South of midnight is a unique game. Its art style coupled with its setting have not been seen in a game that I can remember. It was immediately eye catching upon reveal and I was really excited to get into it. It has a great foundation for platforming and the stories told are significant, but some of the combat stuff felt very tacked on and uninteresting. It’s not a perfect game, but there’s a lot to like about it.

The story begins with our character Hazel, preparing for a hurricane. Her mom comes home and they prepare together until she urges Hazel to check on their neighbors. Upon doing this the winds tear Hazel's house from its foundation and sweep it away down a river with her mother along for the ride. This is where the story of the game begins; Hazel needs to find her mother, but to do so she needs to traverse the Louisiana bayou and all of its rich history. Throughout her journey she is introduced to elements of her Heritage that she was unaware of. These include the power of weaving, which manifests in a variety of ways from traversal mechanics to unraveling past trauma, but are ultimately just tools that she uses to get from one area to the next. She has to battle haints, which are essentially spiritual manifestations of pain, along her path. Throughout the journey she experiences the history of the swamps through the residents’ backstories and somewhat helps them process their trauma. Each of the chapters in the game focuses on a different story which most of the time relates to Louisiana folklore. She even gets assistance from some of the characters she meets (including a giant catfish). The chapter-based story structure made apparent that the driving force behind Hazel’s expedition wasn’t very strong. There was no immediate sense of peril for her mother, and if some urgency could’ve been added to the earlier parts of the story, I’d have felt more connected to her determined demeanor. Each chapter was a complete story (minus 10&11) though, and touched on such raw topics that I was still invested enough to continue.

Let’s be honest, this game’s unique artstyle and setting do a lot of the heavy lifting. The aesthetics of the environments being so diverse, despite them all basically taking place in a swamp, is a feat. The partial stop-motion animation with the hand-painted look of the environments, make the game seem other-worldy. In conjunction with this visual style is a wide musical arrangement that helps set the scenes perfectly. From jazz arrangements with ramping intensity to ballads of woe and misery, the musical tempo accentuates Hazel’s actions every step of the way. I was always looking forward to the boss fights of each chapter as the musical storytelling coupled with the larger-than-life mythological creatures kept me on my toes.

Most boss encounters are about avoiding attacks to wait for an opening and counterattack. Few had many surprising mechanics, but the one featuring a bird-like creature wasn’t intuitive. Others featured mostly well choreographed attacks, but weren’t very challenging. I think that combat is where this game missed the mark completely. None of the attacks you do are satisfying to land and most of the basic encounters revolved around me mashing my buttons off cooldown. There’s not much diversity in how you handle these encounters either. You can spend some time seeking upgrade points in the environment but none of them augment your abilities meaningfully. I question the reason for its inclusion as the game functions well enough as a platformer.

Platforming and doing basic environmental puzzles is the other half of the gameplay. These are also relatively surface level. There’s many times where you just need to move a box or wagon into a spot to use as a platform or hurl something at debris covering a climbable surface to continue. It’s a functioning system that helps break up the pacing between the cutscenes, but I wished they were more involved. If combat was removed, I think a focus on platforming that weaved into the story more would’ve been more impactful. 

The segments where platforming intersects with the story are common at the end of the chapters. Throughout the chapters Hazel is usually bottling up someone’s pain, then when she finally gets it all, a shadowy force shows up and starts an escape sequence where you platform to get to the bottle tree at the end. It’s not as tense as it sounds as you don’t really see the entity behind you and the pathway is laid out in a way that makes it hard to mess up. The enemy doesn’t throw anything at you or destroy the path, so there’s no sense of urgency here either. This seems to be the underlying issue I have; the game progresses slowly. I think they wanted to immerse you in the world, but this slowness mitigates the impact of the overarching story.

There’s clearly a lot of love and effort put into South of Midnight. Its focus on the history of Louisiana’s culture and mythology in the stop-motion artstyle culminates in a truly unique experience. If the gameplay was focused more on platforming, it would have been one of the alltimers. I would recommend this game to anyone that craves a story that draws from a unique mythos or someone that enjoys artistic think pieces that present a distinct perspective.