South of Midnight Review (Xbox): Traumatic Beauty

Sometimes, there is media that comes out that is so focused on the darker side of life. Whether it’s a movie, book, or video game, sometimes it’s really nice to witness a story where everything is bad and somehow, there is still a light at the end of the tunnel. In the case of South of Midnight, I feel that is a strong case for why I enjoyed this game as much as I did. This game is filled with tragedy. Whether that is directly tied to Hazel and her family, or her learning about awful events that transpired in the past. Mix that story in with a beautiful art style and pretty good boss fights and traversal controls and you have a great game that deserves your attention.

So much hurt, so much healing

In South of Midnight, you play as Hazel, a recent high school graduate who is trying to find her mom after a hurricane blew their house away with her mom inside. While chasing the house on the river, Hazel starts noticing she can see threads in the air around her. For whatever reason, fate has decided that she is a weaver, someone who can use these threads to her advantage to reach new places and mend broken spirits. On her journey to locate her mother, she comes across many folklore creatures who are haunted by traumatic events of their past. Hazel uses the threads to try to heal them and let them move on either with their life or into the next one.

As you venture, you find notes of paper around the place that give background information for the horrible things that happened to that chapter’s folklore monster. I found these to be very interesting to look through, and hearing what Hazel had to say was always appreciated. It gave a level of worldbuilding that I would compare to the recordings found in Bioshock. As you get closer to the boss fight of that section, you learn exactly what happened to these people and the kind of grief that turned them into what they are today. I don’t want to spoil any of these moments because there was multiple that had me gasp in shock. The first instance of this, Benjy, really affected me, as someone who has an autistic brother that I took care of a lot growing up. It wasn’t to the point that I was ever close to crying, but the tales of the folklore at play here do a lot of heavy lifting for why I ended up caring about the characters in this world so much.

If I had one complaint about how the story is handled, it would be focused on how we never see the ending product of most of those stories. There are multiple instances where the murderer goes on with their life with no consequence. Sure, they have to live with what they did, but there were several times I was hoping to have one more conversation with the survivors of those situations to see how they would react to the information that Hazel came across, but we never get those moments, except for one brilliant moment. I can appreciate that the focus is on the victim, but there are small bits of the story that felt incomplete to me without that resolution from everyone involved.

Southern hospitality is a little different than what I imagined

Compulsion Games crafted a very interesting southern world here. Everywhere you go, you are greeted by wildlife, which will run around and watch what you are doing. While you will see a lot of thorns, exploding mushrooms, and water to be seen as obstacles, it’s what surrounds that stuff that sticks out here. One chapter, you are walking through a beautiful forest. Later on in the game, you move through a darkened swamp. You may be running down tunnels at the end of the day, but looking around you makes the world feel so much bigger than what you have access to. There were multiple times I found a high vantage point and just looked out in awe at how well the backdrops of these levels looked. One chapter has you literally run through a flooded pig farm, with all the nastiness you would imagine, and I was amazed at all of the farmland in the background.

There are moments you also get to look at the burrows the local wildlife have created. Hazel has a stuffed toy from her childhood that has come to life named Crouton. You can control him to get into small passageways, and while I never felt his moments ever added much to the enjoyment of the game, I appreciated a look at the homes for many of the animals you see outside.

I focused on the folklore monsters above, but there are quite a few other good side characters you come across. Catfish acts as the narrator for your look into the backstories and most of the in-between storybook sections that recap what just happened. He’s a story-obsessed person who is quite the gossip. I enjoyed his interactions with Hazel. While Hazel’s whole journey is focused on her mom, I actually found her to be one of the less interesting characters in this story. She’s a hard worker who goes out of her way to help children in need, which is great, but I’d be lying if I said I looked forward to learning more about her backstory when there were far more interesting characters littered in every chapter.

I’ll weave you a black eye

At the end of the day, South of Midnight is a video game, so while the story is deservedly the focus, we have a lot of gameplay. First off, traversal in this game is really fun. Throughout the game, you will slowly learn to double jump, zip to grapple points, wall run, and glide. Using these abilities, I never got bored of moving around obstacles, whether for main progression or checking side alleyways for collectibles. Every now and then, you will have a large section that tests your skills with the movement as a deadly fog chases you down. These were probably my favorite sections of the game as it felt intense.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the weaver combat, I was a little more down on this section of the game. When you are walking around the world and gathering memories, you will often come to small arenas with a knot inside. Almost every time you see one of these, you have to fight a few waves of enemies called haints. While there are a few varieties thrown in to try and keep things fresh, I never fell in love with these fights. In fact, I found them exhausting, and was just looking forward to clearing the area so I could move on. 

Haints are the manifestation of the hurt and negative emotions tied with that place. It makes sense when you’re gathering the backstories, but finding them out in the middle of nowhere always feels like Compulsion trying to meet some kind of quota for fight encounters. I wish there were a lot less of these fights in the game. They do nothing but waste time. If you have ever played Kena: Bridge of Spirits, it felt almost exactly the same as that situation with its fights.

While I wasn’t in love with the normal fights, boss fights in South of Midnight are much better. Everyone has you going against a large folklore creature that tests your ability to dodge their attacks and strike when you have the right opening. Sure, a lot of this comes down to memorizing their patterns, which isn’t quite that interesting, but I thought they were a lot better than the haint fights. Additionally, the soundtrack starts playing special songs that are supposed to be an important character explaining what happened and it was very cool hearing that while in a tense battle. It was kind of like being in the middle of a musical and I found it very entertaining.

Final verdict

In conclusion, I found South of Midnight to be a very enjoyable game that has a lot of value to it. Hazel is a strong protagonist, and the folklore monsters and their backstories take center stage as truly masterful storytelling. Boss fights and traversal keep things fun outside of cutscenes, but the fights with haints were tiring, at best. I can’t speak to the accuracy of how well Compulsion handled the material they used to create these characters and this world, but I think it stands up there with one of Xbox’s best stories from start to end.

South of Midnight was reviewed on Xbox Series X with a code provided by Xbox Game Studios. It is also available on PC.

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