Whether you adored 2013 indie darling Contrast or were disappointed by 2016’s We Happy Few, it’s hard to argue that developer Compulsion Games doesn’t swing for the fences and try new things. After spending a day with the team taking a closer look at South of Midnight, it’s clear that innovation streak hasn’t slowed down one bit, and I went from mild curiosity to full-blown hype for this unique action-adventure game. Though I didn’t see anything that blew my socks off in terms of gameplay, it stood out in just about every other way, especially with its striking setting, curious stop motion animation, and stellar original soundtrack. That all left me eager to see more and play it for myself.
South of Midnight is set in a part of the world we don’t see too often in games: the American deep south. It isn’t just a backdrop for you to fight monsters, but rather the entire premise on which the adventure sits, with characters, folklore, and mythical creatures all drawn from real-world places and stories. During a hands-off demo, I saw flooded wetlands after a recent storm, mosquito-riddled swamps, and ostentatious Antebellum manors, each infused with elements of fantasy I’d not seen anywhere else.
These exotic places fit nicely with an equally unusual art style that emulates stop motion animation – yet another rarity in games, and one that would be sure to fog up Guillermo del Toro’s glasses. The whole thing looks like it was ripped from the pages of a children’s story book, which I really dug. It definitely took some getting used to at first, as the jerky movement might easily be mistaken for framerate wonkiness to the untrained eye, but it also adds to the otherworldly fantasy charm that South of Midnight oozes.
It can sometimes be pretty difficult to understand how exactly a game will feel to play during a hands-off demo, but in the case of South of Midnight touching a controller wasn’t necessary to recognize its best quality: its music. Each level has you facing off against a cryptid from deep south folklore as southern-inspired blues and jazz intensifies and the lyrics help tell the story of whatever beast you’re tracking down. In the case of this demo, it was an enormous alligator called Two-Toed Tom (based on an actual legendary creature). At first the music started slow with a slick bassline and a choir whispering “Two-Toed Tom,” but by the time we unraveled the mystery of the mythical gator and progressed to the final confrontation, the chorus reached a fevered pitch, the words of which told the tale of poor, old Tom.
All of these components – the setting, art, and music – set South of Midnight apart in a major way and made me extremely excited to get my hands on it. The flipside of that is that what I saw of gameplay offered far less originality. Combat looked like a pretty by-the-numbers system of dodging, striking, and finishing moves that are quite well-trodden, and exploration relied on double jumping, midair dashing, and grappling to distant locations that are pretty standard stuff. The boss fight against Two-Toed Tom, for example, was a very repetitive process of leaping over telegraphed attacks and whaling on the gator when he presented obvious opportunity to do so.
Compulsion Games says that while they expect gameplay to be engaging, it isn’t nearly as much of a focus as the story, music, and other elements they’ve clearly put the lion’s share of work into. Instead, they’re keeping levels relatively short for a ten-ish hour story and putting all of their chips into South of Midnight’s exceptional presentation and worldbuilding, and so far I’m convinced they just might pull it off. After all, even without playing it myself, it’s made a great impression on me. Here’s hoping it delivers when we finally get to play it next year.
