Currently standing as 2025’s best-reviewed game, tied only with Blue Prince, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is a phenomenal experience from a gameplay, narrative, and soundtrack perspective. What really resonated with my first playthrough of the new RPG though, was the music. Composed over five years by Lorien Testard, Clair Obscur’s music stands with the potential to be crowned one of the best videogame soundtracks of all time.
Among the 154 songs that compose the game’s eight hours of music sits the beautiful “Until Next Life,” which marks actor Ben Starr’s first foray into performing video game music. Starr, who plays Verso in the game, tells GameSpot the amusing tale of how Testard approached him to sing on the soundtrack.
“I’ve been in this industry for about five minutes, so I really haven’t done a lot, relative to a lot of my amazing colleagues and peers. I’m trying to do everything everywhere, all at once. Really, I feel like I’m juggling 1,000 things and wearing a million different hats,” he begins, “I might never get to do it again. I was in Montpellier, and [Testard] just sidled up to me, and I was really intimidated because this was the first time I was meeting him. I’ve heard his work and I was like, ‘I don’t want to embarass myself.’ Then he pulled me aside and I was like, ‘What’s going on?’ He just said, ‘I’d like you to sing on the soundtrack. Would you want to do it?’
“I genuinely thought I’d misheard it, so I didn’t want to say yes immediately, because I was just like, ‘Why? Why would you want me?’ but without even thinking I just said yes, not really thinking about the consequences of my actions.”
Testard has his own memories of asking Starr to be involved, too. “I wrote the song Ben is singing, I think maybe a year before asking him to do that. It’s a really important song for Verso and for the game, and we recorded it with the orchestra. It was an emblematic track with orchestra and voices, and Verso. I tell Guillaume [Broche, Sandfall Interactive CEO and creative director], ‘It will be really cool if we can have the actors sing, so let’s ask.’ I met Ben at Christmas one year later, and I have the song in mind, and I asked him to listen to it, and if he wanted to sing on it. He said yes, and we recorded the morning after.
“It was really, really impressive to have a voice actor who is not a singer to do the singing parts. Honestly, I would never let the song on the soundtrack if I didn’t like it. It could have been very hard for me to say, ‘No Ben, it didn’t work,’ so I’m so glad that I really like the song, and I think it gives a lot to the soundtrack.”
Starr then goes on to explain how, the night before recording the song and while visiting Montpellier with co-star Jennifer English, he got a little over-excited. “I think I introduced a large portion of the team to tequila shots just when the evening was dying down. I think I bought like 20 tequilas, and I was that annoying person at a party that’s like, ‘Do your tequila shot!'” he recalls.
“Clearly, they didn’t want them, so I was left with far too many going, ‘Fine, I’ll do the tequila shots.’ So, turning up the next morning and going into the studio and being like, ‘Thank you, sir, teach me how to sing this beautiful song,’ with Alice [Duport-Percier, vocalist]’s vocals already over it, and me contributing alongside it, it was really intimidating.”
Those tequila shots never hampered Starr’s performance, though. “Hopefully–I’m saying hopefully, I’ve heard it–I’m so proud of it. I’m so proud to be a part of this journey, and to explore different things. It isn’t a stunt, it is narratively really intriguing and I think it adds a lot to the story.”
While some thought the launch of the Oblivion Remaster just days beforehand could spell disaster for the indie game, Starr disagrees, saying that Clair Obscur can “exist alongside” the juggernaut.
