South of Midnight Review – The Master Weaver

When I previewed South of Midnight earlier this year, I walked away pleasantly surprised. With just a glimpse of Hazel’s story in a Gothic fantasy version of the American Deep South, Compulsion Games convinced me they were working on something full of creativity, personality, and charm.

After completing the roughly 12-hour story campaign these last few days, I would describe South of Midnight as a flawed but fun ride that captures the beauty and essence of Southern fables and culture. Here are more thoughts on what you can expect from this upcoming title.

Prospero’s Last Hope

South of Midnight is a third-person-perspective action-adventure game set in a gothic, fictionalized version of the Deep South. The story is told in 14 chapters and revolves around the lead female protagonist and hometown Prospero native, Hazel Flood (voiced by Adriyan Rae), as she embarks on a life-altering quest to find her mom after they are separated during an intense hurricane.

While on her journey, Hazel meets a ghost weaver from the past named Mahalia and unlocks weaving abilities of her own. She also uncovers deep and dark family secrets and meets several mythical creatures with stories behind their origins. Hazel must use her newly acquired powers to navigate an ever-changing, stigma-filled world and mend broken bonds and spirits as she crosses paths with them and eventually reunites with her mother.

This storyline, penned by David Sears, achieves the goal of honoring the South. As an Atlanta resident of almost 20 years, I was drawn to trying out this game and seeing how they would capture Southern culture and folklore. Every character you meet, including Catfish (who also narrates the story between chapters) and others, performs effortlessly with smooth accents and swagger. This game also does a good job of expressing the importance of relationships and facing setbacks head-on instead of keeping these emotions bottled up inside.

My only real critique about the storyline is that it starts strong but begins to falter by the end. A mystery element is at play because Hazel is trying to find her mother while learning about her powers and the hidden secrets throughout the community. While you can expect a few twists that keep things interesting, one particular outcome is predictable, and the story ends abruptly in the final act. The game length feels appropriate for what you get here, so it might not be a deal-breaker for some, but a stronger, more expansive ending would have wrapped everything up a little better.

Beautiful Visuals And Animation

South of Midnight is built entirely in Unreal Engine 5 and looks phenomenal from start to finish. Both the countryside landscape and world architecture match the Southern setting. The character models remain perfectly aligned with the signature art style used for the animation performances. If you aren’t a fan of stop-motion animation, you can turn this off for gameplay, but it will still be displayed during cutscenes.

Playing on an Xbox Series X console, I didn’t experience any known issues or performance hiccups during my entire playthrough. There will most likely be a day-one patch released that will address any problems that might be present in the game, but everything ran smoothly for me.

Gameplay Pros And Cons

In my South of Midnight preview, I stated that combat, traversal, and exploration are the three core pillars that define the overall gameplay experience. What I love about traversal is that Hazel can double jump, glide, climb, dodge, and wall-run throughout key moments in the campaign. You unlock these abilities as you naturally progress through the storyline, and these moves can also be combined in combat scenarios for more versatility when outmaneuvering foes.

Speaking of combat, Hazel acquires hooks early on in the game that can be used to hack and slash Haints after weaving, stand pushing, strand pulling, and stunning them when you enter a combat arena. Once their health bar is fully depleted, you unravel them by pressing the Y button. There are green healing items that you can use at any time in these areas, and successfully unraveling enemies can gradually restore your health bar.

While the combat gets easier as you continue to unlock skills and dodge attacks, the repetition of entering these combat arenas gets pretty old fairly quickly. There is some variation on the types of Haints you fight, which is good, but these fights happen far too often and make things feel a little stale and predictable.

In addition to Haints, there are some cool bosses to fight. Some of these bosses are considered mythical creatures that you have already seen in the trailers, and most of these fights require studying their attack patterns and hurling nearby objects at them to disorient and then hacking and slashing their weak point. Every boss fight ends with Hazel using the unravel ability to shut them down.

My one issue with the boss fights is that the final boss encounter is significantly weaker than the others and is more of a rehash of the same recycled combat fights I mentioned above. This adds to my frustration with how the final two chapters wrapped up. This point might not frustrate every player, but you can tell the difference between the bosses you faced before and the final threat you have to deal with.

Staying on the topic of mythical creatures, they aren’t all hostile. Like Benjy, a handful of them need your help and have traumatic backstories about how they came to be creatures. These stories are very well explained and require unraveling stigmas in various areas. After unraveling each stigma, you’ll uncover a key moment from their past and capture these moments in a special bottle. This culminates in a final race to a bottle tree where you are chased by a mysterious fog that growls at you until you reach the end.

This entire racing sequence is highly repetitive and happens far too often in the storyline. Certain obstacles are added to each mad dash to make them appear different, but the result remains the same. As someone who studied animation in college, I fully understand how time-consuming it can be and why using the same models and repeating animations keeps costs down. With that said, I think this is another repetitive sequence that may tire out some players, but only those who aren’t emotionally invested in the storyline and want to see Hazel finish her journey.

The final aspect I want to mention about gameplay is the attention given to exploration. There are several collectibles in the form of readable documents and lore around characters, creatures, and the world. Observing images gives further backstory details on other characters and fully illustrates their key life moments.

Hazel also finds her childhood toy, Crouton, which comes to life and can be used to explore areas that Hazel can’t fit into. This adds a bit of puzzle-solving to the game as you can summon Crouton and switch between both characters to get past an obstacle. In addition to exploring, Crouton can also be used as a weapon against Haints by being thrown at them and taking control over them temporarily to attack another Haint. This silent but effective toy is a nice, fun tool and adds more personality to a cast full of talent and charm.

Phenomenal Soundtrack

One of the best aspects of South of Midnight is the brilliant soundtrack composed by Olivier Deriviere. The music embodies the soul and spirit of the South with catchy vocals that will leave tunes in your head long after finishing the game. It pulls you deeper into the world, and the vibe aligns with every positive and negative that Hazel goes through.

As mentioned above, South of Midnight took me 12 hours to complete. The standard length is between 10 and 12 hours. If you are a completionist and want to find every collectible, you should be prepared to spend more time replaying chapters. Sadly, there is no new game+ option, and replaying chapters erases progress made past the point where you are replaying.

Final Verdict

South of Midnight is a good action-adventure game filled with memorable characters, an amazing soundtrack, and deeply rooted love and appreciation for Southern culture. While the gameplay combat can get repetitive, and the main storyline falters towards the end, Hazel’s journey is still entertaining and well worth the short time it will take you to finish.

This written review was based on a digital review copy of South of Midnight for the Xbox Series X provided by Compulsion Games and Xbox Game Studios.