South of Midnight |

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios

Developer: Compulsion Games

Release Date: 04/08/2025

Available On

The south of the United States of America has a lot of culture. The region we refer to as “the Old South” extends from Louisiana to parts of Georgia, Alabama, and South Carolina. The black culture here is deeply rooted from ex-slaves, and it is a very proud community. South of Midnight explores this culture and does it tastefully, where most games caricature the “voodoo” aspect of the South. While that is in the game, it’s not the sole focus. You play as teenager Hazel Flood, who goes on a journey of self-discovery and exploring the roots of her own culture. The game begins with Hazel helping her mother pack and escape a dangerous flood. Her mother doesn’t seem to be in too much of a hurry and is more worried about her community than her own safety. This causes the two to fight, and her home gets swept away in the flood. As you search for help, you discover that you are a Weaver. Someone who can weave the threads of fate and fight Haints and Stigma, which are things that most folk can not see. You come across a giant talking catfish, various fun creatures, and a journey with a heartwarming story.

Of course, it’s not all perfect. While I did enjoy the story and wanted to see what happened next, there aren’t any huge twists or turns. The game runs for about 10 hours, so there’s enough time for a decent story, but the amount of detail the game puts in here doesn’t allow for quite enough time to really expand and become something really nuanced. We get to know Hazel quite a bit, and we explore her childhood, psychology, and her family history, but most of the other characters are secondary to this. The voice acting is fantastic, and the stop-motion animation of the characters looks great. Everyone looks like wood-carved puppets with a lot of detail. I found the story fun and interesting, but not memorable, but that’s okay. There are a lot of environments to explore and tonnes of platforming.

Sadly, there’s not a lot of exploration, as this is a very linear game. You stay on a single path with an occasional left or right branch for some “floof”, which is used to purchase upgrades on the limited skill tree. You can also find green figments to permanently upgrade your health. A lot of the mechanics in this game feel half-baked, and nothing is more underwhelming than the game’s combat. You only have a single attack button and just whale on enemies and knock their health bar down. You quickly (too quickly) unlock powers such as a push, pull, weave, and passive abilities to stun enemies, but these don’t add much to the combat. Enemies are damage sponges, and you just spam the special attacks without much strategy outside of sending your doll Cruton out to possess the most powerful enemies. When an enemy is down, you can untangle them and absorb some health. Each of these combat areas is walled off with a single health orb inside. You rinse and repeat for 10 hours. It gets incredibly dull very early on. Before Chapter 3 was over with, I was already checked out with the combat. There are no additional attack buttons, and the enemies, while all looking and attacking differently, don’t give you any reason to strategise attacks. Some enemies will turn yellow after so much damage and do an AOE attack, but that’s about it. I found them boring to look at and to fight.

One of the gameplay loops through half of the game is to listen to the stories of various characters that were close to Hazel. They manifested in the world as a large enemy that needs to get defeated. Sadly, you don’t take these enemies down God of War style. We are relegated to fighting some enemies, watching a scene, fighting more enemies, watching a scene and repeating. You need to fill your memory bottle just enough until the evil fog is triggered and a chase sequence ensues. This requires you to run and parkour through a long run. Once you place the memories in the bottle tree, you “save” that creature, and you move on to the next one. There is a small break with more platforming and storytelling about 2/3 through the game, and combat eases up a bit, but the boss fights are the only things that change anything up. These have repetitive cycles as well, but there’s something a little more thrown in to make it challenging, and they are great to look at.

Outside of platforming and the tedious combat, there’s not much else to this game. There aren’t any puzzles, which is a missed opportunity, and I feel Cruton is underutilised. You can throw him out and control him to explore burrows to find floof, but there’s not much to his areas except dodging brambles and walking up ramps. I feel the core action-adventure experience is here, and maybe a sequel could really fix a lot of these problems. Hazel is a great character to follow and play as. Her outfits change a few times throughout the game and look awesome; she feels like a powerful character without playing to stereotypes. I continued playing solely because of my investment in her, not the combat. The platforming was fun and had a nice flow to it, but some puzzles really would have added depth to this game.

Overall, South of Midnight has a strong foundation with great storytelling, a fantastic protaganist, and beautiful visuals, but the combat is seriously lacking. The repetitious behaviour of the attacks, the basic skill tree, and the boring gameplay loop of arena and platforming make me wish there wasn’t any combat in this game at all. A single attack button and a few passive abilities just don’t cut it. The bosses are a nice change of pace and can be fun, but that’s it. There are no puzzles, and Cruton is a Clank-style sidekick that is underutilised. The current elements provide a solid foundation for what could become the next God of War, but let’s hope a sequel addresses these issues.