Okay, so here’s the deal. Writing a book? Mostly you’re flying solo, living that isolated writer life — unless you’re like, collaborating or whatever. But, writing a screenplay? Piece of cake, maybe 120 pages tops. But video games? Oh man, that’s a whole different beast. You’re basically juggling a million things at once, trying to stuff hours of content into this weird interactive storybook while making sure it fits with the gameplay. And don’t get me started on the deadlines — sometimes you end up just throwing words around at 3 a.m. and hoping for the best. Oddly enough, that’s when the magic sometimes happens.
Anyway, French this and that in “Clair Obscur” has really gotten under people’s skin, and then there’s this character, Esquie — who’s huge, by the way — and there’s this one chat about his buddy François. Verso thinks François is a total downer, but Esquie’s like, “Nah, Franfran used to be all ‘Wheeee!’ and now he’s more of a ‘Whooo’ kind of guy.” The whole thing lasts about a minute and lets players dive into their own whee/woo adventure. Seriously, it’s so silly it’s genius.
Svedberg-Yen, the person behind this madness, admits she was totally scrambling to crank out seven dialogues for Esquie in the dead of night. Can you imagine? Must’ve been wild.
The script for “Clair Obscur: Expedition 33” is absurdly long, like 800 pages, and that doesn’t even include all the banter from random characters or all the lore stuff she cooked up. She basically sucked up inspiration from every corner of her life. Fun fact: Monoco, another character, is inspired by her dog. One day, her dog was overdue for a haircut, and she was like, “Boom. That’s going in. Monoco will talk about looking like a mop.”
And the whole “whee whoo” moment? Barely made sense in the early morning fog, but something about it just clicked.
She says she was super tired but needed the scene to talk about joy and sadness, the whole shebang. And of course, she blanked out but then, you know, words just fell out: “wheeeeee!”
As a fantasy author, she’s all about keeping it real, even if the characters are outlandish. Doesn’t second-guess much, even the bizarre stuff. Because life isn’t all doom and gloom, right? It’s about balance. She’s once said, if lost for words, she digs into her own mood. That’s where the realness pops out, the stuff she’s feeling.
