Lumière, Alicia, déchirer la toile, une vie à s’aimer… I have so much little green hearts 💚 next to Clair Obcur titles on my Spotify.

I agree that it is very refreshing to see French inspiration, we are not very used to that in video games and they embraced it to the joke level. The baguette outfit were, quote from Guillaume Broche (CEO & Art director, creator of the project): "A joke we had on our internal discord and it went too far".

Clair Obscur is an art style, the game takes place in the Belle époque (late 1800s early 1900s) and you can see plenty of references to that time, for example the pattern on the robe of the first flower seller in Lumière, just after the red and white tree.

This time period is never explored in games so that is also very cool to see.

Esquie is the best friend indeed, and he has a perfect French as the voice actor for English and French is the same. But all voice actors are amazing, English and French, it’s funny that you can hear the English ones struggling a bit with the French swearing (they tend to say "poutain" instead of "putain").

And no, no Tabarnak, this is exclusive from Quebec and very much not a thing in France (or any European French speaking country). It doesn’t really have an equivalent as they use it for various emotions. I’d say it’s the Quebec F word, so the French P word (putain).

The game was made by French from France, so no Belgian or Swiss specific French language, only the one from continental France.

It shows after you meet François, in both languages Esquie says:

• Ahahah François you got smashed
• Ahahah François qu’est-ce que tu as pris cher.

"Prendre cher" is very very French street language and means something like "pay dearly" but always in a bad way. You got hurt doing something stupid? Tu as pris cher.

It started from the city of Lyon I think and like plenty of French slang has Arabic influence, this one being the word "Cheh".

Cheh is a Moroccan (and probably Algerian) onomatopoeia for "serves you right", so if I hurt myself being silly, I will hear a little and discreet "cheh" from my Moroccan wife in the other room. One magical onomatopoeia to say "I told you so, that serves you well".

For French language differences, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Monaco and Switzerland are very close and we can understand each other without strong complications. Same goes with Northern Africa and most of Africa. It’s mostly an accent change and most vocabulary stays the same.

It gets a little bit difficult with the Caribbean French and other far away islands as they often use their own local language mixed with French.

Then you have the final boss, the endgame, Québécois. Oh Canada… You have strong accent + different vocabulary + slang. Dudes from Quebec HAS to make efforts to be understood in France (or Switzerland or whatever) cause we won’t understand them if they don’t 😁

Maybe we could with a little training, but as a famous languages school said in an add: "Time to learn French, because they won’t learn English"