Clair Obscur won multiple awards but used generative AI art as placeholders during production.
The Indie Game Awards revoked Clair Obscur’s Debut and Game of the Year after the AI disclosure.
IGAs reassigned the awards (Blue Prince, Sorry We’re Closed) and reignited debate on gen-AI use.


Sauce: https://english.elpais.com/culture/2025-07-19/the-low-cost-creative-revolution-how-technology-is-making-art-accessible-to-everyone.html
Not exactly a massive AI slop problem, right?
One of the rules was no AI during development, they voluntarily claimed they didn’t use it.
They used it. Sure, in a minor way, but they used it and got caught.
The rules are the rules. Some chess events ban caffeine, we might laugh and say drinking a cup of coffee is not a big deal - but they’d be disqualified.
But this is like banning someone from a chess event because they experimented with caffeine 3 years ago and accidentally left a single Nespresso pod in their bag. That they also immediately threw in the trash when they noticed
Or like they submitted a game to an award that said no AI in development, said they didn’t use AI in development, when in reality they did.
Is there a rule that chess players can’t train with caffeine?
Of course not. It’s not at all the same.
Almoat… its like the rule said you cant have used caffeine for the past 5 years and you used some 3 years ago and then lied about it.
This has the same validity as an argument as “I was just following orders” or “I am just doing my job” or “I told you I would hit you in five seconds, so you did know” same reasoning behind teachers that throw students out for being 5 minutes late
Ok, reality check: we are talking about video game awards. Calm down.
That doesn’t change the claim. Following the rules for the sake of following the rules instead of understanding why they are there is a defining trait of this sheep behavior.
If you don’t enforce rules then you don’t have rules. You should have learned that dealing with all those teachers who threw you out for being late in school.
There’s nothing to learn from teachers with fragile ego
Sounds like an excuse for bad behavior to me.
Right. The far bigger problem is how trash of an engine Unreal5 is, and all the forced processing making things look and run like shit. But that’s not just a Clair Obsur problem.
Can I say I agree, very disappointed when I loaded up the game that I had to change so much to make it essentially playable on a high refresh rate 2k monitor. After disabling all the filters and turning off upscaling, I have it working fine but wow its like they made something beautiful and have no idea how to allow people to see it.
After all the comparisons to Larian, I thought I’d see a more competently assembled package with Clair Obscur, but at least everything else is great besides the game engine and graphics settings.