I was smitten with Compulsion’s South of Midnight well before I got to play a little more than an hour of it recently. From the first enigmatic trailers hinting at this Southern gothic, dark fantasy, magical realist stop-motion game set in the Deep South, to IGN’s own first look, to the bigger gameplay overview at the recent Xbox Developer Direct – South of Midnight struck me as a deeply moving, highly stylized game that would almost definitely make me cry. When I told the Art Director, Whitney Clayton, that I had immediately thought of that decade-plus-old movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, she confirmed that was one of their early major inspirations for its “Mythical Bayou-type location, folklore creatures, and this really heartwarming protagonist.” That, along with the “darkness and folktale fantasy” of Pan’s Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro. Huge yes to all of that.
In the section that I got hands-on time with, I absolutely got the sense that all of the intrigue and hype-building was no bluff, and yet a couple elements of the gameplay still needed more time in the metaphorical oven before it’s ready to ship out. Even with those minor blemishes – which are slightly concerning because we’re just a couple months away from its April 8 release date – I left still enamored with the setting and bubbling with curiosity about the bigger story about ghosts and environmental catastrophe driving South of Midnight.
I played through Chapter 3, far along enough to have some magical combat tricks as a Weaver going up against spooky figures called Haints – which is exactly where I began. (Though the question of “What exactly is a Weaver?” is yet to be explained.) Diving pretty much headfirst into a fight was expectedly disorienting, but I was reassured that all of the mapped techniques – push, pull, and what’s basically a stun move – are introduced at a pace that’s much easier to get acquainted to naturally. Part of the struggle was the autolock feature being a little loosey-goosey at times; because of the volume of Haints and where they appear in the combat area, the camera spun around the main character, Hazel, in a way that made me a tiny bit woozy.
I eventually got the hang of the Weaving moves, plus the timing of dodging for its magic recoil against nearby Haints, and found it challenging enough but not necessarily revolutionary. But I hardly think it needs to be: South of Midnight’s charm is, well, basically everything else. As long as it’s fun (it was) and not horribly repetitive (it wasn’t), then it can, in fact, run almost purely on vibes. From each encounter with the Haints, I felt a sense of eerie dread from the lighting and fog, the blaring drums-and-horns score, the general spore-like creepiness of the Haints and their corruption. And when I finally beat their spooky asses, it culminated in a cathartic cleansing of the land, both physically and spiritually, that had been choking on its past. Hazel wasn’t just clearing out the wreckage of environmental disaster from a devastating hurricane where she lost her mother, setting her on this very journey. She was healing the ghosts of history that were haunting the land, too.
That’s kind of how the beats of the chapter went: platform around a swampy area with double jumps, glides, and magic skills to find what I’ll call “Haint holes,” clear ‘em out, and pick up little pieces of a bigger story that all point back to a Mythical Creature – this one in particular at the behest of a giant talking magical Catfish who is both narrator and seemingly Hazel’s mode of transportation around different areas. Chapter 3 didn’t end with a boss battle against one of the giants highlighted in earlier videos; instead I climbed up a giant man-shaped tree to clear the Stigma of its Wound. I swear, the game explains why it exists at all through the collected ghost stories, and houses and spaces are littered with ephemera that help fill out more of the character-building picture. But even so, the ultimate answer still felt like a cliffhanger: Who were these people and how were they connected to the bigger tapestry of South of Midnight? I gotta know!
This storybook narrative meshed peachily – pun intentional – with the luxuriously textured elements of its habitat. Clayton told me the basis of these details was rooted in making the animation feel tactile: “What would this look like if it were actually handcrafted in real life?” she said. “What kind of materials would they have been made out of to look like the thing that they’re supposed to be made out of?”
Speaking of stop-motion: The team knows that not everyone is going to love the style, Clayton said, and that’s fine: “Anytime you do something a bit bold, you’re gonna get polarizing feelings.” (For what it’s worth, if it’s that distracting, you’ll be able to turn it off outside of cutscenes in South of Midnight’s settings.) I will say, I did catch a couple of moments with frame rate issues that haven’t been fully ironed out yet, but Compulsion is aiming for 60fps on Series X by launch. And when everything is running smoothly as it ought to, South of Midnight should be a uniquely beautiful game that might even make you cry a little bit, too.
