Compulsion Games has made a staggering three games in their existence as a studio: Contrast, We Happy Few, and now South of Midnight. Quickly going over their ‘review’ sections for each game my consensus is:

All their creativity and art is kneecapped by gameplay.

Does South of Midnight break that curse? I don’t know, I’m only assuming the statement I made is true, I have not played their other games.

So how is it?

STORY

South of Midnight follows Hazel Flood as she tries to save her mother, Lacey, after their home is washed away in a hurricane. It isn’t long until she begins experiencing abnormalities in the world around her and within herself. She learns that she’s a Weaver, someone who can see the stands of the Grand Tapestry, the fabric of the universe that intwines all life. As her journey unfolds she meets residents of the South that harbor a deep emotional pain, as a Weaver her mission is to help these folks as she tries to find her mother. She reveals their pasts in an attempt to help them move on from their traumas, though the results, much like reality, vary.

These stories you learn of throughout the chapters cover trauma from violence and loss, from the othering of a sibling by a community, to toxic masculinity teachings of bottling your most painful emotions until you can’t anymore. Though each of these smaller stories has a resolution by the time Hazel moves on, it’s not always a happy ending for everyone involved. Not everything is fixed and everyone has been redeemed, you can only help people so much before they have to help themselves move on.

I enjoyed the history of these characters, they all have compelling and sometimes challenging pasts that aren’t so black and white. The game is considerably darker than I anticipated it would be going in, but it’s not crushingly depressing or nihilistic when covering these subjects. 

MUSIC

These sad and emotionally gripping stories are accompanied by music composed by Olivier Deriviere, the composer of both Plague Tale games, Dying Light 2, Vampyr, and Alone jn the Dark [2008]. Okay I only played the Rat games but the soundtracks for those are fucking awesome, Olivier is quickly becoming one of my favorite game composers. This game is no exception either, his music continues to be emotional with an underlying eeriness, and triumphant when the time comes. In South of Midnight his sound is infused with Blues and Jazz to fantastic results that accent this Southern Gothic/Folklore experience well. An inclusion new to his work are more traditional songs with lyrics that tell the stories of those you help along the way. It all works well together, the singing is great and filled with the right emotional delivery each traumatic past requires. 

The song ‘Benjy’ sounds a bit more country than I would prefer but it doesn’t sound estranged from the rest of the tracks, and it *is* a track for white characters. Did that have a hand in how the song came out? Most likely not, I imagine they just wanted to make each song have a unique melody and tone.

GRAFIX

As good as the music is, the art certainly doesn’t play second fiddle. This time around Compulsion decided to emulate the aesthetics of stop-motion animation; textures on characters have a clay-like finish to them and the animation is smooth and yet subtlety choppy. Unfortunately I did not pay much attention to the rest of the texture work in the environments to see how well they invoke the chosen stop-motion style, I can only say everything looks superb. I can’t recall if the wood has heavy brush strokes to simulate the texture of trees, if the metal looks airbrushed and then meticulously hand-painted to look weathered and rusty, or if the flora looks like dainty paper or whatever they use for them in stop-motion flicks.

It doesn’t look like they made claymation-inspired models and just threw them in Unreal Engine 4 asset world, is what I’m saying. The art for the environments look great and have a lot of craft put into them to make them stand out from each other. 

[Also pretend I said ‘claymation’ every time I wrote ‘stop-motion’, that’s what I actually meant and don’t want to go back and fix it because it’s currently 4:13 am]

GAMEPLAY

Usually I cover gameplay as soon as I can because that’s my deciding factor for continuing with a game, if something isn’t fun to me why even bother? The combat is simple at first, just simple single-button combos and an execution-style move that grants minor health regeneration. As you go on you gain more abilities to help traverse the world, these double as combat skills as well. You are able to push back enemies, pull them close to you, lock them in place [this ability is named Weave], and possess them with your companion, Crouton. 

There is a small skill tree that lets you enhance these skills, each one usually including the added bonus of being able to lock enemies into place if used a certain way. These upgrades are incredibly overpowered because Weave can be upgraded to cause bound enemies more damage, as well as lasting longer. The optimal way to play is to upgrade Weave as soon as possible, get the weave upgrades for Push and Pull, while focusing on the General skills when you can.  Weave upgrades are incredibly powerful so unlock them and use it as if it’s a crutch, not because it’s needed to get through poorly balanced combat, but because it’s makes cutting down these slightly spongy enemies faster. 

The fun in the combat comes from utilizing your dodge and abilities as efficiently as possible, which unfortunately doesn’t become rewarding until you get far enough in the story to unlock the later tiers of the skill tree. Again, your only button to do physical damage is X on the Xbox pad, holding the button will let you charge a blast attack that does more damage but leaves you vulnerable. The combat is pretty basic and doesn’t really get more complex, the only thing to be wary of is the which enemy types you should be targeting first in any given combat encounter.

I had a concern early on that they would run out of unique enemy types to put into the game to keep combat fresh, I’m happy to say that they don’t. There’s enough variety to make sure the combat doesn’t get too stale, even in the late game. It doesn’t make up for the lack of tools and moves you get in your arsenal, but it’s serviceable. Bosses have unique gimmicks and easy-to-predict patterns, you won’t be having a difficult time with them either.

Combat is fine, nothing innovative is attempted to the Action-Adventure formula, but it doesn’t pretend that it’s trying to do anything daring or unique either. This is truly the weakest part of the game.

The locomotion is very nice though, once you get the double jump and glide it’s a joy to run through the levels and collect the health upgrades and skill points, called Floof. You get them pretty early on so you won’t have to wait long. 

AXE TO GRIND

I saw someone write an article saying there’s too many collectibles in the game which lead to them dropping the game; I beat the game in about 12 hours, got all the health upgrades, collected 2000/2210 floofs, and 76/103 documents. You barely have to look for the floofs or health upgrades, if you can be fucking bothered to explore just a little bit you’ll find most of them. They’re not well hidden, just slightly out of the way. 

CLOSING

South of Midnight is available on Xbox Series X|S and PC/Steam. I played it on Gamepass but I’d say it’s well worth the $40 price tag if the uninspired and safe combat isn’t a hard deal breaker for you. Not a lot of replay value unless you want to get all the notes, but I wouldn’t imagine they would add a whole lot to the story. You don’t need to collect all the Floofs to unlock every skill either, there’s no real incentive to get them all after your first playthrough. 

Big recommend if you want a Southern Gothic-inspired game with great art, awesome music, and a story that explores themes of trauma without trying to hamfist a happy ending into the sub stories.

Hopefully it comes to PS5 and Switch 2 in 6-12 months. I’d say Switch 1 as well, but I doubt it’ll be supported for that much longer.

My accent sounds like 40,000 crawdads fuckin’/10