces that I like to use for my talks actually as a title: Art as Window and Mirror. Because I do believe that it is something that we use to explore the world around us to see, but it is also a mirror into ourselves. And that's true for both the artist and the audience. So as an audience member, you now can see into somebody's mind in terms of what they're presenting to you, what you're exploring. Whether it's a landscape, whether it's music, whether it's books, it's opening your mind to a different perspective, which is also why I think reading is so important for building empathy. It really helps you understand other people's point of view.

So I think as an audience, it's a great window into other minds, but also a mirror into your own because then you take what you see and you reflect it back into your own life and you can see some patterns or some resonance. And I've gotten some really lovely messages from players about how playing this game made them feel seen, but also helped them process their grief. That they actually took a lot of the philosophical points and applied it to their own life and came to a decision that they needed to change something, that they were Maelle, they were Verso. And seeing the opposite or seeing that that path played out was a catalyst for them to do something different. Or just enjoying our game, inspired them to create their own.

At the same time, it's also therapy in a way. Sometimes writing these things, I would get quite emotional writing things. I was crying. I think Guillaume and I were both crying when we were writing the burial scenes. You put a lot of yourself into this. But again, from an artist's perspective, it's both window and mirror, right? And so, the work itself reflects a lot of things about-

[At this point, Maelle voice actor Jennifer English saw us at the cafe and came over to say hi and we chatted for a bit. She hadn't agreed to be recorded for this, so I'll jump ahead and leave that out, but that is why Svedberg-Yen's answer is suddenly cut off above. English did compliment my sweater, which made my entire week. I'll pick up below, after English had left.]

So you guys have won like 10,000 awards at this point for the studio for this game. [They have won even more since we conducted this interview.] Does this change anything for you guys as far as your future or how you work going forward? Are you going to get bigger? Are you going to try different things?

Svedberg-Yen: I think we are going to try to maintain the core of what we do. I think the idea is to stay small because I think it's worked for us. We have a culture and a dynamic that's working at the moment. I think we don't want to jeopardize that. On the other hand, there are some places where we could use more help because there is a lot of work. So I think we'll strategically add a few more people, but I don't think we're going to add a ton. I think it'll just be in the places that need it the most, which at the moment is marketing. We just added two new marketing folks.

I think with the awards and also with the commercial success of the game, it's been really overwhelming and also way beyond what we expected. We did not expect this at all. We did not expect the Metacritic score, I would say. There are internal bets on the team of what we thought the Metacritic score would be, and then if it is over that, they have to do some dares or do some things, like get a tattoo, dye their hair, or different things.

Wait, say more. Did anybody get a tattoo?

Svedberg-Yen: I don't know if anybody's gotten a tattoo yet, but there are some people who are supposed to, I think.

A tattoo of what?

Svedberg-Yen: I don't know. They can decide, but I think there's a whole list. There's a whole list of things that people have to do if the Metacritic score is above a certain number. Some people have already... I think one person had to eat a chicken, a roast chicken in one sitting within a certain amount of time while another person beatboxes. There's a lot of random stuff. One person had to dye his hair. He did do that.

What color?

Svedberg-Yen: Pink.

Amazing.

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah, A lot of really random things. I think somebody has to do stand-up comedy.

Is this a person who's good at stand-up comedy or has experience with it?

Svedberg-Yen: I don't know. He is funny. I don't know. I look forward to seeing him do it. Yeah, there's a lot of random things.

That's incredible.

Svedberg-Yen: None of us really expected this, so everybody lost. Everybody lost their bet.

Everybody lost their bets?

Svedberg-Yen: Pretty much. I don't think anybody thought that it would be... It was more like, if the score is above this, then they'll have to do this. If the score is above that, then they'll have to do that. Yeah, I think everybody lost.

I think obviously we're all very, very appreciative of the massive response from the fans and the players. It's just incredible. I think one of the nice things is it does mean that the studio's future is financially secure, which is a really nice thing. In the midst of what's going on in the broader industry, that is very much a blessing and something we don't take for granted. So I think it's going to be just keep our eyes on the prize, try not to get distracted, stay focused on the art and the joy and the game that we want to make.

What about for you personally? I mean, this all started with you just trying to figure out what you wanted to do with your life. Is this it? Is this the career? Is this the path?

Svedberg-Yen: I don't know. I've been asking myself this because I'm tired after six years. I'm feeling like, I think I really do enjoy games very much. I think right now, I'm probably going to take a little bit of a break. I'm doing some consulting for a couple of other studios at the moment. So I think that's been really fun, to be able to look at different types of games, different genres, different stories, and helped other teams with their things. But those aren't my stories. Those are other people's stories.

I also have my own short story collection that I have been working on and off for the past whatever years. I mean, that's where the meta story, that short story was originally part of that short story collection, but it is in very rough shape. I was planning on working on it last year after the game came out because I thought I'd have a very chill year. It was not as chill as I thought. So I haven't actually done anything on it. I think I'm going to try and maybe focus on that. There are some of the stories in there that I think might actually be really cool as either a TV series or a game. So I think I might actually try to develop that a little bit more and see if that's something that has traction. I think there are lots of different stories and different tones and genres that I want to explore.

As you can see, I have diverse interests, let's just say. And so I think it would be interesting to try a different genre or try a different angle or a different medium. What's really cool is we see now a lot of trans media where IP spans different mediums, and that's really something very cool and exciting. And within my short story collection, I can already see some that would be better suited for TV, some that would be better suited for games, some that would be better suited for novels. And so I'm thinking of just sitting down actually putting some time into all of that and seeing if maybe I can do something there.

So it seems like regardless of which direction you go, this has solidified that you are a writer. That's where you went.

Svedberg-Yen: Yeah, that's one of the things that I used to say. I never felt like I could... I always felt shy about saying I'm a writer because at that point in time, I hadn't published anything. I didn't have anything out, and I was like, can I really say I'm a writer? I feel like major imposter syndrome. And I had to think to myself, if this was somebody else and I was giving them advice, what would I say? And I'd be like, "You are a writer. You write, it doesn't matter if you're published. It doesn't matter if you have something that you've put out to the world. If you write, you are a writer." But it was so hard for me to internalize that.

I think when they give you a French knighthood for your writing, I think at that point, maybe you've made it.

Svedberg-Yen: Maybe I can say I'm a writer now. Yes.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.