"The first track spoils the whole game": Clair Obscur Expedition 33 devs confirm they were filling your ears with spoilers the entire time

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"The first track spoils the whole game": Clair Obscur Expedition 33 devs confirm they were filling your ears with spoilers the entire time News By Jordan Gerblick Contributions from Austin Wood published 9 March 2026

Luckily, it's very hard to understand what's being said

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(Image credit: Sandfall Interactive)

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Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has some beautiful music, but you might not want to listen too closely if you haven't finished the game and don't want anything spoiled.

"The first track spoils the whole game," says Sandfall audio lead and music designer Raphael Joffres during a panel at Game Developer's Conference 2026 attended by GamesRadar+.

"When you are playing the game and you start in Lumiere at the very first part of the game, the first track spoils the whole game," says Joffres. "But it's said in a way that you don't understand. You think, 'Oh OK, it's talking about... boy, this is actually talking about the endgame bosses.'"

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According to Joffres, the spoilers are encrypted via the mixture of French, English, and a made-up language in lyrics that play at the beginning of the game, but as you progress through the story, the lyrics become more and more interpretable.

"That's why, at the end, you have full English tracks, but at the beginning, everything is kind of in a made up language," he adds.

Catching up with Joffres after the panel, we ask him directly why Sandfall decided to spoil its own game in its soundtrack, and he says it's so that players who choose to replay the game from the beginning "have a different understanding of the lyrics because you already know the lore." So, they're auditory Easter eggs, basically.

This has actually been theorized before by Reddit sleuths (and reported on by TheGamer), but this is the first official confirmation we have from Sandfall itself that, yeah, don't read too much into those lyrics if you don't want anything spoiled.

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Clair Obscur Expedition 33 took inspiration from a surprising anime - Soul Eater creator's Fire Force: "Because it was a JRPG, we tried to find a mix"

CATEGORIES Xbox Series X PC Gaming PS5 Platforms Xbox PlayStation Jordan GerblickSocial Links NavigationStaff Writer

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.

With contributions from

• Austin WoodSenior writer

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