From swamps to Appalachia, how South of Midnight captures a seldom-seen America

digitaltrends.com:

After a slow start to this console generation, Xbox is looking to make its mark starting in 2025. Major entries in franchises like Gears of War, Doom, and Fable are on the way, alongside an ambitious Perfect Dark revival. The most intriguing game in its lineup, though, isn’t a glitzy game from a pre-existing franchise; it’s something entirely new.

South of Midnight is the latest game from We Happy Few developer Compulsion games, and the studio’s first project since being acquired by Microsoft in 2018. The action-adventure project, set to launch in 2025, is unique in two key ways. For one, it has a unique visual style that makes it look like a playable stop-motion film. It’s also a video game set in a place that few big-budget games have ever deeply explored: America’s deep South. It’s a magical realist story inspired by Southern gothic literature and folktales from the region.

Today, Xbox released a new documentary about the project and its aim to both capture an authentic Southern story and make that tale relatable to all players. Ahead of the reveal, Digital Trends visited Compulsion Games’ studio in Montreal, Canada, where we saw a fresh gameplay demo and spoke to several members of the creative team about the project. The conversations painted a picture of a team that’s well equipped to tackle such a unique project thanks to unbridled creative energy at every stage of production.

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“Creatively as a studio, we’re more like a jazz band than a person who comes in and directs everything,” Compulsion studio head Guillaume Provost tells Digital Trends. “It doesn’t matter if the pianist starts playing or the singer starts singing. It doesn’t matter which portion of the creative team gets that first foothold on a creative project.”