South of Midnight review – beautiful surfaces can’t hide thin gameplay
Soaring development costs; protracted production cycles; cautious C-suites looking to deliver reliable returns for shareholders: for many reasons, there is a dearth of original programming in big-budget video games. Already this year we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization game, the 14th entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the 27th Monster Hunter title. But look: here’s a magical-realist tale set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix.
South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked details of a Tim Burton film. Within minutes, a house – that of high-school athlete Hazel and her mother, a social worker – is carried away along a roiling flooded river. Playing as Hazel, you give chase, bounding with a lanky teenage gait across various platforms until the storm abates. In its wake lie miles of stagnant, fetid swamps. At one grisly point, you explore a farm stacked with the carcasses of pigs who did not survive the typhoon.
As a protagonist, Hazel more than holds her own against this vivid and unusual (for video games, at least) world. With mere flicks of her wrists, connected to which are metaphysical scythe-like blades, Hazel rips through reality itself. For this spunky, determined young woman is a Weaver, adept at magically dispelling unsavoury spirits lurking amid the weeping willows and glinting glass bottle trees of her southern home. As a Weaver, she is able to see an enormous cosmic grand tapestry where myth, reality, time and space collide; peering into the past, she learns of ancestors who helped free slaves and of tragic child deaths.
Sprinting with energy, South of Midnight lays out its imaginative stall: action-packed chapters whisk the player from sweltering bayous to chilly mountains that feel as if they are edging towards Appalachia. The atmosphere is thick – at times, laying it on a little too thick: your friendly guide to this folkloric romp is a gigantic catfish who speaks with a distinct Creole drawl about, among other things, the classic southern dish grits.
But in the actual playing, South of Midnight is simply thin. With its mostly linear mix of 3D platforming and melee combat, the game evokes PlayStation 2-era titles. Yet neither element has much personality. The brawling looks stylish, ending with brutal finishing moves in which Hazel unravels her wraith-like enemies’ very fabric of being. Really, it lacks the depth and expressive possibilities of titles such as God of War. Platforming feels floaty until you are vaulting from one conspicuously painted white ledge to another: then it just feels prescriptive and clunky.
What great lengths the team of visual artists, sound designers, and scriptwriters at Microsoft-owned studio, Compulsion Games, went to in creating this rugged, earthy place, only to have it undone by gameplay of often mind-numbing smoothness. At various points, you must flee from a nebulous, mist-like entity. But these sequences are so straightforward as to lack any dramatic tension. They repeat many times throughout the game’s approximately 12-hour duration, only increasing a little in difficulty each time.
Other loops grate as the hours stack up: clear this area of oozing corrupted matter (a visual manifestation of the land’s pain and trauma); watch another lightly animated flashback. This lovingly illustrated depiction of the south is rich and arresting yet the game is rote.
What you’re left with is a game whose best ideas are all optics. The fairytale southern style plays out like a modern, YA take on Toni Morrison’s fiction while summoning some of the whimsical, damaged beauty of 2012’s Beasts of the Southern Wild. The soundtrack is a rambunctious collage of howling blues, twanging folk and lilting jazz. Compulsion Games bottled much southern magic during the making of this seemingly risky gambit for Microsoft, yet failed to take risks where it really mattered: this unique setting deserved more.
