What is Xbox game South of Midnight, and who’s making it?
The spooky, blues-inflected South of Midnight was one of the more arresting trailers revealed at Sunday’s Xbox Games Showcase, but also one of the more mysterious, and easily lost amid noisier fare like the reemergence of Fable, the reveal of Star Wars Outlaws, and the gargantuan Starfieldinfo-dump. What is it about? How will it play? What’s its pedigree? And how will it navigate the tricky waters of its American Deep South setting?
Some, if not all, of these questions are answered by an official developer interview on Xbox Wire. The short version: It’s a magical realist occult adventure from the makers of We Happy Few that will explore the folklore, music, and rural environments of a fictionalized South — but the studio, Compulsion Games, isn’t saying much about how it will play yet.
No release date has been announced. Microsoft dated several games for 2024 at its showcase, but South of Midnight wasn’t one of them — like Fable, it could be even further off. As an Xbox Game Studios release, it’s coming to Windows PC and Xbox Series X, Game Pass, and Steam.
This is the easy part. Compulsion Games is a Canadian studio based in Montreal founded by ex-Arkane Studios developer Guillaume Provost. As an indie, it made the pretty but slender 2013 puzzle-platformer Contrast and 2018’s We Happy Few, a dystopian, first-person, survival-horror game with roguelike elements set in a twisted 1960s England. Compulsion was acquired by Microsoft and became a first-party Xbox Game Studios team in 2018.
Compulsion’s website says it aims to make “hallucinatory adventures in worlds strange but provocatively familiar,” with rich storylines and world-building and a “handcrafted” feel. Its games are built around strong art styles and notable
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