Two months ago I played a single chapter of South of Midnight, a new game about how life becomes legend and how legends cling to the South like Spanish moss. I wrote about that 90 minute slice of the game here at Paste, praising its story and its approach to magical realism, but noting that its most game-like moments—its combat and its platforming—felt begrudging, perfunctory, like something awkwardly grafted onto the game out of commercial concerns—not because they serve the story the designers at Compulsion Games wanted to tell, but because it’s a videogame, and people expect videogames to be about running and fighting and carrying on. I’ve now played the rest of South of Midnight, all 15 of its chapters, over a span of 12 or so hours, and honestly, everything I wrote in that preview applies to the full game. So, uh, go read that, if you haven’t. It’s not that bad, I promise.
If you’re weirdly averse to clicking links, or already read that piece, or want to learn stuff you don’t already know about the game—or if you’re one of my parents, or my mother-in-law, who all claim to read every word I write—I reckon you can keep on reading. It’s not like I have any sway over your internet activities, or anything. You’re going to do what you’re going to do, and I respect that, even if I don’t always understand it. Either way, as ever, thanks for your time and your support.
South of Midnight doesn’t give an exact location for Prospero, the small dying town it’s set in, but it’s clearly somewhere in Louisiana. Cajun accents abound, one character played football for a Louisiana college, everything’s built on swampland, and a hurricane’s about to flood the whole place. Local high school track star Hazel Flood and her mom Lacey are fixing to head out to a hurricane shelter when disaster strikes: their home is washed away by the rising water with Lacey still inside. Hazel’s journey to rescue her mom becomes a magical communion with the history and folklore of Prospero as she helps atone for the hidden sins of her neighbors and the secret tragedies within her own family, and it’s all fascinating stuff—until you have to spend five minutes smacking some floating bad guys around.
Sometimes you can tell when game designers aren’t that enthusiastic about a part of their game. That appears to be the case with South of Midnight’s combat. These fights are broken up into short, discrete chunks of action enclosed within small circles of impenetrable fog, with two or three staggered waves of enemies to destroy. There are only a handful of enemy types, and you learn everything you need to know about each individual type the first time you fight one. It stops introducing new enemies roughly halfway through the game, so for the second half you’re fighting your way through repetitive, interchangeable encounters, solely so you can accomplish something to unlock the next bit of story. South of Midnight only ever switches up its battles when you’re facing one of its few bosses, which are long, multi-phase affairs that require a good grasp of Hazel’s various skills. The boss fights have a bit of a Zelda feel to them—the rule of three abounds—and are fine challenges that directly play off whatever story that level is focused on. The regular encounters are nothing more than speed bumps, though; their only purpose is to make sure you know how to fight before facing a boss.
Fortunately Hazel’s suite of acrobatic movements doesn’t always feel as uninspired as the fighting. If you’ve played a 3D platformer in the last, say, 20 years you’ll recognize most of what goes on here. When she’s not walking or double-jumping Hazel has to climb up walls and cling to ledges, or use a magical handheld parachute to slowly glide over the land, or wall-run between billboards or cliffs. It’s Uncharted, it’s Assassin’s Creed, it’s Prince of Persia—it’s the classic platforming songbook covered once again, but it at least keeps you moving forward, unlike the momentum-stopping fight scenes. And, speaking of songs, these moments of traversal at the end of each chapter are typically accompanied by original folk, country, or blues songs, with lyrics that reflect the current story; the songs aren’t always that good, but it’s a beautiful little world-building note and a unique hook that further steeps South of Midnight in its Southern milieu.
As that music shows, South of Midnight consistently looks to the real South for aesthetic inspiration, but it also digs into Southern folklore (which, in many cases, means African folklore) for many of its themes and mystical story beats. Supernatural figures guide and hinder Hazel, from a wise creole catfish, to the Acadian sleep paralysis demon known as Kooshma, to a shape-changing, juke joint-owning rougaroux. Hazel eases the suffering of many of these magical beings by confronting the worst ghosts from the South’s past—slavery, racism, the exploitation of workers forced to work inhuman hours and live in mill towns, an upper class that lives parasitically on the poor. She helps these Southern myths just like her mother, a social worker, helps those in less metaphoric types of need—and unlike her grandmother Bunny, who owns most of Prospero and feels no mercy for or responsibility towards anybody, and whose words (and cheekbones) are sharper than any knife. (The relationship between the mixed-race Hazel and her white grandmother Bunny subtly explores a racial dynamic rarely investigated by mainstream videogames; the game absolutely could have dug deeper into that, and I honestly can’t decide if it’s a sign of restraint or cowardice that it doesn’t.)
