In the past several years, Microsoft made some interesting studio purchases, but the one that surprised me most was always Compulsion. The most notable of their two previous releases was We Happy Few, a game with a stunning art style that, according to reviews, was dragged down by middling survival focused gameplay and bland use of procedural generation. Even though the consensus was that it was disappointing, it was clear that this was a talented studio that had potential for creating interesting worlds.
Now as a part of Microsoft, it feels like they’ve finally put all the pieces together with South of Midnight.
South of Midnight immediately caught my eye from the first reveal trailer. Much like We Happy Few, it has a strong visual hook, this time painting a gorgeous picture of the American Deep South with a wholly unique stop-motion inspired animation style. The game casts you as Hazel, a young woman who becomes a Weaver, granting her powers to mend broken spirits, after her mother and her home are washed away in a flood. What follows in the ten to twelve hour campaign is a magical realist, dark fantasy folktale that ties grand mythical creatures into a deeply personal family drama.
I can’t stress enough how much personality this game shows right off the bat. The look of the game is so unique, portraying a part of America that you don’t usually see in video games in a way you’ve never seen. It’s a game that excels on both a technical level and an art direction level, making for one of the best looking games I’ve seen in quite some time. The character models look and move like something out of a stop motion animated film, constantly reminding me of the fantastical worlds created by Laika’s movies, which is a great thing in my book. Whether you’re in a classic bayou made casually surreal with giant sized fruits in the background or passing through a dream-like New Orleans-esque city street, it always feels vibrant and full of life.
Not only does it look phenomenal, but the storytelling matches the effort put into the visuals. From the first interaction between Hazel and her mom, their relationship feels relatable and lived in. The drama in their immediate family is casually spelled out without feeling like forced exposition, investing you in the characters before we even get into any fantastical elements. When introduced, the mythology of the game is just as engaging as the family drama, and the game blends the two effortlessly. As a Weaver, you fight haunts, shadowy creatures that threaten the Grand Tapestry that connects all life. During your travels, you’ll find Stigma, the physical manifestation of trauma that has scarred the land. This Stigma is often related to one of the many mythological beasts that you run across around the fictional county of Prospero. A croc with islands on their back, an owl man, and a child-stealing spider-like monster known as “Hugging Molly” are among the many colorful creatures and characters you’ll run into, all with well-realized backstories tainted by tragedy.
The gameplay itself doesn’t feel as fresh or personal as the narrative, but it makes for a snappy and thrilling way to engage with the world. South of Midnight has a fairly familiar action-adventure formula, mixing platforming, traversal, and combat arenas between narrative beats. Oddly enough, the gameplay reminded me a lot of another Microsoft hit, Hi-Fi Rush, only without the emphasis on rhythm. Moving around the world rarely requires much exploration, but there’s a certain joy to the movement mechanics that make the traversal sections satisfying, if not always challenging. Wall runs, grappling hooks, timing based traps, and double jumps are all elements mixed together to make for fun travel, along with some Uncharted-esque climbing sections. You even have a little creature named Crouton that you can magically remote control to get into places too small for Hazel. It all feels refreshingly video game-y in a way that almost feels like a throwback to an older generation of consoles. At times the platforming can feel a bit loose, the jump always felt a little more vertical than I was expecting, but when it’s all clicking in place it works really well.
Combat has a few wrinkles to it, feeling crisp if not entirely unique. Being a Weaver affords Hazel some special powers in fights, all of which act on cooldowns that need to be managed throughout the fights. These add a bit of variety to the standard melee-based combat, giving you options to push, pull, stun and even possess your enemies. These abilities are doled out slowly over the first few chapters, which gives you time to get used to the combat, but also means that it takes a while for the encounters to start getting interesting.
