Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a video game released last year that has taken the roleplaying world by storm. And the music world.
The intricate RPG won a record number of awards in 2025, including Game of the Year. The soundtrack did equally well, scooping up several major awards for video game scores, including the World Soundtrack Awards and the Game Awards.
The Clair Obscur soundtrack also reached No. 1 on both the Billboard Classical Albums and Classical Crossover albums charts.
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It’s a massive recording — 154 tracks, and after a digital-only release last year, it came out on both CD and vinyl in February of this year.
The game was developed in France, and the name translates to chiaroscuro, the art concept of contrasting lights and darks, a conceptual framework that the composer makes use of throughout the score.
That composer is Lorien Testard.
“My father worked in a video game shop when I was a baby, and he passed his love for gaming on to me. Many of my childhood memories are deeply connected to video games,” he wrote.
Testard was working as a guitar teacher and composing game music in his spare time; he decided to share some of those pieces on an indie video game forum where they were discovered by Clair Obscur’s director. The rest is history.
Testard chose specific instruments to reflect certain characters (cello and saxophone for two of the most prominent) but the human voice takes center stage on the soundtrack. Soprano Alice Duport-Percier is the soloist, lending an ethereal transparency and clarity to the music.
With so many tracks, characters and storylines, the soundtrack to Clair Obscur provides an ever-changing and riveting listening experience, though it’s a cohesive one — something of a musical mosaic that shares an overarching soundscape.
“What I love most about video game music is how it follows us beyond the screen, becoming a companion to our lives, emotions, and both big and small moments,” writes Testard. Composers through the centuries have been conjuring up just the right music to accompany stories and move audiences, from early plays, to opera and present-day film scores. Testard’s substantial contribution is a welcome addition to that lineage.
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