South of Midnight Is No Carpetbagger

I’ve been wary of South of Midnight since the first time I ever heard of it. 

I’m from the South, and stories about the South by people who aren’t from here are almost always terrible. They usually depict the South in one of two ways: a backwards place that should be either mocked or pitied, without ever really trying to understand or engage with the many institutional reasons and intentional choices that have made the South poorer and less educated than most of the country; or as a weird, mysterious, quasi-mystical land full of myths, secrets, and folklore. The South is rarely shown as just a place, where real people live and work, and not as some tortured symbol or high concept. Based on all the marketing material about it, South of Midnight was clearly going to lean into the mystical mumbo jumbo; the fact that it was being made by Compulsion Games, a Montreal studio, was an even bigger warning sign.

And then I found out the game’s creative lead, David Sears, is from the South. And not like he was born there and then wound up in Quebec later on as a kid; he stuck around his native Mississippi long enough to graduate from Southern Miss in Hattiesburg. Of course, the South isn’t a monolith. The South Sears grew up in is not the South I know. (Hell, growing up in Mississippi makes him more Southern than my suburban Atlanta ass could ever hope to be.) Neither are the South that the game’s hero, Hazel, lives in. This all set me at ease a bit, even if the game was clearly going to play hard into Weird South tropes. 

I’ve now played a little bit of South of Midnight—one entire chapter, to be precise: chapter three, in which our hero Hazel, a newly-anointed “weaver” who can see glimpses of the past amid a litany of other superpowers, has to rescue a giant talking catfish from the clutches of an enormous tree-man. Now that’s a slice of the real South!

From this tiny chunk of game, South of Midnight seems to make its fantastical elements work by defining this as an Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland-style tale. This isn’t some liminal space with porous borders between the real and unreal, where the distinctive environments and cultures of the South are reinterpreted as unknowable and otherworldly fantasias by outsiders who can’t be bothered to know them as part of the world they live in. Based on the stop-motion animation intro to the preview, and based on how Hazel talks about and reacts to the swamp she’s exploring, this is clearly and unmistakably a fantasy. Hazel’s hometown of Prospero—somewhere near the Gulf of Mexico, obviously within a swamp—has been rocked by a hurricane and Hazel is now in a place that looks like Prospero but obviously represents something else—a folkloric approximation.

(It also has tons of giant peaches, for some reason. They’re all over the place. None of them are anywhere near as big as the Gaffney peach, though—the towering, hemorrhoidal peach on I-85 officially known as The Peachoid.)

Whatever this version of Prospero is, the historical tragedies of the South loom heavy here. Hazel (and thus the player) occasionally sees the spirits of a 19th century weaver and the slaves she’s trying to guide to freedom, and the demo establishes that the poor denizens of Prospero are being exploited by the rich landlord who lives in a mansion up on a hill (and who, in an interesting twist, is Hazel’s grandmother). The main story that unfolds during the demo, about a character betraying his mentally disabled brother (who, in an overt Faulkner nod, is named Benjy) and nailing him into a tree, has the Biblical resonance and folktale universality of a good murder ballad—an artform that isn’t uniquely Southern, and yet one that Southerners perfected long ago.

Based on this demo, I don’t know how accurate it is to say that South of Midnight is about the South. It’s more about how folklore grows out of the real world, elevating facts into richer, more evocative fictions that say more about us than any news story could, with the South as its setting. Perhaps in the “real” Prospero a man named Benjy was trapped inside of a tree by his beloved brother Rhubarb (I would like to believe he is named after legendary Atlanta radio personality and occasional World Championship Wrestling ring announcer Rhubarb Jones, but I’m sure that’s not the case), but whether that actually happened or not the local folklore has given it a larger, enduring truth by turning it into a story about a betrayed brother becoming one with a weathered and curiously man-shaped tree that towers over its surroundings. A local landmark was combined with a local crime to become local folklore—and, based on the song that plays as Hazel climbs up that tree at the end of the demo, a piece of local folk music, as well.

This is all great so far. If South of Midnight maintains this vision throughout, it’ll be a game people talk about for years to come. It’s also an action game, though, and an Uncharted-style 3D platformer. And those parts of the demo felt awkwardly hammered into place, like a concession to the fact that this is a videogame and thus has to fulfill expectations of game-like play. 

The South of Midnight demo does not do any of these things poorly. The combat is a little fidgety and particular and takes some getting used to at first, but by the last of the demo’s six or so encounters it was pretty easy to keep straight. As a weaver (a role that isn’t explained within the demo, so no idea what that means) Hazel has a few supernatural abilities that she uses to fight “haints” and scamper around Prospero. Fights are contained to small, open spaces, and typically have multiple “rounds” (there’s no official distinction between these rounds, but additional enemies appear after you defeat others, which gives it that feeling). Hazel’s kit includes a basic strike she can perform without limitation, and then a few moves that have cooldown timers, including one that yanks enemies towards her, and another with a scatter effect that feels like a gunless take on a shotgun. Later on in the demo she can unlock a useful ground pound. It uses a standard 3D action game lock-on mechanic to guide your attacks towards a targeted enemy, and Hazel can dodge attacks by rolling out of the way; she can’t block or parry in the demo, which isn’t a problem, but is surprising given how every single videogame right now seemingly has to have parrying. When Hazel beats one of the haints, who are spectral enemies covered in a viscous black fluid referred to as “stigma” and who represent terrible and repressed memories, she has to “unravel” it with her weaver skills; that dispatches the haint for good and also restores a bit of Hazel’s health. And after clearing every enemy out of a makeshift arena Hazel has to unravel a big ball of stigma at its center. 

Hazel’s combat skills improve throughout the demo in game-like fashion. While exploring Prospero she collects glowing white orbs called “floofs” that can be used to power up her skills or unlock new ones on a skill tree within the pause menu; finding those floofs gives South of Midnight a collecting mechanic with actual in-game benefits. Throughout this one chapter Hazel unlocks multiple new traversal abilities, including a double jump, a glider, and a wall-run. She’s also as inhumanly good at climbing and shimmying on ledges as Nathan Drake or any of Ubisoft’s assassins; indeed, instead of a boss battle, Chapter 3 ends with a long platforming section where Hazel scales the man-tree that was once Benjy. 

From a mechanical perspective, this is all done entirely proficiently. No complaints about how any of these actions feel or are performed. As I said, though, they don’t really fit the game’s overall vibe. They connect the combat to the thematic focus on how the past becomes legend over time by framing most of the battles as a struggle to remember repressed memories—unlock four memories to see Benjy’s fate and free the catfish—but the seams in that description are as visible as the ones in the overalls my grandfather used to wear out in the tobacco fields. There’s nothing clunky about the combat other than its existence in this specific game, but given the mainstream console audience Microsoft is pitching this to, it’d be foolish to expect anything else.

The combat is what you have to do to experience what makes South of Midnight special. And the art style retains a special charge even within those battle scenes, with the fluid motions of the Bible black haints unsettling and sinister compared to the herky jerk stutter and impressionistic design of the friendly animals Hazel encounters in the swamp—including that enormous, English-speaking catfish. 

One 90 minute demo only goes so far with a game that will presumably last several hours longer. But what I’ve played of South of Midnight assuages a lot of my initial worries, and despite the awkwardness of the combat (and, honestly, the less-than-sterling songwriting of the folk song about Rhubarb and Benjy) I look forward to returning to Prospero and learning about more of its folktales when it’s released on April 8.

Senior editor Garrett Martin writes about videogames, TV, travel, theme parks, wrestling, music, and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky. He did really like the fiddle part in the folk song about Benjy.