South of Midnight arrives as the third title from Montreal’s Compulsion Games, marking their first release entirely under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Having built a reputation as a studio with stunning artistic direction and evocative musical scores with titles like Contrast and We Happy Few, my anticipation surrounding South of Midnight has been palpable since their acquisition by Microsoft in 2018. After a seven-year development cycle, the question remains: what emerges when a studio with such a strong artistic pedigree is afforded increased resources and time? Does the stigma often associated with larger budgets – that they don’t guarantee quality – hold true here? Or has Compulsion taken that additional ammunition and weaved together something truly magical?
The Whole Box Of Crayons
South of Midnight is a semi-linear action-adventure game where you play as Hazel Flood, a young woman haunted by a personal tragedy and thrust into a quest to save her mother, as well as her town, from a malevolent force known as the Night. The world of South of Midnight is said to be constructed of something called the Grand Tapestry, and anytime a person suffers a great tragedy or loss, there are knots and tears formed in this tapestry. These allow evil spirits, knowns as Haints, to take form and terrorize whatever or whomever surrounds them. Hazel discovers early on in her journey that she is what is called a Weaver, a magical warrior capable of fending off these Haints and repairing the tears in the tapestry by remedying the pain that causes them in the first place.
The leap Compulation Games took from the already beautiful Contrast to We Happy Few was big. The leap to South of Midnight? Astronomical. From the first frame, it’s immediately obvious that one of the design goals of South of Midnight was to put the capture button on your Xbox controller through its paces, and boy did it. The world is as unique as it is beautiful, though, as the team clearly put a painstakingly large amount of effort to ensure its motif stands out. You might be asking yourself how a group of 80 or so developers all the way up in Montreal could create something so authentically southern, and they honestly asked themselves that same question. And with that question in mind, the team sent many members on several excursions to different regions of the South, to the Bayous, Appalacia, and even New Orleans in order to ensure their world was as authentic as possible. They also enlisted the help of multiple award-winning storyteller, spoken word recording artist, and author, Donna Washington, in an effort to ensure that they could become experts on Southern Folklore and Criptids, which are not generally well known but prove to be such a big part of the narrative in South of Midnight.
So a lot of work went into making sure the game felt authentic, and it definitely paid dividends. The game is set in the fictional town of Prospero, located deep in the American Deep South, and the story blends traditional gothic tropes while exploring themes of the South’s history, tensions, and societal problems. And it’s through the eyes of charming and sometimes grotesque characters. Creating a game world and a vibe that not many games have done before, in a medium that is getting increasingly more derivative by the day, was genuinely so refreshing for me to explore. And exploring pays off as the incredible amount of detail and environmental storytelling found in Compulsion’s previous works, We Happy Few, is alive and well here, with it being difficult to spot reused layouts and such inside the game’s many interior spaces. A lot of what is placed in the world is placed there for a reason.
Charming and Grotesque
South of Midnight is more then just a pretty face, though, as the creatures and characters you meet along your journey really bring this experience to life. Everyone you meet has a unique charm to them, and their art style really sucks you in. In most cases each new character or creature you meat has a chapter, or segment of a chapter, dedicated to them, with a lot of their story being discovered through the events of the game and collectables discovered along the way. What really stands out is that most chapters, and therefore characters, have their own original song on the game’s soundtrack. As you progress through the level, the song builds and builds, and as you near the end of the chapter, it crescendos into a ballad all about that character and their story. It’s something that never got old and never failed to impress the whole way through the game.
The characters in South of Midnight are one of the more impressive parts, and the performances from Adriyan Rae, Ahmed Best, and the rest of the cast are great. This is important since the game’s narrative is not overly dense, but the characters’ tales are still quite interesting. Seeing as their stories are not spared from a lot of the despair that is commonly associated with Southern gothic tales, you do end up feeling for a lot of them, which is a tell-tale sign of characters done well.
The game famously uses stepped animation, or “animating on twos,” meaning the characters in the foreground animate at half the frame rate the rest of the scene is running on. This used to be an efficiency thing back when animators needed to draw every frame by hand; however, these days, it’s generally a stylistic choice. And it’s a style choice that has become quite popular thanks to a certain friendly neighborhood man spider and his friends. The team at Compulsion knew that this would be a divisive choice as it is a relatively new technique in video games, a medium where people are often seeking out more frames, not less. So they provided an option to turn this off entirely within the game’s settings. Personally, after experimenting with both settings, I decided to leave it on as I think it adds a lot to the uncanny-ness and mystique the world provides. It would be my recommended way to play, honestly.
