Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 Wins a Hugo Award, Beating Silksong and Hades II at Sci-Fi's Oldest Prize

At some point Sandfall Interactive is going to need a bigger shelf. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 won the Hugo Award for Best Game or Interactive Work on Sunday evening, announced at LAcon V in Anaheim, the 84th World Science Fiction Convention. The Hugos have been handed out since 1953 and are best known for crowning science fiction and fantasy novels, which makes this a genuinely different kind of trophy from the ones the game has been collecting all year.

That difference matters more than it might look. The Hugo is not an industry award. There is no jury of developers or press. It is voted by Worldcon members, the same readers who pick the year's best novel, and this year's winners were decided from 2,492 final ballots. A turn-based RPG from a small French studio winning over that crowd says something that another games industry statue would not.

Video: Kepler Interactive on YouTube

The company it beat, and the company it joins

The 2026 finalist list was arguably the strongest this category has ever seen. Clair Obscur came out ahead of Hollow Knight: Silksong, Hades II, Blue Prince, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and Dispatch. There is a neat bit of history in there: Hades won a special one-off Hugo for Best Video Game back in 2021, the first game ever to do so, and this year Supergiant's sequel came back to the ballot and lost to the new kid.

Games are still recent guests at this particular table. After the 2021 experiment, the Best Game or Interactive Work category only became a permanent, annual award in 2024. Baldur's Gate 3 won the first one, the wonderfully strange roguelike Caves of Qud took 2025, and Clair Obscur now makes it four winners in the category's short life. Three of those four are RPGs, for whatever that says about what science fiction readers want from their games.

An awards run with no brakes

For Sandfall and publisher Kepler Interactive, this lands on top of a season that already rewrote the record books. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 launched in April 2025, and by December it had turned thirteen nominations at The Game Awards into nine wins, the most in that show's history, including Game of the Year, the first time a debut game has taken the top prize. Awards season clearly never ended for this game, it just changed venues, the same weekend the gamescom award winners were crowned in Cologne.

Our take: the Hugo might quietly be the most meaningful one yet. Industry awards reward craft, and Clair Obscur has plenty, but a literary institution voting a video game its best work of interactive fiction is the kind of recognition the medium has spent decades asking for. That it went to a first game from a new studio, over two of the most anticipated sequels of the decade, makes it better still.