South of Midnight is one of the few times I have seen the South so beautifully embraced in a video game that wasn’t a pure indie. While games like Norco brought players into the sinking suburbs of Louisiana, it’s rare to see the South tackled with the amount of pride and reverence that other regions of the United States receive. For developer Compulsion Games, the South is a living, breathing character as much as Hazel or the Catfish are.

During the media preview, I played through one chapter of the game, Chapter 3, which lasted just over an hour and a half. The story starts with Hazel and her mother preparing for a hurricane. But Hazel is left alone when her home is swept away by a storm, taking her mother, Lacey, with it. Hurricanes and their life-altering damage aren’t new in Southern storytelling, whether influenced by Katrina or Helene.

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Lost and alone, Hazel heads into the storm and unlocks her magical power, weaving. This power connects her to a long line of Weavers destined to help souls move through the world and process their pain. When she encounters Mahalia, a Weaver from the past, she begins to follow her spirit through the toxic waters of the hurricane, learning new abilities as new obstacles appear.

Chapter 3’s primary goal in this preview is to teach the players all the platforming and combat mechanics they will build on throughout the rest of the game. In this small section of South of Midnight, you meet a giant Catfish, find a tree that drops gorgeously rendered giant peaches, and encounter a storyteller who expands on the world around you.

 South of Midnight’s aesthetic vision is bold and beautiful but may be a hurdle for some. 

South of Midnight’s only issue will come from its bold animation style. To open the game, the player watches a stop-motion animated sequence. It’s a short but beautifully animated introduction to the world that Compulsion Games has built. Media-literate players will also take it as a primer for understanding how the game will be animated moving forward.

If a player misses the connection or chooses to skip the introduction, the way that Compulsion Games has carried stop-motion into cut scenes, action sequences, and even moments where you rest can feel like a bug and not a feature. Everything down to the texture in the character models and environments visibly captures the tactile nature of clay-made stop-motion, and in the game’s cinematics, they come to life beautifully.

Once you settle into the stop-motion, South of Midnight comes to life as a unique artistic vision realized in a 3D space that feels like you can explore in every direction. While the paths are primarily linear, the verticality and evolution of platforming always showcase the magic of the bayou. When we think of the South in pop culture, we usually think of caricatures, including the land. Here, the artistry is haunting and whimsical, transporting the player into the magic of the South that we know it to be.

The platforming itself, outside of what it lends to the game’s interesting beauty, is dynamic. It takes faithful platform building blocks like double jump, glide, and wall-running but imbues them with a signature style that feels great to play and watch. With five difficulties focused on varying combat difficulty levels, the platforming retains an inventive quality no matter which difficulty level you play on. Instead, the platforming requires you to read the landscape to find all the hidden rewards you use to level up your skills.

Force into avoiding cleverly placed thorn bushes and navigating homes left just above the toxic floodwaters; learning what you can traverse and what you can’t is a part of the game’s loop, and it keeps you invested. While South of Midnight uses traditional platforming building blocks, it also allows you to use your weaving magic to rebuild fragments of the past. This enables you to rebuild a staircase for a short period to complete a path.

While this is relatively standard across different platforming subgenres, how it’s employed in South of Midnight is just enough to differentiate it from others. What the game embraces as foundational elements of its game type, it differentiates in execution and artistry that makes it a wonder to play. The only issue that arises with the platforming is one easily fixed in a patch. Falling off a platforming path is a toss-up on understanding when the game will resurrect you. Will it be the spot you were just at? Or will it be something completely different, facing another direction and making you slightly disoriented in the process?

My only real issue with the stop-motion and the camera’s default setting to move with you is that it set off my motion sickness during combat. When I went to adjust my sensitivity settings (usually the only option I have available), I was met with the choice locked for the preview build.

I was worried that the vertigo would make me put down the game, and then I found the accessibility settings with many elements available to customize to reduce the issue. It was one of the few times in a game I could specifically target the aspects of play that put me at odds with the game. It wasn’t just removing motion blur but allowing players to remove the stop-motion effects altogether. Play is thoughtful in South of Midnight without ever eliminating challenges.

A Southern Gothic fairytale, South of Midnight understands the literary legacy it steps into. 

