South of Midnight Is North of Awesome

I mean that as a compliment

South of Midnight might end up being one of my favorite games of the year. Granted, there’s still a long road ahead of us with games like Doom: The Dark Ages coming out really soon, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this ends up near the top of a GOTY list I probably won’t bother compiling.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for the stop-motion aesthetic. After all, Harold Halibut was one of my favorite games last year. And boy howdy did Slow Bros., the team that made Harold, go all-in. They actually made many of the assets in real life and 3D scanned them to build out the game.

But enough about ole Harold—South of Midnight didn’t go to nearly the same extremes, although the effect is nearly as good. Compulsion Games, the team behind Midnight, modeled everything in Unreal, and just made it appear as though it was stop motion.

The effect is very cool. Cutscenes are locked at 30 FPS, and all animations are halved to 15 FPS, to give everything a jerky, frame-by-frame quality that’s quite reminiscent of stop motion. On top of that, South of Midnight also has a very impressive opening cinematic, which is actually made with real-life puppets. The game actually plays it every time you launch the game, which I would normally hate, but to be frank, I watched it every time.

This all, of course, only applies to the in-game cutscenes. The actual gameplay runs at whatever framerate your PC (or console) can muster, while the animations (much like in the cutscenes) run a little slower to give that stop-motion vibe.

The good news is that if the animations bother you, you can disable the effect in the settings. Then, the game just runs like a normal game, except for the cutscenes.

Southern Folklore at Its Finest

South of Midnight takes place in a fictionalized Southern United States. While the game’s town is called Prospero, I don’t think they ever provide a state, but it sure seems pretty heavily inspired by Louisiana—plus, the events of the game happen during and immediately after a flood caused by a hurricane. So, there are definitely parallels to make.

In the game’s prologue, flood waters are rising, and Hazel Flood (nice last name) is hurriedly packing, getting ready to evacuate with her mom. Needless to say, shit goes from bad to worse, and Hazel is flung on an adventure filled with voodoo, hoodoo, and exploring the pain of the people of Prospero.

It’s very cool to see this sort of story realized so well in video game form. I also play a lot of Hunt: Showdown, which is set in Louisiana (among other places), but that’s a wholly different beast compared to this.

I’m by no means an expert, as a generic white dude who hardly leaves his house, but the care and execution Compulsion Games demonstrated with South of Midnight is really impressive.

Especially since, between you and me, the team’s last game, We Happy Few, was pretty mid. That game had a lot of fine ideas, but it struggled to really execute on them effectively.

Fortunately, South of Midnight comes together splendidly, with one relatively small exception.

Everything Is Great, Except…

We’ll get into the many aspects of South of Midnight that I absolutely adored shortly—which is basically every other aspect of the game, but first, let’s get my only point of contention out of the way. And it’s not even like an actual issue. It’s just that, with as great as nearly every aspect of this game is, from art to story to music, it’s just kind of a shame that the combat is just sort of … okay.

Thankfully, it doesn’t detract from the experience much at all, and it’s completely servicable, and not wholly unenjoyable, but compared to everything else, it feels like typical third-person action shenanigans.

You go into an arena, haints (the enemies in the game) spawn, you put them out of their misery, and then you pop a little orb to finish the encounter. That’s basically all you do throughout the entire game, barring boss fights (which are great, we’ll get into those shortly).

The encounters never really got too boring, thanks to continued upgrades and pretty decent enemy variety. I was also playing on the hardest difficulty, so it kept me on my toes pretty well.

But toward the end of the game, I felt as though these encounters were just breaking up the pacing of the rest of the game in a way that, overall, didn’t add much to the experience—just padded it out.

I guess that’s partly thanks to everything else about South of Midnight being so joyous. And even then, fightin’ enemies is never a chore, and the design of everything—animations, the enemies themselves, the sound—helps to hide the fact that there’s not much going on.

Everything Else Is Great

Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s gush. While I wasn’t too fussed during the combat encounters, I loved the rest of the game. Between each of these combat encounters, there are swaths of platforming, Uncharted-esque climbing, and, of course, story.

For starters, it’s beautiful. Stop-motion aesthetic aside, the lighting and attention to detail, especially in a lot of the interior spaces, are delightful. Each house or building feels actually lived-in, and the art style and lighting heighten this to another level. In many ways, it looks like an animated movie—similar but still quite different from Kena: Bridge of Spirits (another great game).

Bosses Have a lot of Character

While the combat itself isn’t really anything special, the boss fights are. There are five boss fights spread throughout the game, and the chapters leading up to each one help to explain the pain and trauma that led to their creation.

The first one, Benjy, isn’t even really a boss fight—unless you’re scared of heights. Instead, it entails an extended platforming section set to a pretty fantastic song.

The other fights are actually fights. Each one has a little gimmick to figure out in order to defeat them. I say “figure out” very lightly; they amount to: “Oh hey, I better ring this bell that’s lying here for no obvious reason.”

It’s pretty neat. By the time you get to the boss, you’ll have learned enough about their backstory that these thematic elements add a lot, even if the amount to ringing a bell.

Ticklin’ the Ears

Perhaps one of the most impressive aspects of South of Midnight is the music. Composer Olivier Derivière knocked it out of the fuckin’ park with this one, and honestly, it seems pretty different from most of the other stuff he’s done.

A mix between folk and jazz, the music permeates nearly everything you do. Not only does each of the boss fights have its own corresponding theme, and each one is distinct and fantastic in its own right.

These righteous tunes also extend to the combat music, which is just the right amount of chaotic jazz (and probably one of the reasons those encounters don’t detract too much from the overall experience).

Overall, the music and sound design are some of the best things about South of Midnight.

Story’s Good Too

I think, while South of Midnight will probably pull people in based primarily on the setting, the art, and maybe the music, deep down’s a pretty good story, too, both as a tour through Southern folklore as well as a personal story of Hazel’s search for her mother after she was swept up in the flood.

I won’t get into too many spoilers, because I think it would be rad if everyone played it, but it plays out like a fine little adventure, without too many crazy reveals or twists. South of Midnight primarily feels like a well-written vehicle to explore Southern culture and folklore, and that alone is worth the price of admission—plus it’s on Game Pass, so the price of admission might be nothing if you’re already subscribed.

What Else Can I Say?

South of Midnight impressed me from start to finish—and maybe lost me a little bit with the combat, but really, even on hard, it never got boring or frustrating, it was just there, and fun enough.

It’s just fortunate that nearly every other aspect of South of Midnight elevated the experience to impressive heights. I highly recommend it.