South of Midnight

Compulsion Games doesn't seem to restrict itself when it comes to the types of games it makes, and South of Midnight is certainly no exception. While the game's premise is somewhat common these days, being a third-person Action Adventure with Souls-like combat, the setting couldn't be more unique: set in the deep US South, complete with nods to its culture and history.

Unlike many games in this genre, the combat isn't the main focus of South of Midnight. Very quickly, you'll realize that telling a narrative is what the game is all about, and the gameplay elements merely exist to serve that part.

The story begins with Hazel, our protagonist, and her mother preparing to evacuate from a hurricane. Unfortunately, before they do so, their home is washed away by flood waters, carrying Hazel's mother with it. Thus begins the adventure, with Hazel following the river downstream to find her mother, encountering a strange cast of characters, exploring the culture and history of the American South, and discovering that she has supernatural powers as a "Weaver", someone who can heal wounds of the past.

The themes of the game largely center around the Hoodoo folk religion. Indeed, your main enemies in the game are known as "haints," a term used in the American Deep South to refer to ghosts. Hazel uses her abilities to fight ghosts of the past and heal old wounds. These serve as a sub-story alongside the main plot of finding your lost mother. You will learn about the past, including Hazel's and her mother's, with the events in the past playing out in "ghostly" form. The events are generally not positive ones, given that the whole aim of the game is to heal past trauma. The solid voice acting and themes the game tackles around slavery, relationships, and society serve as interesting side plots that help build up the game's overall atmosphere.

The downside is that the method in which you "heal" these traumas is a little on the repetitive side, beating a wave of enemies, playing out a scene, beating another wave, playing out a scene; this is pretty much the gameplay loop.

As for the combat, while South of Midnight is inspired by Souls-like combat, relying on timing to dodge attacks and only being able to sustain a few hits before death, it is much more forgiving than most games in the genre. Each battle area has a healing point that lets you heal once, and defeating enemies will grant you a small portion of health each.

Sadly, I found the combat somewhat lacking in South of Midnight. It feels less Soul-like and more Soul-lite. Yes, it has the dodge-then-hit mechanics of a Souls-like, which is fun when you time it well and get a perfect dodge, but it misses out on any ability to parry attacks or block. The game airs too much on the easy side to present much satisfaction for defeating enemies, meaning they merely feel like an obstacle to delay the story.

While Hazel is incredibly maneuverable and acrobatic in the platforming sections of the game (as I will get into next), the combat feels much more grounded and static. Given the game's movement mechanics, there could have been a lot more room for faster-paced and more exhilarating combat.

The enemies themselves also aren't particularly interesting. You're mostly fighting the same foes repeatedly, with little variety. By hour 3, you'll have met 3 different enemies, and by this point, you're approaching the game's halfway point. Even without the variety, each enemy behaves uniquely and has their attacks to get used to, so there is some saving grace there.

I can understand now why the game has accessibility options to skip all combat, because it serves little purpose other than to delay the story and provide a slight change of pace from running and jumping.

I also found the camera pretty awkward in combat. The game has a "lock-on" mechanic to fix the camera to an enemy, but I often found myself struggling to get the camera to face where I wanted it to, including out of combat. There are options to disable any sort of camera movement decided by the game, and you might want to look into that if you find it frustrating.

Speaking of Running and Jumping, the platforming is reasonably solid in South of Midnight, compared to the combat. This is just as well because much of the game is spent doing it, possibly more so than combat. Hazel can double-jump and wallrun, and she uses her supernatural abilities to grapple ethereal threads in the sky so she can traverse the swamp (as you do) and glide by summoning a ghostly glider.

At this point, you can probably see why I was disappointed that the game's combat is 90% on the ground and merely involves dodging and counter-attacking your enemies.

I did have a couple of issues with the grappling. The game likes you to have your grapple point on the screen to accept the grapple input, but sometimes that's easier said than done when mid-air, and as mentioned in the combat section, the game's camera can have a mind of its own by default. The platforming also gets repetitive after a little while, as it's mostly the same maneuvers you are doing, and it can be a good solid 15 minutes of platforming in some cases.

Finally, there's the presentation of the game. The Stop-Motion effect of the game definitely divided opinions before the game's launch, and I have to say, it was one of the first things I disabled when I started playing. Sadly, the cutscenes must have it enabled, for whatever reason, but the gameplay itself can have the effect disabled. I feel like this wasn't done brilliantly, and in some cases, it just makes it look like your game is running at a low framerate. The graphics in general are wonderfully nice, though.

Music also plays a big part in South of Midnight, and while the music itself is pretty nice and fits in with the environment, I question the use in certain places. In a fairly tense part of the game, the game chooses to play a rather relaxing piece of jazz music, which didn't fit the vibe that I felt from the game at all at that point in time. However, the actual soundtrack itself is great.

South of Midnight - Steam Deck Performance

South of Midnight runs pretty well on the Steam Deck. The game defaults to 1280x800 as a resolution, and has good controller support.

Unfortunately, we must aim for a 30 FPS target no matter what settings we choose. The Steam Deck just isn't capable of anything higher. We set all the settings to low except Textures, which we set to Medium, and then upped the TAAU quality from Balanced to Quality, which gives us a decent-looking game. We also use the in-game frame limiter to limit the game to 30 FPS.

The performance holds up well. You should expect a stable 30 FPS for most of the game. I experienced drops to 27 or 28 FPS in a couple of combat areas, but it wasn't a huge issue.

There is an environment halfway through the game that completely tanks the performance, dropping it below 20 FPS in combat. There isn't much we can do about it; even the lowest settings don't hold 30 FPS, so you just need to grin and bear it for this portion of the game, which is only about 10-15 minutes long.

The power draw varies hugely depending on your area. Some areas, particularly interiors, will hang around 10W, but areas with dense foliage and water can cause the draw to go up to 19W, and temperatures are around 60 °C in quiet areas, going up to 70 °C in busy areas. Expect about 3-3.5 hours of battery life on a Steam Deck OLED and around 2-2.5 Hours on a Steam Deck LCD.

Accessibility:

South of Midnight has a lot of accessibility options. For colorblind users, you can change the colors of almost all the UI elements you choose. Text size can be increased, and the size of individual HUD elements can be increased. There are options to help with motion sickness, like disabling camera shake. You can also disable the game's stop motion effect and skip any combat and boss encounters if you want the platforming, story, and nothing else.

The game does feature a large spider-like creature, and there is no arachnophobia mode, so just bear that in mind. It doesn't appear too often, though.

Conclusion:

South of Midnight is a game of two halves. The platforming and story aspects hold up pretty well, being, for the most part, interesting and engaging. Sadly, the combat feels like something the developers felt they had to put in but didn't really want to. I'm not sure how the game would have felt without combat, but it is a shame that this portion of the game feels pretty weak.

Steam Deck performance is completely within the realms of being playable. We're stuck at 30 FPS, but the game feels good to play, and you shouldn't worry about buying South of Midnight to play on your Steam Deck.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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