How ‘South of Midnight’ Weaves A Stop-Motion Fantasy from Deep South Lore

In the ideological battle for the soul of video games, South of Midnight (out April 8) is the stop-motion heart beating a strange, staccato rhythm at its center. 

The upcoming third-person action-adventure title from Montreal-based studio Compulsion Games (We Happy Few, Contrast) challenges Roger Ebert’s infamous “video games will never be art” take on almost every front. It’s a magical, lovingly hand-crafted world nestled within a rarely mined locale, featuring an effervescent protagonist, a stirring soundtrack, and a vibrant cast of mythical creatures and colorful Deep South personalities.

While not groundbreaking, South of Midnight’s gameplay is expertly woven into its Southern Gothic tapestry, offering players something all too rare in the current climate: a game that doesn’t concern itself with ticking boxes or chasing trends, but instead presents a clear, cohesive artistic vision. Compulsion Games wants players to be fully immersed in this world, in whatever way suits their fancy, whether that’s ramping up the difficulty or toggling invincibility on.

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At a recent preview event in New York, Rolling Stone went hands-on with South of Midnight and spoke to the team working on the action-adventure game about its many complexities — from painstakingly recreating the visage of stop-motion to weaving together fairy tale-like elements with a poignant take on generational trauma.

A tapestry of the Deep South

South of Midnight draws from old Southern Gothic novels and the cultural practice of oral storytelling, so each section of the game is split into chapters introduced by a narrator as if he’s flipping through an ornate old book. That feeling of a warm fireside tale is amplified by the game’s aesthetic, which, as art director Whitney Clayton explains, was reverse-engineered by the Compulsion design team to look like hand-crafted, stop-motion animation. The result is breathtaking in motion.

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Every twisting tree branch and bounding bunny looks like they were painstakingly created and photographed frame-by-frame, a style Compulsion drew from Montreal-based stop-motion animation studio, Clyde Henry (Madam Tutli-Putli, 2007). Early in development, the artists visited Clyde Henry’s studio, where they were able to examine the highly detailed maquettes and get a crash course in the stop-motion process. 

This off-kilter visual style lends itself well to the magical world of South of Midnight, which presents its own take on decaying Americana with a highly textural feel in both its character designs and space, and also draws inspiration from Guillermo del Toro movies like Pan’s Labyrinth (2006).

Compulsion is known for its highly stylized visual language, but South of Midnight was a new beast — the stop-motion style complicated development and challenged the team to create strict aesthetic and design rules to abide by throughout production. 

“Between growing [as a studio], and COVID and being remote, it forced us to be more specific with what the vision was going to be, to be clear, to ensure consistency,” Clayton says. “We wanted to try and push things to the next coherent level. It felt like a nice, natural evolution.”

That evolution manifests itself in truly awe-inspiring ways during the hands-on session. Every moment is brimming with whimsical detail, from lacy-white magical threads that are conjured out of thin air, to a giant talking catfish who looks like he’s made out of a colorful patchwork quilt, and glowing azure glass bottles that adorn a gnarled tree, just begging to be plucked. 

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These surreal visuals are only made more magical by the game’s music, which adds to the sonic layer of this mystical world. The humidity of the Deep South is almost palpable when trudging through a water-logged swamp, watching rabbits bound away from your footsteps, and hearing the lonely twang of a banjo echo your steps.

Though there is decay all around, the goal is to unravel that rot and cast it out so that something new can come from the fertile land. There is beauty in every corner of this game, on the surface and hidden beneath. Sometimes you have to go through something truly ugly to emerge shimmery and new.

The complexities of South of Midnight’s stop-motion style also meant that the team had to plan carefully to ensure combat was still legible and intuitive despite the game’s lower frame rate presentation. “You’ll look at an animal and be like, ‘Okay, there’s the stop-motion on that,’” game director Jasmin Roy explains. “The combat goes fast, it moves at a certain speed where you might not necessarily notice it as much.” 

Clayton and the team recognize that this could still be a sticking point for some, so the settings allow players to turn off the stop-motion filter and smooth out the game’s visuals with a more standardized frame rate for its movement. Beyond that, “You either like it or you don’t,” Clayton laughed during her presentation. 

A swampy playground

During the preview, Rolling Stone played “Chapter Three: A Big Fish,” which comes just after protagonist Hazel, desperate to find her mother after a hurricane’s flash flood swept away their house, is bequeathed the magical power of “Weaving.” 

This power allows her to conjure ghostly threads out of thin air with the help of magic spindles, which aid in traversing the dangerously flooded lands that are infested with an otherworldly, physical manifestation of trauma, along with massive, mythical monsters.

As Hazel sets out on her journey, the ghost of a woman named Mahalia (also a Weaver) leads a group of spectral slaves on a quest for freedom and inadvertently teaches Hazel how to use her new powers.

Hazel’s magical threads can be fashioned into a temporary glider or a grappling hook to help with platforming, used to conjure spectral objects that seem somewhat stuck between worlds, and wielded in battle to push enemies away and pull them towards her. They are also used to clear the “stigma” lying over the land, which manifests as thorny bushes, rotting trees, and “Haints,” the main enemies players will face.

Chapter three is still early on in Hazel’s journey (she doesn’t have all of her abilities just yet), but it’s a good sample of what players can expect from South of Midnight: frequent, occasionally challenging platforming and spaced-out combat encounters with Haints in closed-off arenas, all wrapped in a dewy, magical blanket. 

The hands-on session featured three main Haint enemy types: fast-moving Ravagers that sweep in and swipe, a stationary Haint that throws projectiles, and Haint Larva, which burst forth from gnarled, knotted creatures and can be hucked back at enemies if timed right.

South of Midnight’s combat can also be retooled for different player tastes, a decision the team made early on in production. “We went through a variety of different balancing processes, and we started talking about difficulty first,” Roy says. “We ended up settling on a main difficulty, a balance that is on par with action games in general without being too hard — the game is meant to be accessible, meant to be picked up and played.” 

South of Midnight will have bog-standard difficulty settings (easy, story, and hard modes), as well as some custom tuning options for players that can make Hazel invincible, or iron out the visuals to be more readable. Compulsion wants each chapter to feel perfectly paced, whether it swells into a major boss battle or ends without any combat at all.

Roy says they were focused on “the idea of being able to move through a region based on its narrative pacing,” adding, “That’s why we mean by narrative driven — making sure players could go through the different modes of the game and make sure we had moments of contemplative exploration of the world.”

Chapter three tells the story of a man betrayed by his brother, his trauma hanging like smoke over the land. It has a few enemy encounters, but focuses mainly on traversal and exploration, ending in a platforming sequence up a massive, gnarled tree. It’s a far cry from the giant alligator boss battle shown during Compulsion’s previews in Montreal in November of last year and at the latest Xbox Developer Direct.

A Southern Gothic love letter 

South of Midnight feels like a rare video game made solely for the love of the medium, driven by the power of its story and the passion of the team behind it. Thanks to Microsoft’s backing (Compulsion was acquired by Xbox in 2018), the development team was able to expand, allowing the studio to focus on making something true to their vision instead of just another bloated AAA game chasing rote trends like live service nonsense or microtransactions.

As such, the entire process was uniquely collaborative across the different teams and even with artists outside the studio. The voice actors (which includes Star Wars’ Ahmed Best) offered insight into the Black experience, with Hazel’s actor, Adriyan Rae, even making dialogue suggestions. Compulsion staffers from the South, plus storyteller Donna Washington, were in constant conversation to ensure South of Midnight was authentic. “We all kind of came together,” writer Zaire Lanier says. 

Audio director Chris Fox, who enlisted BAFTA-nominated composer Olivier Derivière to work on the soundtrack, even sought the writers’ help when crafting lyrics. “The narrative team was very much synched with us,” Fox says.

Telling a story as special as Hazel’s, one steeped in magical realism but also rooted in a traumatized American South, required the team to frequently check in with internal and external sources to ensure it was done gracefully. “There was almost a bit of a cultural exchange,” Lanier says. “We have to trust each other and our various levels of expertise. We did a lot of experimentation with our narrative delivery systems. We came up with Mahlia fairly late, and because we had that element of slavery and wanted to handle it sensitively, [the team] trusted me when I said, ‘This needs space to breathe.’”

Weaving was an integral part of Hazel’s story that is naturally tied to the psychic scars the Deep South holds. “What is it like to be chosen by the land?” Lanier asks. “It’s likely that the weave is probably coming from a disenfranchised population. Hazel doesn’t have to help these creatures, but she’s making a choice to do so, she’s reacting with a lot of empathy.”

Empathy drives both Hazel and the narrative forward, offering a fresh take on combat and conflict in games — not every chapter ends in a boss battle, nor does Hazel “solve” every problem. “Hazel is kind of like a mirror,” Lanier explains. “She sees what [someone] went through, she’ll empathize, she’ll comment on it, but she’s not necessarily fixing it. That’s important because sometimes someone just needs to hear your story.”

Lanier recognizes that choosing to center a game around a Black protagonist in this current cultural environment is “a risk.” But for her, “the passion comes through” in South of Midnight, and that’s all that matters.

To echo a sentiment from the game’s art director: You either like it or you don’t.

South of Midnight arrives on Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, and Game Pass on April 8.