When we exit the gameplay and move into the narrative, South of Midnight’s Chapter 3 fits any Southern Gothic genre of storytelling. It is horrifying in its final reveal but drenched in folkloric whimsy that keeps it from instilling horror. Southern Gothic stories often explore the darkness and complexities of life in the South. It looks at what’s ugly about life in the region, explores it, and reviews the grotesque through magical realism often coated and informed by the spiritualism found throughout the South and Southern Appalachia.

But if I were to choose a quintessential Southern Gothic story, it’s Kasi Lemmons’ Eve’s Bayou. Set in a large home amongst the beautiful willows of the South, the story tracks social decay across one family and uses the supernatural to accentuate the darkness rumbling through the houses’ halls.

Ultimately, it’s about family and the darkness humans hold even when they’re meant to be there for each other. In the story, we get to experience we meet two brothers, Rhubarb and Benjy. One locks the other in a tree to be rid of the burden his love creates, and so the affected brother is taken by the land and becomes the tree itself. It’s a tragedy turned magical that links South of Midnight to its narrative genre. One familial tragedy becomes central to the fabric of the world we see, and that is how folklore is born.

With a finale to the chapter told through a folk song, it’s hard not to be swept away by South of Midnight’s approach to storytelling. It fits into a legacy built largely by literary greats like Toni Morrison, William Faulkner, and Tennessee Williams, expanded on in the film by John Huston, Kasi Lemmons, and Benh Zeitlin.

South of Midnight captures the dynamic element between the beauty of a setting, the darkness of the world, and the choices people make when moved by it. Thoughtfully weaving in themes of trauma collected in bottle trees most Southerners will know, the game has what it takes to join the greats within the literature from which it draws inspiration.

As a weaver, Hazel is a magical mender of broken bonds, tapping into the pain left behind by spirits. The tears that spring up in the world can cause it to rot. Within Southern Gothic stories, the festering rot of one bad deed is often what propels everything around it. Inspired by European Gothic storytelling, this American literary tradition is captured here with all of the idiosyncrasies of the American South and done so without feeling like a joke, uninformed by life here.

One of the ways that the rot is captured is through knots in the world that Hazel must undo. They spawn different enemy types, all pushing Hazel into different forms of combat. The combat itself is as expected from the adventure genre, primarily localized to one button that forms combos and uses the triggers and bumpers to use attacks that deal more damage or have special abilities like push, pull, and stun. But the combat isn’t nearly as interesting as how the enemies impact the larger world and fit within the narrative.

From the toxic water you must avoid in your platforming caused by the hurricane to the eviction notices on doors and the person you encounter who’s left behind, those small pieces create a narrative I want to see more of. While Hazel is on her own weaving quest, she encounters and impacts the world around her. Filled with Mythical Creatures inspired by and impacted by the land around them, it’s a fascinating take on something I have seen my whole life.

The South is a beautiful place if you only know which lens to look through. 

Where South of Midnight meets the darkness of Southern Gothic storytelling, it also captures the fantasy of a staple in depictions of the South in media, like Big Fish and Beasts of the Southern Wild. This game wears its inspirations on its sleeves but does more to honor them and the long tradition of tall tales and folklore that has kept them going. There is more to South of Midnight than just the gothic rot we fight as Hazel. The love and community are there in bits and pieces that we see as you explore the world and read up on the story so far in the lore.

The South is a unique place in America. It’s a beautiful place, a scary one, and a romantic region that has been built high by the communities that built it. When you look at the census, the South, for all the stereotypes about it, is home to the majority of Black Americans in the United States. It’s beautiful to see Hazel at the center of this story but, more importantly, to see her inspired by Mahalia as a call to the past captures the South in a way that those who live here do.

Authenticity cuts through South of Midnight in many ways, not just through the protagonist. From the bottle tree to being called boo hag to the quilts that have come to signify storytelling across generations in the South, there are pieces of life in the South present and shown as magical moments to embrace.

South of Midnight understands the tradition it fits into and the people it represents. If the rest of the game plays out narratively as Chapter 3 does, it’s fit to blaze a new trail for the South in video games. But even if it doesn’t, it can make one person see the South as a magical and gorgeous place when they think of it as one large backward section of the US to be ignored.

South of Midnight is available April 8, 2025 on Xbox Series X|S and PC, and day one on Xbox Game Pass.