"South of Midnight" Review

Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Developer: Compulsion Games
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), Xbox Series X/S

This one is going to be extremely short, so let's get right into it. South of Midnight is the worst-written game since Dragon Age: The Veilguard. It's tremendously boring, sporting the single most ho-hum, half-assed attempt at a combat system I've seen in a while. It's terribly optimized, resulting in frequent freezes and framerate drops. And despite these things, I'd say it's worth picking up during a sale or on Gamepass just because I don't think I've ever laughed so hard during a game. Don't get me wrong, South of Midnight isn't trying to be funny, but it succeeds nonetheless! 

Let me pick up my thoughts and try to organize them somehow. South of Midnight takes place in the parts of the American South that contain swamps and gators and has a distinct backdrop centered in that kind of folklore. You play as Hazel Flood, a young lady who doesn't understand why her mom spends so much time at her job at the shelter helping the needy instead of at home paying attention to her. And no, this character is not a little kid. She's either freshly graduated from high school or a little older...but she's still like "how dare you prioritize the needy instead of being here?" Anyway, at the start, there's a hurricane on the way to the Flood family's trailer (gee...I wonder what byproduct of hurricanes is going to be the major issue here?). Hazel's mom is returning from the shelter while Hazel packs things up, one thing leads to another, and while Hazel is checking on a neighbor, a (you guessed it) flood sweeps their trailer away. So, Hazel sets out on a journey to rescue her mom from the flood waters...oh, and also, Hazel is the newest "weaver": a sort of chosen one who can weave the fabrics of reality...or something like that. Really, she can just summon carts and tables to solve platforming puzzles. 
I threw some shade at that intro, but it's worth noting that it seemed promising. It's stupid that a young adult would act like Hazel does, but there was plenty of promise for a "coming to realize why your parents do what they do" narrative...sadly, once the trailer washes away, so does all that promise. Suddenly, the surprisingly decent writing is replaced by GODDAMN MCU quips. And if that weren't enough, Hazel also leaps head first into the modern protagonist trap of not being able to shut her mouth for two seconds. I'm not the kind of gamer who gets pissed off about white paint to denote climbing areas, but even so, the amount of verbal and visual hand-holding here is off the charts. Because while I'm fine with the white paint treatment, what I can't abide is having the camera constantly jerked away from me and held in place to show where I need to go next while the protagonist blabbers on about how she needs to get to that place I've been forced to look at for the last half-minute. 

I'm already getting sick of this, so let's move ahead quickly. Gameplay is awful. Imagine a "baby's first soulslike" situation built by people who weren't trying to make a soulslike. You just wail away on the most uninspired enemies known to man, dodge out of the way after a couple hits when these enemies do an AOE attack, then slowly trudge back to them to continue wailing on them because there's almost no distance closing. There's a distance-closing spell, but all spells are on a massive cooldown, meaning you'll realistically only get to cast a spell once per combat encounter.
Normally I end on the technical details, but I want to do something different this time. So, the technical stack here is awful, just like the gameplay. Constant stutters, minute-long freezes at the start of certain combat scenarios, janky animations, a stop-motion style that causes significant visual clashes when the game moves from pre-rendered cutscenes to gameplay. Everything that could go wrong goes wrong, in other words.
Now, on to why I'd still recommend picking this up at a reduced price: the unintentional humor factor. I got to the end of an early chapter involving a pair of brothers. The older brother had killed the younger one and stuffed him in a tree...off to a gut-busting start here, I know. But the chapter goal was to heal the murdered younger brother's trauma, and this eventually leads to a sequence in which you do a platforming challenge. While you're doing this, a song starts playing in the background. At first I thought it must be a Johnny Cash track. "A little early and unearned, but whatever" I thought. But then, I listened closer and realized that the lyrics were from the perspective of the brother that did the murdering...about his crime. It was so serious and self-important that I thought I was going to die from laughter. I couldn't help but wonder what was next in future chapters!
"ooooh yeah, I held her down in a back alleeeeeeeeeeyyyy"?
"let's do the burning the house down for the insurance money raaaaaaaaaaaaag"?
"yo-ho, yo-ho, using footage from Nintendo"?
I can't possibly convey the gravity of this song in writing, so just trust me when I say it's the most hilarious thing I've experienced all year. And while I couldn't get further than the third proper chapter, the promise of more of these songs kept me going far longer than I would've thought.
Having not finished this game, I don't feel like I should give a score, so that's where I'm going to leave this! I wouldn't recommend South of Midnight in any good faith sense, but if you find yourself in need of a good "so bad it's good" laugh, I'd generally point you in that direction! I'm led to believe that it gets really good after a while (it would have to for Yahtzee Croshaw of all people to give it an unironic thumbs up), so who knows? Maybe you'll get something out of it that I didn't!

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