South of Midnight is like a bowl of Southern gumbo served at a chain restaurant. It looks incredible. Smells great. It’s clearly been plated with love—gorgeous presentation, loads of style. But the moment you dig in, something’s off. The flavour’s flat. It’s missing that soul, that secret ingredient passed down through generations in a dusty old recipe book. It’s not bad—it’s just bland. And that, in a nutshell, is South of Midnight: a game with phenomenal art direction, killer atmosphere, and a banging soundtrack… but gameplay that feels undercooked.
Hazel Flood, our protagonist, is immediately compelling. She’s pissed off with her mother—and fair enough. Mama took too long helping other people while Hazel was left packing up before a storm hit, scared and alone. There’s a clear love between them, but it’s complicated by Hazel’s frustration at always coming second. What Hazel can’t see—at least at first—is the emotional weight her mother carries. The exhaustion. The quiet sacrifices. The compulsive need to help others, even when it costs her time with her daughter.
Available On: Xbox, PC
Reviewed On: PC
Developed By: Compulsion Games
Published By: Xbox Games Studio
Then the storm hits. Hazel’s home is swept away by floodwaters, her mother along with it. In a moment that’s both tragic and surreal, Hazel sprints after her drifting house, launching herself into a Southern Gothic fever dream. The game dives headfirst into folklore and fairytale, painting a world of magic, trauma, and talking catfish. Some creatures want to help. Others want Hazel dead. Typical Tuesday in the bayou, really.
Hazel is a “Weaver”, a magical being that can see the “strands” that weave together to make our universe. Using these powers she is destined to help heal broken souls by unravelling their “Stigmas”—psychic trauma knots with a touch of magical realism. It’s a clever concept, one that lets the game dip into themes like generational pain, forgiveness, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive.
And hey, sometimes it works. Hazel’s great. The voice acting? Excellent across the board. Some of the characters she meets are equally compelling. But for every strong emotional beat, there’s another subplot that fizzles out like a damp firework. The Benjy and brother arc, for example, insists Hazel “healed” them… but I was left staring at the screen wondering how, exactly. Did I miss a scene? A dialogue option? A side quest where I hugged them into emotional wholeness? The catchy musical number that narrates Benjy’s tragic life was almost enough to make me breeze back the lack of real closure. Almost.
Graphically, the game slaps hard. South of Midnight looks beautiful and employs an interesting stop-motion style. In other words, it seems like every few frames is missing, a visual quirk you might have seen in movies like Across the Spider-Verse or Puss in Boots: The Last Wish. The art style looks like Southern folklore brought to life through muddy bayou magic, earthy colour pallettes and exaggerated animations. It’s a little bit Tim Burton, a smidgen Guillermo del Toro, but with its own twisted charm.
The obvious flaw of stop-motion in a video game is that it can come across not as an artistic choice, but more like your frame rate deciding to go on a vacation. Is my ancient Nvidia 1080ti finally dying? Nah, it’s just the stop-motion doing its thing. Luckily, the game’s performance seems stable, which is great because I’m sure stop-motion and a low FPS would be horrible to look at. If anything, I actually wish the game had leaned harder into the stop-motion because I honestly didn’t notice it most of the time.
Oh, and you can opt to turn off the stop-motion if you want. Unfortunately, you can only turn it off in gameplay – cutscenes will still have those missing frames.
If the visual presentation is killer, then the soundtrack is glorious fucking murder (in the best way) committed by composer Olivier Deriviere. Hand this man an award or five, because his soulful, catchy tunes abound, from the quieter backing tracks that help set the mood as you explore swamps to the jazzy tracks that are unique to individual levels and encounters. Some tracks even have lyrics tied to specific characters, giving scenes a punch of theatrical flair. It’s the kind of soundtrack that deserves an award—and probably a vinyl release. The price I paid for the Premium Edition upgrade was worth it just to get my grubby-ass hands on the OST.
Diving into the gameplay, though? Mid. Sometimes, even less than that.
This purely a linear, guided game and I’m perfectly okay with that. It’s honestly refreshing to step back from the endless parade of open-world adventures that expect me to spend 80 hours on nonsense. The controlled nature of games like this should allow for smarter pacing, and for the most part that’s what South of Midnight manages to do as it brings you on a tour of thorny forests, creepy bayous and farmland.
The combat is aggressively mid. Hazel charges into battle with exactly one attack button and zero remorse. You’ll spam it like a ‘Buy Now’ button on a sneaker drop. That’s it. You can unlock some extra powers—possessing enemies, yanking them around—but they feel like seasoning sprinkled on stale meat. They’re boring, and have been done far better in numerous other games.
The game tries to ramp up difficulty by throwing more enemies at you, but the combat system clearly wasn’t built for crowd control. After a few hours, you’ll have seen every enemy type, every combo (all one of them), and every identical “arena” layout the game has to offer. Toward the end, I started sighing every time I stumbled into another sealed-off fight zone. Not because it was hard, but because it was predictable. On top of that, enemies all kind of look the same, and there are issues with reading enemy attacks, especially the basic Haint’s strikes. But on the plus side, I did learn that “haints” are an actual old south form of ghost, so that’s cool.
Platforming fares no better. It’s the same basic climb-and-jump setup we’ve had since the Uncharted days. Hazel can summon ghostly objects to climb and zip around a bit like bayou Spider-Man, but the game never asks you to do anything clever with those tools. No timing puzzles. No tight movement challenges. Just “go here, press button, move on.”
Exploration is barely worth mentioning. Despite some lovely level design, it’s mostly window dressing. You can collect “Floofs” (yes, that’s really what they’re called), the game’s currency for an upgrade system that really doesn’t have anything worth talking about.
The whole game adheres to a rigid structure that becomes repetitive after just a few chapters. A bit of platforming, another obvious combat arena where you are sealed in until everything is dead, a bit more platforming, a brain-numbingly simplistic puzzle, another arena and repeat until the credit’s roll. All of this always leads to a slightly open area where you unravel 4 bits of Stigma which lets you finish up the chapter, sometimes leading to a boss fight. Then you repeat it all over again about ten times.
Boss fights? A mixed bag. Visually and musically, they’re glorious. Each one looks like a fever dream and sounds like a Broadway number staged in Hell. But mechanically, they’re insultingly simple. Rule of threes is in full, unrelenting force. Dodge, hit, repeat. The final boss in particular was a narrative and gameplay wet fart. No tension. No payoff. Just… done. Although the overall narrative wasn’t anything amazing, the game’s southern vibes, characters and foot-tapping good music did have me eager to see the end, but when the credits rolled it just didn’t quite land.
Look, by their very nature games are repetitive and have repetitive structures. They are built around gameplay loops, after all. But the best developers can hide this fact, using interesting twists on established gameplay, narrative, presentation and other tricks to distract you from the repetition. Or, of course, the gameplay can just be so good that you don’t care about the repetition. But since the combat, puzzle solving and platforming in South of Midnight are weak, the rigid structure of the game becomes more and more pronounced as you play.
South of Midnight left a mark. Not because it plays great—but because it tries to say something. About grief, about legacy, about rhythm and soul. It doesn’t always hit the mark, but it tries. It’s a shame the gameplay couldn’t keep up with the vibe. It just needed a bit more time put into the gameplay and a bit less into everything else. But then again, if Compulsion did that, South of Midnight wouldn’t be anywhere near as interesting as it is. But if Compulsion Games ever make an animated film? I’m first in line. Preferably with a proper bowl of gumbo.
And to all my southerners out there, I’m very sorry about the terrible gumbo metaphors. But not sorry enough to take them out.
#South #Midnight #Review #WGB
