On April 3, 2025, Xbox Games Studios released Compulsion Games’ South of Midnight. Staged in a fictional Southern town, the game follows a young Black teenage girl as she hunts through the detritus after a hurricane sweeps her mom in their trailer down river. She seeks to find out her mother’s fate, along the way discovering a lot about herself, her family, and her whole community. The game is well-rendered, but not so well that you feel like you are watching a movie. This is a nice approach if you are more interested in the gameplay than the story, but not so digitized that you feel like you are watching a badly-drawn cartoon.
There is a narrator who sets the tone of the game at the beginning and the end of each chapter. Original music (by composer Olivier Deriviere) is as much a part of the adventure and the storytelling as anything else. More than one of the songs will surely give you an ear-worm that will take days to get out of your head.
The game has different modes that support all levels of interest in gaming from none to expert, and along the way there are objects that provide context but in most cases the story is not modified should you not discover some insight. Occasionally, there is a hidden pathway or room that you need to locate to continue your journey, but there is a thread that allows you to find what you need and to keep you on task.
In battle sequences, there are different creatures or haints that you must defeat to clear the stigma that pervades the community. In the game, stigma gives form to the pain or suffering in a place as a result of the secrets that abound. Each chapter allows Hazel, the protagonist, to uncover a secret about herself or her mother that helps her understand the strange things she has started to see. It turns out that she is a weaver and with that designation comes abilities, different tools, and responsibilities. Her late father and the circumstances around his death and the trials and tribulations of his life weigh heavily on what has happened and will happen as Hazel searches for her mom.
The player part provides the opportunity to hunt tools to manifest your weaver abilities like your hooks or items that increase your endurance or allow you to magnify your attacks or defensive capabilities. The movement mirrors the jumping from surface to surface as if you are Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, the wonderful swinging in Just Cause, or the potentially treacherous wall running from Titanfall. At times, all these movements are necessary to flee the big bad that is always there, propelling Hazel to the next obstacle. Clearing stigma generally requires clearing haints and other ghoulish creatures from an area and then there are the boss battles. For the mildly coordinated, the developers have made sure that there are hours of fun to await you adjusting to you defeat your foes, or you can change the difficulty or game options that allow you to bypass both.
South of Midnight is a wonderful mixture of stories told by the campfire and the video game battles that have you staying up way too late to conquer. The developers have ensured the ability to do as little or as much as you want to enjoy this multi-faceted experience. Now, if you have a phobia of spiders or gators, this is probably not the game for you. Also, if Hurricane Katrina still pays rent in your psyche you may want to skip this one as well. Otherwise, put your running shoes on and get going!
Check out some of our gameplay here:
South of Midnight is available on Steam.
