South of Midnight is "10 to 12 hours" long because its story unfolds within a single day: "There's a kind of urgency to it"

South of Midnight developer Compulsion Games has revealed the action-adventure game's runtime, with the story taking place in the span of a single day.

"It's 10 to 12 hours," gameplay director Jasmin Roy tells GamesRadar+ of the average time it will take to beat South of Midnight's 14 chapters. "That was kind of the target, I think, [though] maybe a bit bigger than we thought, but it is pretty much in the ballpark of what we thought at the beginning. We don't like to necessarily put numbers on it."

"We always knew it was going to be a game that had a momentum of narrative," Roy says of the Southern Gothic adventure, with the game encompassing "a 24 hour period which also informed us of the kind of scale of the world we wanted to build. Because, you know, you're trying to find your mother. She disappeared. There's a kind of urgency to it that makes it feel like we do want you to explore, but it needs to support the momentum of Hazel's journey."

So, South of Midnight is "a day in the life of Hazel – a very strange day," according to Roy. In terms of how this single day pans out, art director Whitney Clayton describes it as "a linear game with some bits of exploration through the sections, and you go through various different types of locations in the deep South, all the span of one day. So you start your adventure in the morning, and it ends at midnight."

This means the game will take players through different environments as the clock ticks forward, each with "their own really specific mood, which would then reflect the type of story being told in that moment." Compulsion has already outlined four biomes in a half-hour documentary that premiered last year – the swamps, the Delta, the Appalachians, and a New Orleans-inspired area – but it's news to us that she'll be encountering them all across such a snappy timeframe.

Despite its shorter length, the reverse-engineered 3D modelled world of South of Midnight was no simple feat to develop. According to Roy, "it's [taken] around five years, I'd say, from the first few concepts." He references the extensive research, planning, and iterative prototypes throughout pre-production phases, though "the bulk of the game has been made in the last three years."

South of Midnight is one of our most anticipated games of 2025, and there's more where it came from