2018 was a big year for Compulsion Games. The studio managed to launch its second-ever game and get acquired by Microsoft in the same year, ditching its indie status and officially becoming a part of Xbox Game Studios alongside Playground Games, Undead Labs, and Ninja Theory.
In the seven years since then, Compulsion has largely stayed out of the spotlight, quietly developing a mysterious new project, which, as it turned out, is South of Midnight, an action platformer that is steeped in the mythologies of the American Deep South. This is not the direction I ever expected the We Happy Few developer to head in, but after experiencing the new game firsthand, I can say that the studio has made something special.
I was already impressed with the game after playing a preview earlier this year. While the aspects that I was critical about haven’t changed much, the positives have only managed to shine more. Despite being a 10-12 hour experience, there’s so much to explore in South of Midnight, both in terms of the world itself and the heartwarming stories it shares.
With well over a dozen hours spent in-game across PC and Xbox Series X, I think I am ready to offer my thoughts on South of Midnight. One thing to note is that I’ve tried to keep spoilers to a minimum, with only some mentions of early campaign events being discussed in detail. These specific story points are already detailed in the game’s store pages and trailers.
Now, with the introduction out of the way, here’s my spoiler-free review of South of Midnight by Compulsion Games.
South of Midnight
South of Midnight is almost like a fairy tale. There’s a story involving plenty of magic, an epic quest through the wilderness, fantastical creatures, and lessons about growth. Even the loading screens are depicted as pages of a storybook covering the ongoing tale.
However, this isn’t a whimsical tale. Compulsion has gone for a much more serious tone with the actual storyline about traumatized people, lost souls, and depressing backstories. It’s an alluring combination - one that had me pushing through the game’s chapters just to find out the mystery at the end of each section.
The story follows Hazel, a teenager on a quest to find her mother after she goes missing in a flash flood. The modern setting quickly changes to a much more fantasy one, though. She quickly realizes there’s some magic in her for Weaving, an ancient power of mending spirits, though we get to use it for much more than just that. Compulsion doesn’t hold back on presenting this world’s oddness and folk legends. For instance, the first generous spirit who wants to help Hazel in her quest turns out to be a giant catfish who can also talk a good talk. The cast only gets weirder and more interesting from there.
Almost every chapter of South of Midnight focuses on a person — or something a little stranger — hurt a long time ago and Hazel’s attempt at mending the broken parts of their traumatized soul. The campaign had me wading through stories of bullying, child abuse, animal cruelty, and other tough subjects. This theme of delving into the trauma of individuals and helping them reminded me quite a bit of Double Fine’s Psychonauts series.
The environments Hazel must travel through offer playgrounds of different flavors to utilize her newfound platforming powers. The double jumps, glides, wall running, air dodges, and rappelling are a joy to use, with a good combination of floatyness and precision. I found the difficulty of the path to the main objective and surrounding environmental puzzles simple, but cleverly, it’s the side ventures that make things a little bit tricky.
I wouldn’t say any particular platforming section ever got difficult, but the side stuff was challenging enough for me to always have a crack at them, considering there are always upgrade materials for combat (seen below) and pieces of lore to read at their ends. Later in the game, Hazel also gains the ability to summon a childhood toy to traverse through smaller spaces, open doorways, and complete puzzles. It’s pretty cute, and I didn’t mind these sections, but it did break the fast pace of the rest of the game in an annoying way at places.
The game also uses a Dead Space-like system to draw a simple path towards the current objective’s end goal. For me, this was the perfect tool for finding hidden nooks and crannies to fill my need for uncovering secrets. Simply use the pathfinding button and go in the opposite direction. For completionists, the pause menu also displays how many hidden materials have been collected, a small but welcome feature.
Traversing the pleasant environments and solving puzzles with Hazel’s abilities make up the majority of the experience, but each level also has multiple combat arenas that must be completed. I call these the ‘beating the trauma out of you’ sections. It’s, unfortunately, a very ordinary affair.
Combat arenas
Almost every chapter has Hazel running into arenas that trigger a fight with some inky, nightmarish enemies with melee, range, and area damage-causing abilities. They can be fast, try to gang up on you, have large health pools, and hit rather hard, all depending on the difficulty level.
Our protagonist, of course, has combat abilities using her Weaving too. This involves pushing and pulling foes, converting one to your side temporarily, and area-affecting charge attacks and stuns, but with substantial cooldowns for each ability. As a result, most fights boil down to dodging enemies and hitting them back.
While serviceable, compared to how impressive I found the rest of the game, the combat felt a bit too standard, and I got the point of boredom nearing the last few chapters of the game. I feel like expanding these tiny arenas to cover larger portions of the map, utilizing platforming powers and elements for combat, or even giving free reign to abilities without cooldowns but with larger enemy forces could have made things much more interesting.
Increasing the difficulty doesn’t really help either because the underlying issue of being stuck in an arena with respawning enemies only gets more tiring as the chapters go on. There’s only so much you can do to elevate a standard dodge and counter formula. It works, but it’s nothing unique or special, unlike the rest of the game.
There aren’t many boss battles in South of Midnight, but they are fairly unique for each confrontation, and they also let Hazel use her traversal skills for greater effect. Lowering the massive health pools of bosses can get a little tiring too, but always with end goals in sight; they don’t fall into the same trap as standard brawls with enemies.