By the end of the game, there are about a half dozen enemy types that are mixed and matched in the arenas, each with a distinct look and purpose in combat that allows you to assess and prioritize during your encounters. Each time you kill a monster, it leaves behind a little knot that you need to ‘unweave’ (all of the combat verbs are themed after fiber arts like weaving or spinning), which grants you a little bit of health. Overall the combat feels like it’s just good enough to be satisfying for the amount you’re doing it, but never really turns the corner into being something overly engaging that challenges me in a clever way.
South of Midnight falls into a compelling structure that drives the overall narrative forward while also telling great little short stories. On your search for your mother, you’ll run into these massive mythological beasts that are blocking your way in some fashion. To get past them, you need to remove the Stigma from the area and return the land to a more natural state. You’ll be alternating between traversing the environment and doing arena fights at each of these Stigma sites to clear your way.
Each time you unravel Stigma, you’re giving a ghostly recreation of the past that slowly unveils the monster’s past. Some of these stories are truly tragic, going to dark places as you gain empathy for these monsters in your path. After you clear all the Stigma, you do a quick chase scene where a sinister fog pursues you until you reach safety. These sections are where the movement mechanics really shine, giving you fun little obstacle courses to run through that keep you on your toes and require you to keep moving quickly to not get caught.
Afterwards, you confront the monster, and defeating them gives you a chance to mend their broken spirits. It’s a remarkably empathetic game, teaching you to look past what you perceive as “evil” and focus on healing rather than destroying. In addition to the great narrative beats, the boss fights are fun spectacles that change up the combat in fun ways. In between chapters, there are some gorgeous storybook animations that summarize the events in an extremely thematic manner, adding to the folktale nature of the tale being told. This whole structure makes the game feel like a good episodic TV show, giving you a self-contained story that wraps up, while also tying into and moving forward the main overarching narrative.
One thing I absolutely loved about the boss fights was that many of them came with beautiful songs that sang about the character as you fought them. These songs, like all the music in the South of Midnight, are incredibly well composed and worth listening to on their own outside of the context of the game. It’s just another layer of charm that enhances the mood of the world of Prospero, making for one of the most artistically cohesive experiences I’ve had in a long time.
The level design is mostly linear, with some small little offshoots that give you chances to gather more upgrade materials, which can be spent on improving your core combat abilities, or collecting little notes that add texture to the world. Occasionally these little offshoots have nice little traversal challenges, but they never feel like a hidden secret that you’re finding. There’s a Dead Space-like guide that you can bring up to make sure you always are on the critical path, and I often used it at a fork in the road so I knew which way was the ‘wrong’ way so I could go grab the upgrade materials that were off the beaten path. Given how lush the world is, I wish it felt more like actual exploration, but that’s just not the type of game South of Midnight is aiming to be, so it’s hard to hold it against them.
Given the game’s focus on narrative, South of Midnight very much feels like a game that wants you to beat it. The combat pushes back just the right amount without being super challenging (I think I only died a couple times), the linear level design is made very clear by the use of the pathfinding option, and there are several difficulty options to allow you to tune the challenge as much as you want. It also has a habit of always displaying a little tooltip to remind you of your abilities when you might need to use them, showing you the button for push when you need to blast away some debris or reminding you which button summons Crouton to explore a tiny tree hollow. It never feels condescending, but it does feel like the developers want to make sure to remove friction points for you in order to keep you moving through the narrative smoothly.
In a medium where so many stories are told about power or revenge, it’s so refreshing to have a story so focused on empathy and mercy. South of Midnight feels like a timeless folktale, weaving a narrative where the over-the-top tall tale elements are just as affecting as the down-to-earth character drama. The world feels truly alive, mixing the magical and the mundane while showing a part of America not often depicted in video games. Every character is bursting with charm, filling the world with a complex web of relationships. The game’s traversal and combat are tight and snappy, if a tad unambitious, moving you from beat to beat in a satisfying manner. This is the kind of game Microsoft needs in their Xbox library, and I’m eagerly anticipating whatever Compulsion decides to cook up next.
Review code provided by publisher. South of Midnight launches April 8 on Steam and the Xbox Series, as well as Xbox Game Pass.