In the 00s there used to be a ton of generic action-adventure games bereft of any real ambition or gameplay depth. You’d get ushered down a linear path for a dozen hours or so, all while using basic combat to fight enemies and running and jumping through levels. I was not expecting South of Midnight to be one of these, as they mostly stopped making them years ago. The visuals are lovely, the main character is very likable, and the game has a solid atmosphere. But it’s too familiar, dated, and by-the-numbers to really be worth more than a cursory glance.
Hazel Flood is a young woman that lives with her mother in Prospero, Mississippi. A hurricane is coming and the two are about to skedaddle before it hits, when their trailer is carried away with Hazel’s mother still inside it. The plot follows Hazel trying to find her mother and. . . that’s mostly it. There’s more to it than that, certainly, but that’s the main throughline. And what a boring throughline it is. Early on, Hazel discovers that she’s the next in a line of Weavers, who can see strands and help iron things out in something called The Grand Tapestry. Hey, didn’t Eternal Strands have Weavers and strands just a few months ago?!
It’s a very typical young adult-style setup. The plot never really goes anywhere and kind of flounders around for a while before wandering off the path and into mumbo jumbo territory at the end. One thing that vexed me is that the game could have ended hours earlier had Hazel not been acting like an ignoramus. At one point, she’s tracking another character. South of Midnight bludgeons you over the head with signposts that scream “this other character is a good guy,” but Hazel somehow refuses to entertain this idea, seemingly so that the story can go on for a bit longer. She seemed intelligent beforehand too, so seeing her act like a complete fool irritated me.
South of Midnight is divided into 14 chapters (the last of which is really just cutscenes) full of fighting, running, and climbing. These chapters are all linear, although they do have side paths where you can grab items that grant you upgrades, as well as notes and the like. The level design is incredibly dated and gets rather stale before long, as the vast majority of the time you’ll just be running forward in very pretty naturescapes. Hazel can run, jump, double jump, air dash, and glide to get around. She controls well, but the platforming is generally so simple and repetitive that it can’t help but not be all that exciting. The collision detection for the terrain is kind of off, however, as it isn’t uncommon to slide off of things you’ve clearly landed firmly on top of.
The climbing is just borrowed wholesale from Uncharted, so expect lots of clearly indicated little ledges to shimmy on. As for the combat, it’s functional. South of Midnight juxtaposes between moving forward and getting trapped in little combat arenas where you have to fight four or five enemies. Once the enemies are dead, you can interact with something that lets you clear the barrier blocking your progress. I’ve never been fond of when games do this, as it adds a weird stop-and-start rhythm when there are zero enemies just in the levels themselves.
The combat feels decent enough but is wholly unremarkable. Hazel has a five-hit basic combo and a very smooth dodge. Executing a perfect dodge will hit an enemy with an attack, plus you’ll unlock skills that are used both in combat and while platforming. In combat, these are all on cooldown timers, because of course they are. They’re not really all that useful either. One lets you web up an enemy as if you were Spider-Man, another pushes them back, one pulls them to you. Hazel can use her stuffed animal to briefly commandeer a foe too, or you can send it into burrows to help you open the way forward while exploring.
There are only six enemy types in the whole game, so combat can get very old quickly, especially since Hazel’s combat wheelhouse is so limited. Adding combos would have been beneficial here, but South of Midnight very much wants to be incredibly bland in terms of gameplay, so it has seemingly no interest in doing anything that adds any depth to the proceedings. Almost everything on display has been done to death, even if it’s all perfectly competent here. There just isn’t enough weight to Hazel’s strikes and the enemy design is incredibly underwhelming. Combat mostly just devolves into mashing the attack button and dodging, plus it never really evolves in any meaningful way. It feels the same in the ninth hour as it does in the first.
There are a few boss battles to be found, but they’re even more dull than the rest of the game. A couple of them are the sort that just want you to wait until you expose a weakness so that you can wail on a weak point. There isn’t even a real final boss, as the encounter really just has you fight four waves of the same enemies you’ve already gotten sick of. There’s nothing particularly offensive about any of them, but they’re mostly just there to be there.
The most interesting concept South of Midnight has is that you’ll find several self-contained stories usually related to a character getting a family member killed (pretty dark, huh?) The notes you’ll find in chapters typically pertain to this story, plus you’ll need to defeat enemies in arenas to unlock pieces of Stigma that will show you a flashback to the person whose Stigma you’re literally trying to clear. It’s novel, although I swear I’ve seen something very similar in other games.
That cuts to the core of why South of Midnight isn’t probably going to turn many heads. It’s so incredibly safe and dated that it’s just hard to really care about anything it has to offer beyond Hazel herself (when she’s not being a monumental dumbass because the plot demands it, anyway.) There’s a reason they stopped making games like this over a decade ago. These sorts of basic, broad games with no depth that just hold your hand through a series of levels just aren’t all that interesting to players, regardless of how pretty the graphics are.
I beat South of Midnight in 10 hours, but that was with me exploring as thoroughly as I could. While I definitely didn’t have a bad time with it, I was still somewhat bored the entire way through. I’m truthfully not sure why Microsoft would publish such an unambitious, derivative 00s-style action-adventure, but it probably won’t turn out to be a particularly good use of funds. If you’re one of the people who has somehow missed this style of game, you can find a few hours of mild entertainment, but this is a very middle of the road game that just doesn’t have much going for it beyond its graphics and cultural inspirations.
South of Midnight: South of Midnight is undoubtedly pretty, but that shiny veneer belies a hollow interior that isn't interested in much beyond iteration. – Andrew Farrell
Check out our previous review:
Atomfall PC review — Terrific world design held back by terrible combat |