Competent and Continuous
Speaking of play, lets talk about the gameplay itself. As I mentioned earlier, the game is a semi-linear action adventure. It is level-based and has a fairly strict path from A to B with a lot of “forks in the road” sprinkled in, where the game tells you to go down path A, but there’s almost always a path B that takes you to a hidden collectable, or “floof.” These are the game’s version of gaining XP, used to improve your combat prowess.
The combat itself is pretty competent. It has the standard fare of stringing together combos and dodging attacks, which doubles as a parry when timed right, as well as throwing in a handful of abilities you can use to shake things up and gain an advantage inside of a combat arena. I say combat arena because combat doesn’t take place in the open world; it is restricted to specific pre-determined spaces.
Let me paint a picture. Once I got through the game’s opening bits and into a proper level, or chapter as the game calls them, I was introduced to a new character, named Benjy, and began learning about their tragic story. Different hardships they had gone through manifested as tears in the grand tapestry of this area, and it was my job to mend them. How that translated into gameplay was that each tear had a combat arena attached to it, and, upon defeating all of the Haints inside of it, a tragic memory of Benjy was revealed, which I was able to capture inside of a magic bottle. I would need to repeat this process four times and, along the way, was introduced to a few different types of Haints (enemies) as well as a few different types of traversal options. After clearing enough combat arenas and capturing enough memories in my bottle, I was able to undo the tangle that was preventing me from getting to the root of Benjy’s problem. After that, I was introduced to a really cool platforming sequence where one of the games iconic ballads was blasting in the background, and I was able to reach the conclusion of that chapter’s storyline and progress the game into the next chapter.
This is a a perfect encapsulation of what the typical gameplay loop in South of Midnight entails, and, upon finishing this chapter, I was pretty excited for what awaited me in the rest of the game. Unfortunately though, what awaited me was a bit of a mixed bag. Each new chapter does introduce more of the game’s quality ensemble, shows off more of the team’s incredible world, and tells some fantastic and tragic tales. But new enemy types and traversal options are very rarely introduced beyond Benjy’s chapter, which makes entering combat arena after combat area, and filling up bottle after bottle, start to get very played out by as early as the midpoint in the game.
A Journey Worth Taking
Even though the journey in each chapter starts to get pretty stale, thankfully the destinations almost never fail to impress. This is especially true for the ones which end in a boss fight, which are responsible for some of the game’s best moments, with one boss fight in particular being far and away my favorite sequence in the game. I won’t spoil the who, what, when, and where, but all I will say is that it is likely the soul reason for the game’s Arachnophobia mode.
On the more technical side of things, the South of Midnight does run very well, for the most part. All of my first playthrough was done on the Xbox Series X, and the game doesn’t offer a choice of performance or quality mode. But the base mode does aim for a solid 4k60, with presumably a dynamic resolution. Aside from a few flashes of the console’s age showing up in the form of stutters in large areas with a dense amount of objects and effects, the game is a very smooth operator. In my experience I had no crashes and only some very minor collision based bugs, with one instance of a character getting stuck and needing to let a Haint kill me in order to reset the encounter.
On top of its great performance, there is a bevy of options from which to tailor your experience, ranging from several different accessibility options, which are great to see, as well as a way to customize your own difficulty. I played through the entire game on the hard mode, which I would recommend as the combat can become almost too easy at points. The hard mode opens up more situations where you need to take advantage of your different spells and abilities, making the repetitive combat arenas a bit more interesting.
The repetition is definitely my biggest issue with the game, to the point where I started to dread entering a chapter and realizing I had to fill bottles again. To make matters worse, when I finally got through the several bottle-filling chapters and started to make my way though to the final parts of the game, I was further disappointed by the gameplay decisions, in a way that I wont spoil here. I personally think mixing in some minigames, puzzles, or different types of objectives or encounters (outside of boss fights) could have gone a long way into making the gameplay feel more fresh and exciting the whole way though.
While the overall gameplay did leave some things to be desired and could very much have used some more variation, there were still moments of brilliance that were very exciting to play. The gorgeous world, its inhabitants, and the stories being told, however, were absolutely enough to help the game overcome its few faults and make South of Midnight a journey worth embarking on.
Sincere thanks to Xbox for providing a review code for South of Midnight. You can find our review policy here.
