South of Midnight

I went into South of Midnight expecting a polished but safe Xbox Game Studios showcase piece. What I got was one of the most distinct settings in recent action-adventure memory, wrapped around gameplay that is serviceable at its best and frustrating at its worst. That tension between presentation and mechanics defines the whole experience, and knowing it going in will save you a lot of grief. The world is the undeniable star. Compulsion's fictional bayou county of Prospero is soaked in American Deep South folklore, and the studio clearly did their homework. You will run into creatures drawn from real regional legends: Two-Toed Tom, the Rougarou, Huggin' Molly. Each chapter is structured almost like a self-contained folktale, with a narrator (a giant talking Catfish named Crouton, who is every bit as great as that sounds) stitching the larger story together between them. The narrative touches on grief, family trauma, and the weight of history without feeling preachy or exploitative. Protagonist Hazel Flood is sharp, conflicted, and voiced with real emotional heft by Adriyan Rae. The stop-motion-inspired art style, which drops frames deliberately the way Spider-Verse does during action, gives every scene a handcrafted quality that no other AAA game is currently doing. As Hazel grows into her role as a Weaver, her combat toolkit expands from basic hook combos to a roster of spell abilities: Push to create distance, Pull to drag Haints into melee range (or snatch their own projectiles and redirect them), Weave to bind enemies in place and stack vulnerability for follow-up hits, and eventually Crouton himself, who joins the fight around chapter six and can stun or distract enemies mid-encounter. Fights take place in locked arenas with a single-use health sigil per room, and finishing downed Haints requires a separate Unravel animation that restores a sliver of health. On paper, the system has depth. In practice, the combat plateau arrives quickly: enemy variety is limited, the Unravel animation kills pacing, and without a lock-on by default the camera can work against you in tight spaces. Players who want tightly tuned action will bounce off this well before the credits. The game does offer multiple difficulty settings and even full combat-skip options, which is the right call given how story-forward the experience is. Traversal sits in a comfortable middle ground. Hazel's glide ability and wall-running make movement feel light and readable. Floofs hidden off the critical path feed a small skill tree for combat and ability upgrades. Level design is linear without being corridor-narrow, and a visible strand guide prevents you from ever getting genuinely lost. The platforming is low-stakes and approachable, in the PS2 action-adventure tradition, which either reads as charming or thin depending on what you showed up for. Runtime lands around 12 hours for a full playthrough, which is the right call for a game built around narrative momentum. It never overstays its welcome. South of Midnight is the kind of game where the things it does brilliantly, the setting, the chapter-based folk storytelling, the soundtrack (Olivier Deriviere scores each chapter's music with lyrics that literally narrate the action), and the voice performance, are so distinctive that they carry the weight of its rougher mechanical edges. If you go in expecting a combat-forward experience, you will leave disappointed. If you go in treating it more like an interactive folktale with action trimmings, it lands closer to essential.

Alex · Scout Team

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