South of Midnight: The Final Preview

ign.com:

I was smitten with Compulsion’s South of Midnight well before I got to play a little more than an hour of it recently. From the first enigmatic trailers hinting at this Southern gothic, dark fantasy, magical realist stop-motion game set in the Deep South, to IGN’s own first look, to the bigger gameplay overview at the recent Xbox Developer Direct – South of Midnight struck me as a deeply moving, highly stylized game that would almost definitely make me cry. When I told the Art Director, Whitney Clayton, that I had immediately thought of that decade-plus-old movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, she confirmed that was one of their early major inspirations for its “Mythical Bayou-type location, folklore creatures, and this really heartwarming protagonist.” That, along with the “darkness and folktale fantasy” of Pan’s Labyrinth from Guillermo del Toro. Huge yes to all of that.

In the section that I got hands-on time with, I absolutely got the sense that all of the intrigue and hype-building was no bluff, and yet a couple elements of the gameplay still needed more time in the metaphorical oven before it’s ready to ship out. Even with those minor blemishes – which are slightly concerning because we’re just a couple months away from its April 8 release date – I left still enamored with the setting and bubbling with curiosity about the bigger story about ghosts and environmental catastrophe driving South of Midnight.

I played through Chapter 3, far along enough to have some magical combat tricks as a Weaver going up against spooky figures called Haints – which is exactly where I began. (Though the question of “What exactly is a Weaver?” is yet to be explained.) Diving pretty much headfirst into a fight was expectedly disorienting, but I was reassured that all of the mapped techniques – push, pull, and what’s basically a stun move – are introduced at a pace that’s much easier to get acquainted to naturally. Part of the struggle was the autolock feature being a little