South of Midnight review: "A spellbinding tale that struggles to find its rhythm"

There's a beautiful simplicity about South of Midnight. Told across 14 chapters of varying lengths, the broad shape sees protagonist Hazel exploring magic-infused biomes across the Deep South, encountering a plethora of not-always-friendly neighborhood cryptids on a dangerous mission to rescue her mother. With the help of "soft and floofy" ability upgrades (fittingly nicknamed "floofs") to strengthen her Weaver powers, Hazel first must battle and unravel the Haints standing in her path – malevolent entities, drawn to knotted strands of the invisible Grand Tapestry where human pain has been left to fester. Chuck in a boss fight and a couple chase sequences, then lather, rinse, and repeat until around Chapter 10.

This cyclical regimen should err on the side of tedium – and many times, it does. But Compulsion Games' stunningly rendered world of magic and wonder can be forgiven the sins of its stilted format. Powerful subplots and backstories prove the all-important scaffolding holding it all in place, revealing layers of meticulously researched history, supernatural lore, and Gothic iconography interwoven in a grand tapestry of its own. It goes to show that, while unlikely to become a genre trailblazer, South of Midnight shines brightest in its tiniest details.

Spinning a yarn

The world of South of Midnight is a deceptively massive one. Hazel's journey takes her from her Southern hometown of Prospero, into the Abysmal Swamp, across the Delta and the Appalachian Mountains, before landing in a distorted metaphysical realm resembling the swingin' streets of New Orleans – all within a single day.

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Instead of being governed by a sense of time ticking away, however, South of Midnight is framed as a storybook. Unseen hands turn the pages as Hazel or her companion, Catfish, bracket each chapter with a brief recap of events, turning the game into a story within a story. Being centered on folklore and urban legends, presenting South of Midnight as one such legend itself sounds clever on paper. In practice, however, it's my greatest gripe.

South of Midnight's chaptered format highlights pacing issues throughout, bringing the player's attention to how much or how little ground is covered in each. I spent five minutes in the fourth chapter compared to roughly two hours in the ninth, for example. Since South of Midnight has no side content or collectibles other than lore pages and floofs, many hidden behind short traversal puzzles easily spotted while taking detours, the imbalanced chapter lengths are impossible to ignore or explain away. This is only exacerbated by another pitfall of the storybook framing in how the narrated chapter summaries give far too great an impression of time passing.

South of Midnight takes place within a single day, and a seamless, uninterrupted narrative flow might have squeezed every minute out of it rather than saving all the action for the last four chapters. Consequently, the heavy-handed tutorialization between the first and seventh render them somewhat superfluous. It's the kind of narrative filler you'd expect from a much bigger game, serving to entrench a strict gameplay structure – explore, combat encounter, explore, boss fight, chase sequence – rather than develop Hazel's story in a meaningful way. In fact, it takes eight chapters for the second of South of Midnight's four biomes to be introduced – but thankfully, those eight chapters are an absolute delight to explore.

United by a curated artistic vision governing everything from tone to costume and intricately designed monsters with hidden stories to tell, South of Midnight's visual elements are ceaselessly impressive.

Painstaking amounts of detail went into this reverse-engineered 3D modelled world, the stylistic influences of stop motion claymation evident in the environments around Hazel – and Hazel herself, when idle – never disrupting the smooth, 60 frames-per-second experience (though they can be toggled off entirely.) You see the themes of history, pain, catharsis, and magic infusing every aspect, mechanical and decorative, and everything is a metaphor for something far more harrowing. Decaying shanty houses sit abandoned in the swampy bayou, overgrown and rusted over. Meanwhile, Hazel’s sneering grandmother Bunny lives in a grand old plantation manor, a looming reminder of scars left by the slave trade that never quite healed.

The largely same-y level design feels somewhat simplistic after your fifth chase sequence in a row, but Compulsion's prowess for environmental storytelling is what keeps South of Midnight front of mind long after the credits roll. This is a world haunted by pain, but it's also replete with magic. Urban legends and folk stories – "tall tales with hints of truth," as Bunny calls them in a lore page – play a part in forming the fabric of reality. It's through re-weaving this fabric and unknotting points of Stigma that Hazel heals people of their trauma, reunites lost souls, and brings peace to troubled areas – but first, she has to put 'em up.

Fight and flight

Like any good action-adventure, the relationship between the two elements is an interesting one in South of Midnight. Exploration is carried out separately from combat itself, with each combat encounter taking place in an arena-like clearing identifiable for the floating green health sigil in each. You can choose to jump in headfirst, or backtrack and try and find any floofs you might've missed if you'd like to upgrade your spells beforehand. The choice is yours; each biome is essentially one big traversal puzzle where all paths eventually converge.

Traversal itself is a beautiful experience. Each chapter comes furnished with original music, the lyrics often providing clues as to the nature of the cryptid or mythic monster you'll face at the end of it. While floating, dashing, and jumping across Prospero, the music may rise and swell to match the momentum of Hazel's movements, resulting in a beautiful flow state. Your brain switches off as you give into the fluid, platforming goodness, and let yourself get magicked away.

The spells Hazel uses to aid her traversal – push, pull, weave, and summoning her doll companion Crouton – have combat utility, too, though it's safe to say that not all spells are as useful as others. Crouton is one of the game's greatest delights, a cuddly and lumpy little fellow who's as cute as he is ugly. Aside from squeezing into small burrows (to the surprise of many a tea-drinking fox or rabbit) to clear Stigma or gather floof bundles, however, Crouton is little more than a gimmick. I suppose he is just a teddy bear – what other story is there to tell? – but I can't help but feel he poses a missed opportunity outside of possessing enemies mid-combat.

In truth, South of Midnight's combat could be more complex in general. There's a relatively low skill ceiling, with a simple ability tree to invest floofs in for much-needed powerups. It's possible to fully upgrade all of Hazel's spells in a single playthrough, and some of the more advanced upgrades have me making quick work of enemy hordes within minutes. Pulling a Haint toward me before hammering it with a basic attack binds it up, rendering it immobile and vulnerable and usually taking a single combo to defeat it. I quickly get the hang of how to deal with more complex enemy variants – Larval Haints can have their projectiles thrown back at them, while another that spits a stream of high-damage goo can be baited into attacking its fellow Haints.

It's a shame, then, that the final boss battle consists of nothing but four rounds of Haint attacks interspersed with dodging some AOEs. Compared to the complexity of earlier bosses that each had a unique gameplay quirk to them – Huggin' Molly might be my favorite, closely followed by the Rougarou – ending my South of Midnight journey on such a middling note feels more than a little tone deaf.

Ultimately, though, I've largely enjoyed myself. South of Midnight is a beautifully packaged, easily-digestible morsel of Southern Gothic mayhem that only stuck in my throat a couple of times. It won't move mountains for the horror community, nor does it stray far from the Xbox 360-era action adventure rulebook, but whatever South of Midnight lacks in innovation, it makes up for with unmistakable ambition.

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