South of Midnight (2025)

3.5

Fantastic world-building, gorgeous art direction and a (mostly) good story marred by unbearably repetitive combat encounters and janky platforming.

South of Midnight builds a world I want to explore and spend time in, and then rips control away from me (including my camera) constantly. It railroaded me through this beautiful world, forcing 'stop here fight 2 waves of enemies, rinse and repeat' encounters every 10 minutes interspersed with very unreliable platforming sections that have often unresponsive controls and hitboxes (not to mention a VERY flighty camera) in an attempt to break up the monotony that just ends up jarring me from enjoying the game world that I want to run around and experience.

I've never had such a great game be so utterly irritating to experience.

I love the characters, the southern folklore, the critters, the mythology,. the overall design--everything but the actual gameplay itself is perfect. Unsatisfying mechanics (I am aware you can skip combat, and I may very well do that next playthrough) just completely rip me from my infatuation in a tedious loop that is painfully repetitive. The story can be quite on-the-nose and lack subtlety, but it is an important tale that--while the execution is fumbling--is clearly told with love and respect.

This is so close to an amazing game, there is a wealth of things to love in the world design itself, which is why I bumped to 4 instead of 3 to represent my 3.5 rating. The closest Compulsion has ever come to wholly realizing one of their fantastic concepts. It's a shame they fall short, but a massive step-up from their previous outings and consistent enough to make me excited for what they learn moving forward with whatever their next project may be.

I'm liking a lot about this game so far but oh my god is the "let's make the character do commentary on every little tiny thing the player sees or inspects" on overdrive in this game. Holy shit.

"Show, don't tell" is a great philosophy for visual media in general, but WOW does this protagonist never shut up. She is really cool in cutscenes, but in the gameplay... Oh my god. 🤦Stop.

I feel bad that this game just isn’t quite hitting for me as I would like to reward developers for trying different cultures and thematic worlds and exploring other ideas. But the gameplay is just so wrote and boring. Here’s a platforming section with a few secret resources to find. Here is a small circular combat arena with a bunch of uninteresting monsters to fight. Your special powers have extremely long cool downs so much so that I forget I have them. And even then the powers are a fairly bland force push and force pull.

The game is beautiful, I like the art style, but the story is just kind of standard stranger discovers they are special and are transported to an alternate world to explore. It isn’t compelling enough.

I am digging the aesthetic and the unusual world design. A bit of a bland gameplay start with stock platforming and your typical weird monsters in combat arenas to fight. However, I like the slow progression to allow me time to learn all the moves. I am not looking for fast paced action platformer right now and this seems to work well so far.

Only about an hour in so will keep trucking to see if it really clicks with me.