Few still-perfectly-decent games have felt as desperate a disappointment as this one. South of Midnight is gloriously pretty, a game of sumptuous environmental detail and rich attention. It’s one of the best sounding games I’ve played in an age, with a highly unique, artfully implemented original score woven into its sound design. And it’s also extremely well acted, a cut above the vast majority of video games in emotional authenticity and heft. But goodness me can it get tiresome to play.
South of Midnight reviewDeveloper: Compulsion GamesPublisher: Xbox Game StudiosPlatform: Played on Xbox Series X/SAvailability: Out 8th April on PC (Xbox, Steam), Xbox Series X/S (Game Pass)
The premise here in South of Midnight, the latest from Canadian studio Compulsion Games, who last released We Happy Few in 2018, is that you are a freshly minted Weaver. Weavers are rare, magical warrior-healers of the deep South – but crucially, their healing powers are less physical than metaphorical. Weavers heal the world of generational trauma, and they do this, largely, by battering the absolute life out of about six to twelve enemies in small combat arenas arranged in groups of four.
We’ll come back to the issues with that, because thematically this is all genuinely lovely stuff. South of Midnight builds itself upon a collection of largely under-told, underappreciated fairytales and snippets of Cajun, Creole, and other deep south folklore. All of these are woven – pardon the pun in advance – into a quite literal tapestry of thread-based themes. Healing an area, or being, involves clearing ‘tangles’ and untying ‘knots’. Enemies, when you defeat them, can be ‘unravelled’ for a trickle of healing and small cooldown boost. Abilities are appropriately named, as are protagonist Hazel’s weapons, and indeed characters. Hazel’s mother, who you spend the entire game in search of after she’s swept away in its opening hurricane set-piece, is named Lacey.
This unfolds through chapters of a kind of fairytale storybook, and as far as audio-visual renderings of fairytale worlds go, South of Midnight’s is genuinely one of the very best I’ve encountered. The environments are frequently gorgeous in their maximalism, playing with proportion and scale in that nauseating way all the best, properly authentic fairy tales can. You’ll quickly move from swirling gnarls of outsized bramble to looming, slanting country mansions – so many spooky mansions – and sickly-sweet garden blossoms. You’ll regularly be blasted with godly beams over grand vistas – you could play this with sunglasses at times – but just as often drawn to one particularly well-formed bush, or a cluttered kitchen, rusted-out sign, damp outdoor sofa or patch of flouncy, faded wallpaper.