South of Midnight caught my attention the second its first trailer debuted, captivating me with its stop-motion-inspired art style and a story and lore built on the culture and myths from the American South. Up to this point, developer Compulsion Games hasn’t said much about what the actual gameplay of South of Midnight is, so I was eager to check the game out when the studio offered a chance to see it in action. The demo was on the shorter side and, unfortunately, was hands-off, so I still don’t know how it feels to actually play South of Midnight. But from what I saw, the game most reminded me of my time with Kena: Bridge of Spirits–South of Midnight looks like an action-adventure game from the PS2 era: a far cry from Compulsion Games’ Contrast and We Happy Few.
In South of Midnight, you play as Hazel, a woman whose home of Prospero is hit by a hurricane. Learning she’s a Weaver, a magician-like person who can unravel the corruption affecting a place and suture the fraying ties of the community, Hazel sets off in search of her mother who was washed away during the storm. Hazel can use her magical weaving abilities to tear apart enemies, acrobatically flip through platforms, and solve puzzles. Each major arc of the story sees Hazel uncovering the legend surrounding a creature–sometimes an animal, other times a person–that has achieved larger-than-life, otherworldly status as their past traumas twist them into mythical monsters. Upon deducing how these creatures became what they are, Hazel is tasked with defeating them.
The setup looks a whole lot like Bridge of Spirits, with Hazel’s efforts to explore the trauma and backstories of the creatures that threaten her home resulting in the area being cleansed, much as Kena fought off the Rot and the lingering spirits of the traumatized individuals left behind. And like Bridge of Spirits, South of Midnight takes nods from a culture not often explored in video games–just in this case, it’s the American South instead of Bridge of Spirit’s Bali (a small province in Indonesia).
Similarly, South of Midnight looks like a modern-day take on the same type of gameplay Bridge of Spirits built on: that of the action-adventure game from the mid-2000s. The demo I watched saw Hazel use combos to take down mobs of enemies, platform between landmarks, complete optional challenges to unlock collectibles, and take on a larger-than-life monster in a boss fight. Again, I have no idea how the game actually plays, but in practice it looks familiar; it looks like a type of game I’ve played and enjoyed before. What I’m most curious to see is how the gothic-fantasy themes and Deep South setting inform the world design because that–for me, anyway–is what’s going to set this game apart from its contemporaries.
Hazel is a Weaver, using magic that emulates the act of weaving thread.
“Where the South really influenced the gameplay was mostly across three things,” game director Jasmin Roy told GameSpot. “It was the world itself, how we were going to go through various regions that have different biomes, which means in level design, and different spaces to navigate–all these buildings that are abandoned, things like that. And we went like, ‘It would be cool to be able to jump on [buildings] and move around and do things. And that combined itself with magical realism–how you’re going to have powers to interact with the fantasy element of the settings. And when you combine those two things together, you start going, ‘Okay, I’d like to be able to jump, move, use the strands, manipulate objects, create objects with that fantasy of everything being this traditional arts and craft of weaving.’ And then the third thing I know that really influenced [the world] was the mythical creature, folkloric, the giant thing. So that informed how we built the world and how we created mechanics to go around them.”
Roy described South of Midnight as a more linear experience, with the player moving forward from one area to another. “The region informed all the rest [of the game],” Roy said. “And that’s how we ended up creating a feature set and the gameplay loop and how it works. That’s why we think it’s a unique journey and it’s all built as a journey. So you are asking, ‘Oh, is it the same gameplay loop?’ It does fluctuate because it is narrative-driven. So most of the time with the creature, it will play out with, ‘Oh, I need to learn their story to go on.’ But there are also other different beats of narrative events that will happen because dealing with creatures and regions is not the only thing you’ll do in the game to progress. There are other events to be discovered once you get the game right.”
Two-Toed Tom is a crocodile whose past has transformed him into a monstrously large creature.
“Some of the [gameplay] loops do repeat, so I just want to make that clear,” studio head Guillaume Provost said. “The experience [of meeting] the creatures pass through multiple beats and [culminate with] filling your bottle–those are loops that do repeat themselves that you do recognize throughout the game’s structure itself. But to Jasmin’s point, you don’t always fight the creatures–there’s no fighting. There are different types of encounters that you’ll get throughout the game that kind of celebrate different beats that have to do with the story and/or contact your problem that the creatures are going through.”
“Some of [the creatures] are going to focus on traversal,” Roy said. “Some of them even focus on narrative beats. It really is a mixed bag. Some of them will evolve into direct confrontations, like we saw with the demo today. But there are other features that do focus on traversal. We have some of that, and we also have some that focus on that. I don’t want to reveal them too much because I really think they’re really cool. But yes, the idea was that even though the loop was going to be about experiencing their story and interacting with them and beating them, depending on which type of creature you’re going to encounter, fighting wasn’t always the right word. [Fighting them isn’t] always the right thing because [the creatures] do have wildly different stories of things that happen to them.”
Some of the mythical creatures Hazel encounters were once human.
“You as a player are there to resolve their trauma or help move past the situation that they’re in,” Provost continued. “So in certain cases, when it made sense from a narrative [standpoint], structural point of view, there is a combat sequence. For example, when Two Twod Tom eats your house, you get really angry. There’s a setup for it that creates the conflict. Hazel, the main character, is not roaming around trying to kill mythical creatures. That’s the key takeaway. When there is conflict, there’s conflict that’s instituted for a narrative construct and reason that makes sense. But in other cases, there are problems with the creature that don’t involve conflict. It’s better resolved either through narrative [choice] or puzzle-solving or platforming or other types of challenges that actually have to do with specifically the issues of that creature.”
How the studio spoke about trauma was the one qualm I had about the game at the event, given how often “resolve” and “fix” were tossed around. The preview event didn’t include an example of how Hazel would do this and the developers were vague on the subject, but I’m always wary of folks talking about trauma as an easily fixable issue when it’s regularly an ongoing process. And taking into account that South of Midnight is taking inspiration from the Deep South, a place of long-lasting intergenerational trauma that rarely is just addressed and “fixed,” I’m looking at this specific part of the game with an air of caution. Admittedly, the rest of the event showcased that Compulsion has shown a tremendous amount of respect and care toward other aspects of the American South in terms of ambiance, landmarks, music, and language–South of Midnight sounds like a trip to the Deep South–so it’s just as possible that the studio has handled the themes of trauma with similar care and simply isn’t ready to showcase how those storylines play out yet.
“They’re not statements on the here and now,” art director Whitney Clayton told GameSpot in regard to South of Midnight’s mythical creatures and stories of trauma. “They’re folktales; they’re more universal. In this world, they’re legends that [Hazel] ends up coming across after she starts her journey. And then the more she sees, the more it stops becoming surprising for her, and that’s the magic-realism angle. Whereas after she leaves the most grounded area, which is where she’s from, this little town, her home, and she starts going into what we call the focal arc of the Deep South, and she starts meeting these characters and communities, those people just accept these creatures around them. And those creatures, their story is really tied to the land, to the history of that land. And they would have more, I guess you’d say, high-level allegorical messages behind them, if that makes sense.”
Having now seen a smidge of what South of Midnight has to offer, I’m mostly excited–I loved Kena: Bridge of Spirits so another game akin to that is right up my alley–but I do have some worries about the story that I hope to see addressed. South of Midnight is set to launch for Xbox Series X|S and PC in 2025.
