‘South of Midnight’ Is an Unflinching Fantasy Steeped in Southern Folklore

In an early chapter of South of Midnight, I was tasked with scaling a twisted tree, gnarled into the shape of the human soul trapped within. As I grappled with the initial branches, a folk song started to swell overhead, its lyrics recounting the tragic tale of fratricide I’d been unearthing in the surrounding swamp. My eyes quickly welled with tears, and by the final harmonies, I was overcome with melancholy.  

South of Midnight isn’t afraid to pull the covers off an ugly truth and let you bask in it. It’s an action-adventure game entrenched in the milieu of the Deep South, a place synonymous with mythology and magic. The region and its gothic folklore are often explored in TV and film, but rarely seen in big-budget games. And it’s even rarer for popular media to dig into lesser-known stories about mythological figures like the child-stealing Huggin’ Molly and Kooshma, the nightmare king.

With South of Midnight, Compulsion Games (Contrast, We Happy Few) meaningfully engages with the complex history of its Deep South setting, constantly flitting between the fantastical and the real, comedy and tragedy. This ambitious creative commitment infuses the game’s world with striking visuals and inimitable sonic flair. And, even with a handful of pacing issues and combat quibbles, it’s hard not to fall in love with this distinctive atmosphere. 

Eye of the Storm

South of Midnight follows Hazel, a teenage track star caught between reality and folklore after their mother’s home is swept away during a hurricane. In the wake of this disaster, Hazel discovers their connection to an otherworldly force called The Grand Tapestry, which provides her with superhuman thread-weaving abilities, and spiritual insight into the tragedies that weigh on her fractured hometown, Prospero. With little to lose, Hazel accepts her chosen-one duties as the next Weaver, and begins restoring the natural order with hooks and spindles, assisting wronged parties with their festering emotional wounds.

Not to be mistaken for a saccharine tale about forgiveness, South of Midnight’s plot consistently subverts expectations. Cleansing an area will return it to a fertile ground and remove the immediate scourge. But Hazel’s magic isn’t a catch-all salve for human cruelty — rather, it’s an empathetic spotlight that illuminates a past once hidden.

Even with its distinctly modern complexity, South of Midnight’s gameplay feels like a throwback to a nostalgic kind of action adventure popular in the Xbox 360 era. Like 2008’s Prince of Persia, or 2011’s Alice: Madness Returns, levels begin with a player first navigating MC Escher-esque environments and seeking out pockets of enemies to thwart. To move forward, Hazel must also collect key memories – which appear as ghostly animations – and shine a spotlight on the trauma of the area. Inevitably, through this process Hazel uncovers another lead, and once an area is cured she heads in a new and often more dire direction. Although this process may appear to be rinse and repeat at a glance, strong story chops, engaging battle mechanics, and an approachable 12-hour runtime help keep things from becoming tiresome.

A storybook motif regales us with these harsh truths, and as players emerge into a new level, the narrator resets the momentum and tone carefully. The tactile hand-drawn scenes blend seamlessly into South of Midnight‘s stop-motion visual style, which gives each character a whimsical and textured veneer. Up close, characters like Hazel’s estranged grandmother, Bunny, feel handcrafted with a blend of semi-matte plasticine textures that catch the light in a charming way as they emote. Every creature in Prospero moves with the same mesmerizing half-frame flow, too. Rabbits dance and rattlesnakes slither in the hazy undergrowth with the same rickety gestures as the towering creatures above, providing each new environment a comforting, organic feel. 

This thoughtful design scheme extends to the world at large too – each location is brimming with tidbits to find that inform players about the ruinous history at the core of the town. Hazel can seek out letters and deliver expository quips as they encounter objects amongst the intense environmental set dressing that embeds you in the world. In The Quarters, an abandoned area of the town that used to house enslaved workers from a local sugar cane plantation, players can find dusty handmade quilts hanging on cabin walls. Elsewhere, the stacked bodies of decaying pigs lay atop a putrid factory on the edge of Prospero. 

Fight the Good Fight / Blast from the past

Where combat is concerned, you tackle violent emotional manifestations called Haints, which arrive in a variety of species. The pulsating Larva Haint sheds swarming bugs that explode on impact, where the jagged-toothed Hurler Haints rocket gunk your way before unleashing a tentacle-flailing spin attack. Hazel can pull, push, and even infiltrate the minds of the opposing spirits using her abilities, dodging and diving to avoid rogue slashes or a demonic helping of sludge. 

Early on, battles feel exhilarating and fairly easy, with only a few Haints in your way. That quickly shifts as you go deeper beyond the flood. Soon enough, the battlefield feels claustrophobic, with South of Midnight expecting you to lock in and use your intuition and muscle memory to avoid certain death. It’s helpful, then, that Hazel’s weaving powers mirror their effects in both the platforming and combat portions of each level. The hookshot used to fly over ravines transforms into a whip that grabs and drags enemies, where the tree branch clearing blast ability becomes an aggressive Haint shove. Upgrades further bolster the existing set of tools, and diversify your move set, ensuring the constant fighting doesn’t become stale. 

Unfortunately, South of Midnight loses steam during its periodic multi-stage boss battles, with Hazel’s movements unable to keep up with the enemy — despite having all the possible upgrades unlocked. The battles are limited in number, and yet hinder the sense of progression considerably with their tiresome nature and frantic attack animations. I’m no stranger to repeating a boss battle in service of learning its move set, but there’s a noticeable gulf in quality between South of Midnight’s everyday encounters and its more cinematic duels. The attacks often felt rather simple in scope, half-baked and frustrating to deal with, with luck driving my success far more than skill. Fighting a massive gator should induce terror, and the set piece certainly spiked my adrenaline. Unfortunately this process quickly lost its luster as I fell to the same telegraphed attack, seemingly on repeat. 

Thankfully, each fight is bookended with enough story and spirit to alleviate some of the disappointment. Particularly heavy moments are complemented by an original musical accompaniment which arrives courtesy of Olivier Deriviere (Star Wars: Visions, A Plague Tale: Requiem). Across Hazel’s travels the tracks run the gamut, dancing between genres like pop, rock, and jazz, and are cleverly strung together with contextual folkloric lyrics. The rhythm pushes on as your inch closer to your next clue, and it’s hard not to get caught up in that momentum. Particularly, the track “Altamaha-Ha”  — which recounts a mother searching for her lost child in the wake of a tragedy — fills the space with a hypnotizing melody and rich church choir baseline.

As you barrel towards the climactic finale, every thread rewoven into the Grand Tapestry links back to the game’s central themes of grief, empathy, and family, and visceral imagery is used as an analogy for unresolved issues with heart-rending effect. Prospero’s story is a powerful one, and South of Midnight ends on a suitably-thorny note, which drives home the crux of its refreshingly sincere narrative. As well as remixing the nostalgic heights of the action-adventure genre, Compulsion Games has opted to tell a challenging story over an easy to digest one, a daring gamble that, for me, paid off. 

South of Midnight launches on April 8 for Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC.