South of Midnight: Songs of the Soul
It isn’t rare for a game to tell a story, or to feel like it’s taking you into a different world. It isn’t even that rare for a game to feel like a piece of art, be it one that’s visually unique, or one that takes risks with the medium in ways nobody has before. But it is rare that a game truly feels like it’s bearing a soul to the player. There’s no way for me to describe South of Midnight other than to say that it has a soul like no other, telling its story with a voice that’s been waiting to be heard. From the moment the player steps into the shoes of protagonist Hazel Flood, it’s clear that this game is doing something different – in a way that makes you almost immediately willing to forgive it for all those times it does things in entirely the same way you’ve seen them done before.
Hazel lives in the town of Prospero, where her plans to leave for college have been temporarily paused as she and her mother Lacey prepare for an incoming hurricane. Things between the two of them are a little tense – Hazel is frustrated at her mother’s insistence on staying back to help the townsfolk prepare the evacuation centre instead of rushing back to her at home, and it’s clear this isn’t the first time she feels like Lacey has put the community first. As a result, their house isn’t in any shape to weather the storm, but Lacey ignores Hazel’s suggestion that they ask her estranged grandmother, Bunny, for help. Instead, she sends Hazel to check on the neighbours, and just as Hazel begrudgingly abides, the storm takes a turn for the worse. One moment, Hazel is chatting to her elderly neighbour about her famous cooking, and the next she’s running after her home as it’s swept down the street, her mother still inside. It all happens so quickly that even Hazel – a running champion at her high school – is not fast enough to stop it. Things are looking bleak, but Hazel wastes no time before she sets out after her down the road, ready to do whatever it takes – and seek help from whoever it takes – to save her mother.
South of Midnight is heavily inspired by Southern folklore, and the line between the real and the fantastical in Hazel’s world is blurry from the game’s early stages. As she follows her mother’s trail, Hazel comes across some mysterious objects that allow her to “weave” the world around her, creating solid objects where there are none, or freezing enemies in combat. More importantly, as she soon learns, Weavers have the ability to restitch and heal the wounds that plague the mythical creatures of Prospero, many of which are blights born from trauma and despair. To truly heal them, she must learn about their past, collecting powerful memories and insights to get to the heart of what ails them and bring them peace.
Conceptually, and narratively, Hazel’s attempts to heal the damage done – sometimes arising from generations and decades of abuse and mistreatment – feel incredibly impactful. Prospero has a dark history, much of it rooted in the real historic and systemic racism that has plagued the area for hundreds of years. Though some of the stories Hazel learns also include some more whimsical or fantastical elements, most of them are simply bleak, brutal tales of death, sickness, oppression, famine… and though she’s removed from some of the more acute effects of these situations, it’s clear Hazel still carries and understands the weight of these hardships. She’s a protagonist with a huge amount of grit and sheer stubbornness, but also an immense amount of curiosity and empathy for even those who have hurt her – or who are hurting her. She’s young, but she’s grown up hearing stories about the harsh reality of the world, and seems equally willing to accept parts of it may be more magical than she first believed as she is to accept its darkness. She’s learning about what’s possible in her world at the same time as the player is – and it allows for a congruence between gameplay and narrative that games rarely achieve to this level.
But then there are times when that magic wears off. In story moments, the gameplay feels great – chase sequences show off Hazel’s ability to fly through the air, and boss fights give each new learned skill context and purpose. Between those moments, combat feels a little different. Combat is relegated to confined arenas, where Hazel must fight through waves of ‘Haints’ – South of Midnight’s demon-like enemies – in order to rid the world of ‘stigma’ and open up new pathways for herself. Though different types of Haints are introduced throughout Hazel’s journey, none of them felt like they changed up the combat in any meaningful way. Some of them are stronger, or do more annoying attacks, but the strategy for defeating them never really changes, even when Hazel develops new abilities. It becomes very repetitive very quickly, and it was hard not to feel a wave of dread wash over me every time I saw myself coming up to another combat section. The world of South of Midnight is so interesting to explore, and I found myself impatient every time the combat got in the way of exploring it.
The game does give you the option to skip combat encounters if you desire, which is included as an accessibility feature but I think for many will be a genuinely more pleasurable way to experience the game. Outside of combat, following Hazel through Prospero feels exciting, due in no small part to the soundtrack that accompanies her quest. Each new key character you meet has their own song, which plays over the top of Hazel’s traversal over mountains or across rivers. The songs are largely told from the perspective of the story’s most important characters, and some of them can even be seen singing their stories in the background as you move around them in the world. They’re genuinely beautiful tunes, and my only criticism is that I wish the lyrics were also subtitled, because if you’re playing at night with the sound down a little low, it can be easy to miss some of the lines.
The other most striking thing about South of Midnight is its stop-motion art style, which also takes inspiration from puppeteering. Despite early concerns it would be jarring during gameplay sequences, for the most part the stop-motion stuttering is barely noticeable unless you’re looking for it – it’s not at all intrusive. It’s much more apparent in cutscenes, where the clay-like character modelling is on show, adding to the surreal and fantastical feel of the world. Hazel has an offsider, Crouton, who can be sent into small spaces like animal burrows to unlock new paths and seek collectible experience points (adorably called ‘floofs’), and every single animal in those burrows is somehow equally cute and unsettling, mostly due to the stop-motion style.
South of Midnight is one of those beautiful games that is very hard to review, because it makes itself impossible to score. So much about it is phenomenal – the art, soundtrack, and character and world design alone would be enough to earn it accolades – that it’s so frustrating when some other elements of the game are lacking. But at the end of the day, it took me exactly as long to figure out that the combat was going to stay repetitive as it did for me to decide I didn’t care. South of Midnight has so much soul that the specifics don’t matter. It told a story that has been criminally undertold in the games landscape so far, with fresh characters, in a darkly intriguing world. I’d take all the underwhelming combat in the world if it meant we got more games like this one.
Player 2 reviewed South of Midnight on Xbox Series X using a code kindly provided by Xbox.
