NEED TO KNOW
What is it? A Southern Gothic action-adventure.
Release Date: April 8, 2025
Expect to pay: $30 / £35
Developer: Compulsion Games
Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
Reviewed on: Windows 11 Pro, RTX 4080, AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D, 64GB RAM
Multiplayer? No
Link: Official Site
Around 20 minutes into playing South of Midnight, I had to stop and take a moment. Not because I’d taken offense to its portrayals of the American South—that’s something you learn to brace for growing up in Mississippi—but the opposite. The Southern Gothic action-adventure had me feeling disarmed and sentimental over, of all things, a shed. Not the part where I tussled with the supernatural manifestation of a man’s innermost fears, the Rougarou, and forced him to reckon with the pain, but a shed.
In my defense, South of Midnight’s headstrong and compassionate protagonist, Hazel Flood, is just that good. Perhaps it’s less about the shed and more about her casual grief for that rickety thing’s existence, mourning it long before the impending hurricane even has a chance to wash it away. But her fleeting prayer, a simple “I hope it’s still standin’ after tonight,” hit me with all the force of that storm.
Living in the Deep South—in those places where it’s humid enough to drown a man and they’ve as many churches as people—is a lot like that. There’s not enough time to stop and mourn anything, not your shed or your neighbor. It’s a constant churn of brace, endure, and rebuild as best you can.
Much to my relief, South of Midnight gets that, too. It’s not a few hours of kitschy antebellum aesthetics, sanitized bedtime stories, or exploitative violence. It’s a supernatural tale with magic powers and creatures, but that doesn’t stop it from being an earnest, empathetic look at that often-forgotten stretch of land between eastern Texas and the Atlantic seaboard by a team that truly must give a damn.
How’s your momma ‘n’ em?
Hazel’s violent encounters with angry spirits aren’t difficult, but they are fun—I especially liked the sequences where her only option was to run (lest the past catch up to her). The action isn’t the main attraction, though. It’s the details like that shed and other remnants of poverty and grief that really affected me, and on more than one occasion I stopped dashing through the bayous or swinging over muddy obstacles to inspect a fantastically familiar vision of the South.
Hazel’s initial routine may seem a tad mundane to the unfamiliar, but every piece of its opening vignette is placed with an impossible attention to detail and care. It’s in a lot of little things, like photos from state fairs, a social worker’s paperwork, and the familiar blare of severe weather warnings. Then there’s the more subtle pieces, like her momma Lacey’s slight don’t-sass-me tone change and the way Hazel is so endeared to her neighbors.
I suspect some of those folks, like the nearby Mrs. Pearl, are the type to give you the last five dollars to their name or maybe open your front door unannounced. The latter isn’t a degree of familiarity I’d endorse, but the rest has a charm that leaves me longing. South of Midnight is full of those unexpected idiosyncrasies I adore—like listening to a Southerner’s inexplicable and excessive use of the word “done,” or hearing the way we can take a string of words and turn them into one.
Some of those folks, like the nearby Mrs Pearl, are the type to give you the last five dollars to their name.
The whole journey is a tapestry of Deep South born and raised, but there’s a lot of hurt in becoming acquainted with some of those mannerisms, too. They aren’t all forged by some innate Southern goodness, but by places where you better learn to save yourself (and each other) because there sure as hell ain’t no one else coming.
And after the game’s hurricane churns through, separating Hazel from her mother, South of Midnight hammers that sentiment home. If Hazel wants to find her ma’, she’s going to have to do it without the folks who should be first in line to offer help. I reckon it wouldn’t be news to her, Hazel’s probably known since birth, but some of that Southern hospitality is just for show.
A Haint ‘n’ a holler
In those first couple of chapters, where South of Midnight introduces Hazel’s supernatural abilities as a Weaver, combat assumes the pace of a slow Southern drawl. The fights don’t have much depth, and Hazel sort of meanders between smaller enemies in some of the game’s oversized arenas.
There’s definitely a learning curve to figuring out what parts of the world are safe or a hazard too, and its action isn’t always explained very well. Thankfully, the occasionally clunky transition isn’t a very long one, and after a few deaths to a single toe in the water, the game gets its point across.
I never found myself overly frustrated or severely punished, and outside of some of those finicky moments, I had a mighty good time with Hazel’s magical weaponry. Her kit is an ethereal arsenal of beloved trinkets, like a darling childhood doll and a literal bottle to capture emotional pain. Along with her enchanted Hooks, those knickknacks are an important part of the whole Weaver responsibility. Wielding one in each hand, Hazel can rip through enemy Haints—angry spirits spawned by a trauma-fueled rot setting into the world.
South of Midnight knows that festering despair as Stigma and warns it thrives where folks wept their hardest tears. Those formulaic encounters with tortured ghosts in their suspiciously open arenas remind me of Alice: Madness Returns. It gets a little repetitive, even with newfangled upgrades Hazel makes to some of her weapons along the way, but I never really mind it.
That’s mostly thanks to the game always sewing something thematically better in the background. There’s a big-picture perspective on combat that’s often far better than any singular piece. If you stick around long enough to learn how to fight, South of Midnight transitions into even better lessons on how to heal.
A bottle for your thoughts
It’s not enough to destroy the rotting sources of Stigma’s roots, but you can’t really fix things back to how they were either. A lot of Hazel’s journey is about wrestling with that. It’s fixing through listening. Acknowledge the hurt, share the pain, then stitch whatever remains back together. As a Weaver, she’s one of the only few in the world who can. It’s not a fair ask, but the Deep South’s never cared much about fairness, anyway.
It’s a process leading to plenty of encounters with broken people, sometimes easy to hate and hard to love. The expectation, from both myself and the game’s most troubled souls, is that the world will laugh or look away, but South of Midnight never does that. It doesn’t distill places still haunted by the Confederacy, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow into a palatable nothing, and nor does it reduce that residual pain into cheap sentimentality.
Tending the Deep South’s wounds looks different from chapter to chapter. Some are gentle whispers of shared generational wisdom, while others are pleas for mercy after unimaginable sin. When I see Hazel carry all that—still loving so fiercely and fighting so hard—the bitter, redneck chip on my shoulder grows a little lighter and I’m thankful for its thoughtful reminders of resilience.
There’s a moment in the game’s later chapters I won’t spoil, but one line still sits with me, even days after wrapping up Hazel’s journey. In a rush to protect the more vulnerable, Hazel declares, “These creatures aren’t monsters, they’re just waiting for someone who cares to come along.”
It’s grounding, really. It’s given me this feeling I can only describe as what must be the videogame equivalent of a really big hug. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced something so sincerely devoted to the people and places I call home, but I’ll be damned if this isn’t my new bar for how it should look.
