South of Midnight review: Southern Gothic blended with fantasy in a tightly woven action-adventure

It's the year 2025 and having a game with a Black woman as its lead still feels like once in a blue moon. But thankfully that is something that Compulsion Games gets so very right in South of Midnight. Hazel Flood is a breath of fresh air - smart, capable, vulnerable and empathetic, and a weaver of magic to boot.

I find it hard not to compare her portrayal with Frey Holland in Forspoken, incidentally the last time a major blockbuster game featured a Black female protagonist. Even then, the two games feel like polar opposites in their approach. Instead of a bloated and empty open world, South of Midnight is a tightly woven linear action-adventure with fully hand-crafted levels and sequences; rather than chasing next-gen photorealism, it opts for a unique aesthetic that mimics stop-motion animation; and while the other fully transports you to another fantasy world that you never really invest in, South of Midnight's surreal world remains rooted in reality with stories that speak to the heart.

You find out more about South of Midnight's visual design in my interview with the game's art director and animation director, and I touch on it more in this review.

Southern delights

Set across more than a dozen chapters that unfold like pages from a fairytale book, South of Midnight is about Hazel's journey to rescue her mother after a storm from a hurricane washes away their mobile home. Before that however, even in just a few minutes of dialogue, it really does a wonderful job in establishing their relationship and tensions. There's a natural and authentic flow to their speech, neither tiresome Whedonesque quips nor poor stereotypes of Black characters from the Deep South.

Made in Unreal Engine, it's also an incredible showcase for the expressive textural hand-crafted aesthetic that captures the effect of stop-motion animation, even though everything feels smooth once it cuts to gameplay. It all looks extraordinary, especially when you've got the mix of the whimsical, from giant talking catfish to a childhood ragdoll puppet that comes to life, with the variety of locales in the Deep South, as Hazel's journey takes her from the swamps to the mountains, dilapidated shacks to fancy houses.

A recurring theme is that these places are also filled with past trauma, manifested as dark Stigmas that also cause dark spirits called Haints to appear. Hazel also has the ability to see memory echoes, showing visions of the past, the objects from those memories she can even materialise into being in the present, a rather fancy way of creating platforms.

There's a lot of making metaphors literal, so as a weaver, Hazel's magic comes from wielding actual weaving tools such as a spindle and distaff, deep-rooted pain manifests as sharp thorns in the environment, and you bottle up painful memories with a magic bottle. While I do appreciate the image of cursed thorns, there's definitely an over-reliance on them as environmental traps. Perhaps they're too effective because I could feel physical discomfort as I time my movements to avoid the plants that shoot out long sharp thorns in intervals.

Past isn't past

As wondrously surreal as South of Midnight's world is, playing it is a more familiar and conventional affair. In many ways, it feels like a throwback to single-player action-adventure games from previous generations, as you climb across as many ledges as Nathan Drake and squeeze through many narrow gaps. Yet I also find it refreshing that it does away with a lot of bloat from modern games, rarely diverging you off the path save for the occasional lore pick-up or 'floofs' used to upgrade your abilities.

What does undermine this are the combat encounters with the Haints themselves. They remind me of the Hiss in Control – despite being introduced to different types over the course of the campaign, they all have the same dull aesthetic and palette, and each time you reach a Stigma you're locked into a combat arena a bit like Devil May Cry but where the combat is merely serviceable rather than something you feel compelled to master.

It's also why I actually welcome Compulsion's decision to include an option where you can simply choose to skip combat. I had no regrets doing this from the midpoint onwards as I was simply more keen on the rhythm of traversing a level. Double-jumping gliding and wall-running may also be pretty familiar now but that doesn't make it any less enjoyable, especially when they're combined to make up occasional intense chase sequences, usually in the lead-up to a boss.

Unlike the by-the-numbers design of the Haints, bosses are built up really well over whole chapters. Besides being giant nightmarish creatures, you also learn their backstories that aren't just tragic but often quite harrowing, as Compulsion doesn't shy away from sensitive subjects that affect children, including neglect, abduction and physical abuse. Evidently, the studio didn't just study Southern Gothic folktales but Guillermo del Toro's approach to humanising the monstrous (fittingly, del Toro is also a fan of stop-motion animation).

While the fights go on a bit longer than I'd like, the different phases are made all the more special as they build to a crescendo of toe-tapping music that brings in vocals of other Southern traditions, including choirs and jazz. What's perhaps equally admirable is when the game resists the urge to shoehorn in a boss fight for every chapter. Where some might consider it anticlimactic, I think it's a mature understanding that sometimes it's the message that matters most.