It channels the South where it matters most: in its atmosphere, which is thick as molasses and as haunted as the handful of recordings made by Robert Johnson in the ‘30s. Prospero feels like a place frozen in time, its small downtown of boarded-up storefronts evoking long-faded successes, and its outskirts dotted by abandoned shacks, decaying company homes, and a moonshining operation that hasn’t been used in decades but is still largely, surprisingly intact. You can feel the heat surrounding Hazel, the layer of sweat and dirt that sticks to everybody after just a few minutes outdoors down here. A late stage is set in an otherworldly New Orleans full of floating buildings and exploited spirits, and it’s a masterclass in breathing atmosphere into a game. It does turn the South into a cartoon to an extent, but only to get to a perceptive larger truth about it.
It also clearly understands the politics of the region. The United States will probably never really account for the twin acts of genocide it was forged in—the murder and displacement of its indigenous people, and the enslavement and subsequent oppression of its Black population—and the ghosts of that past are always most vivid, most tangible in the South. And we’re still the poorest, least educated part of the country because that is how our leaders and our ruling class have always wanted it, an endless cycle of poverty and enforced ignorance engineered to preserve a society built on discrimination and inequality. South of Midnight doesn’t preach its politics over a megaphone, but they’re still overt and unwavering. Hazel comes across the spirits of slaves fleeing through the Underground Railroad, of millworkers crushed by capitalism, of good people driven to violence and death by bigotry and abuse, and you’d have to be a calloused son of a bitch to not land on the only right side of those issues. Neither Hazel nor the game ever directly lectures anybody, but its perspective is unmistakable, and unmistakably just.
There’s an obvious power to interacting with these characters and these situations instead of just reading about them. That’s the strength of games: it can make things feel more immediate, more personal than a book or movie. But just as its combat feels out of place, South of Midnight also isn’t as confident in its level design as it is its politics. Levels aren’t especially straightforward, but they’re almost always a little obvious; if you see two ways to go, and the glowing spectral trail that serves as your guide tells you to go one way, always go the other way first, because there will almost definitely be important collectibles there. Hazel can unlock and power-up abilities from a skill tree using a currency she calls “floofs.” You earn floofs after every fight scene, but most of the floofs you’ll find are scattered throughout the levels. They’re rarely that hard to find, but you’ll always have to keep an eye out for different paths to walk down and nooks and crannies to explore if you want enough floofs to unlock every skill. The level design doesn’t have that sense of reluctantly accounting for expectations like the combat does, but it’s also not particularly elegant. It more than suffices, though.
That tension between being a game that people play and an immersive narrative that people experience is what most defines South of Midnight. The “walking sim” tag is some nonsense verbiage cooked up by dorks to belittle games whose stories they don’t understand, but South of Midnight would be a stronger piece of work if it more closely leaned into that end of the ludonarrative spectrum. But it’s a game with a sizable budget made by Microsoft for a wide audience, so obviously there has to be some action to it. That action sticks out like a sore thumb, but South of Midnight is strong enough where it counts, in its story and in the evocative world it creates, to make up for the drudge work of its combat. Don’t misread its Southern Gothic trappings as an accurate reflection of what the South is actually like today (I’ve said this dozens of times here at Paste, but the best, most recognizable version of the modern South in pop culture remains Danny McBride’s HBO TV shows), but if you’re quick to dismiss the entire region for its politics, South of Midnight might help you understand how and why it became this way. It’s an empathetic game that genuinely loves the maligned, misunderstood part of the country that made me, and hopefully it will speak to non-Southerners just as much.
South of Midnight was developed by Compulsion Games and published by Xbox Game Studios. Our review is based on the Xbox Series X|S version. It is also available on PC.
Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.