While there are plenty of difficulty presets as well as minute details you can tweak in settings, the accessibility options page specifically features the setting to skip all combat elements from the title. It’s not the oddest setting I’ve found in South of Midnight either, but it is there for those who want it. I recommend dropping the difficulty of breezing through the fights rather than using this option, though, unless it’s for an actual accessibility need.
Audio and Visuals
Hands down, this is the best sound direction I’ve heard in a game in years. Outside of just the fantastic voice work and environmental sounds, the soundtrack is an absolute joy to listen to. Unique Southern-inspired tracks — described as “soulful blues” and “lively honky-tonk” by the developer — slowly drip into every chapter, ebbing and flowing in the background depending on the ongoing gameplay sequence.
Near the finale of each story arc, the main vocals kick in just as the instruments draw attention to themselves, all complete with lyrics that match what has just happened in the storyline. It’s fantastic. Astoundingly, an in-game setting even lets you disable those main vocals and only keep the instruments and background vocals. This is not an option I’ve seen in other games.
Everything from platforming to combat, almost every ability that Hazel uses has a chorus of voices and whispers in the background that liven everything. The voices are more like companions urging our heroine in the quest than something like the manifestations heard in Senua’s Saga. Even the objective direction-seeking ability I spoke of before has whispers calling out Hazel’s name from the correct route in an inviting tone. I prefer this in-universe method of communication so much better than a gamified pinging system.
South of Midnight is also absolutely gorgeous. The first half of the game moves you through different, still mostly flooded, biomes. Overgrown, uprooted, and spindly legged trees litter this landscape, breaking apart the water that has swallowed the region following a massive flood. There are plenty of signs of civilization, but almost everything you find is abandoned, upside down, or floating away. The second half moves through actual forests and deeper parts of the
This isn’t some post-apocalyptic game, but the disaster vibe and the focus on nature’s ability to wipe the slate clean is certainly visible in many places. The developer has done well to include high-ground areas in almost every chapter to show off the landscape at some point in the level, offering a breathtaking view of what you’ve passed through. Unfortunately, the screenshots I’ve embedded into this review don’t do the game much justice. It shines the brightest when in motion.
Animations are a massive part of how immersed I get in a game - that doesn’t mean every game needs to have high-budget mo-capped characters, only that they have well-directed and clean animations that do not distract from the experience. South of Midnight achieves this exceptionally well. Everything from characters and the sparkle of magical elements to the colossal catfish and wildlife all flaunt the large amount of care that’s been put into the game by the developer.
I should mention that some animations can be a little jarring to witness at first due to the stop-motion effect that’s been implemented. This is a talking point that comes up whenever the gameplay is previewed by audiences, too. However, Compulsion has added an option in the settings to disable this feature and let animations flow smoothly while in gameplay – cutscene stop motion effects will still apply.
Even the stop-motion effect has largely grown on me. I kept the option enabled from the beginning, and I feel it does add something special to the experience, making the stylized graphics for characters and wildlife stand out more from the background, offering an old-timey or fairy tale-type feeling.
On PC, I ran the game at 1440p on my Lenovo Legion 5 Pro, housing an RTX 3060 Laptop GPU with 6GB VRAM, an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H CPU, and 16GB of RAM. Despite being an older generation graphics card, the 3060 had the game running at Ultra (everything except textures) at 50-60 FPS in the first few chapters with DLSS set to Quality. The levels did begin chugging a little later, though, dropping to 30 FPS sometimes just as the environment density and effects grew more complex.
Of course, the settings page has numerous options to tweak the visuals and gain more performance. Nvidia’s upscaling tech, DLSS, is included alongside frame generation to help with gaining more FPS. Unfortunately, I did not see AMD or Intel upscaling as options, at least in the pre-release build I was running for the review. I also went through the same levels on my Xbox Series X with a 1440p panel to find out if there are any frame rate issues but found none. The 60 FPS target that Compulsion wants to hit on the console at 4K seems to have been achieved.
Conclusion
I don’t know if Compulsion will return to this Southern American folklore world specifically for its next project. Still, as long as it can deliver quality material like this, I don’t care what region of the world the studio focuses on next.
South of Midnight is a feast for the eyes and ears through its entire run, with almost every aspect of the game oozing quality and attention to detail. Everything from the otherworldly characters and addicting soundtrack to the delightful platforming was a joy to experience. Moreover, its themes of diving deep into the unresolved trauma of individuals had me thinking of the Psychonauts series quite a bit as well. This is more of a fantasy and magic take on the subject, though.
The only part of the game that didn’t feel unique to me was the combat. The recurring fights that happen in tiny arenas were serviceable, but they can get a little tedious, especially during long play sessions.
Even with the slightly underwhelming combat that takes up a chunk of the game, South of Midnight is a must-play in my eyes. Compulsion Games has delivered a captivating world full of wonder that also hides pain under its surface. With its amazing characters, gorgeous visuals, and vibrant soundtrack, South of Midnight is a hard game to put down.
South of Midnight launches on April 8, 2025, on PC via Steam and Microsoft Store, as well as Xbox Series X|S, with a $39.99 price tag. It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate (with cloud play) and PC Game Pass on the same day. Xbox Play Anywhere support is confirmed, too. Those pre-purchasing the Premium Edition can jump into the game five days early, starting on April 3, 2025.
This South of Midnight review on PC and Xbox Series X was conducted on pre-release copies provided by Microsoft.
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