Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 photo mode turned players into big-headed monster makers

The photo mode in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is so unrestricted that it's spawned genuine monstrosities – courtesy of both the developers during testing and players after release. Sandfall Interactive published a dev blog detailing how the tool was built and what happened when they handed users maximum freedom.

According to QA coordinator Naja Dalmagne, the team's goal from the very start was to give players as few restrictions as possible.

"In many games we tested, Photo Modes often felt restrictive, which could quickly become frustrating. So, from the very beginning, one of the key goals we all agreed on was to give players as much freedom as possible. It was really about letting players express their creativity without getting in the way."

But that freedom came with some unexpected side effects.

During testing, the QA team stumbled into bugs that Dalmagne described as "unexpected and sometimes quite funny" – characters with deformed torsos, misaligned heads, and jaws literally on the floor. One of the most severe and also most comical issues involved characters becoming displaced or deformed when Photo Mode was opened after they'd been off-screen for a while.

Senior gameplay programmer Florian Torres, who handled the Photo Mode code, noted that the tool lets players peek into places the developers would never normally allow – infinite camera distance, the ability to pass through collisions, and a full view of what's happening off-camera during cinematics. The results: characters with missing limbs and bizarre expressions right in the middle of cutscenes.

Once Photo Mode went live, players took things to a whole new level of absurdity – the community mastered extreme zoom, turning character faces into enormous heads looming over the frame.

Sandfall picked out the best shots and shared them in the dev blog.