I have a weakness for games that feel handmade. Something about seeing fingerprints on the clay, stitches in the fabric, the slight jitter of a stop-motion frame — it disarms me instantly. So when South of Midnight loaded on my PS5 and Prospero, Mississippi, unfolded like a pop-up book dipped in bayou water and gospel blues, I was gone. Wallet open, heart open, guard down. And for about four hours, that was enough. Then the combat started asking questions it couldn’t answer.
A Hurricane Made of Memories
Compulsion Games — the Montreal studio behind the underappreciated Contrast and the wildly uneven We Happy Few — has built its third game around a premise that deserves more than the twelve hours it gets. Hazel Flood, voiced with quiet, wounded authority by Adriyan Rae, survives a hurricane that tears apart Prospero and her already fractured relationship with her mother Lacey. She wakes up a Weaver: a woman who can see the Strands that bind people to their trauma, and who must bottle those painful memories and hang them on a bottle tree so the afflicted can finally move on.
It’s Southern Gothic through and through — not the cartoonish, moonshine-and-shotguns version, but the literary kind. Flannery O’Connor by way of Laika Studios. Hazel doesn’t fight monsters so much as confront folk legends that embody specific emotional wounds. Two-Toed Tom, the demon alligator. Huggin’ Molly, the spectral woman who squeezes the breath out of children. The Rougarou. The Altamaha-ha. And towering above them all, Kooshma, the King of Nightmares, feeding on every soul too stubborn or too broken to let go.
The narrative works because it never winks. It takes its folklore seriously, grounds it in a Black Southern family’s lived experience, and trusts you to feel the weight without a lore codex spelling it out.
Claymation as a Love Language
Let me be blunt: South of Midnight is one of the most visually distinctive games released in the last five years. Compulsion committed to a stop-motion aesthetic — characters hitch and stutter at lower frame rates during cutscenes while the world around them breathes at a full sixty on PS5 — and the effect is mesmerizing. It looks like a diorama you could reach into. Moss clings to wrought-iron fences with visible texture. Swamp water catches light in a way that feels painted, not rendered.
Olivier Derivière’s score seals the deal. The man who gave A Plague Tale its mournful strings turns his ear to blues, gospel, zydeco, and field hollers here, and the result is one of 2025’s finest soundtracks — arguably the single best argument for playing the game at all. Every boss encounter has its own musical identity. Every quiet exploration stretch hums with the right kind of loneliness.
The PS5 version, arriving nearly a year after the Xbox and PC launch, is the definitive console experience. PS5 Pro owners get higher internal resolution and improved ray-traced reflections. The DualSense adds subtle resistance when Hazel pulls at Strands — a small touch, but it lands. And Compulsion shipped two welcome toggles exclusive to this release: one that disables the stop-motion stutter during active gameplay for those who find it distracting, and a Combat Skip mode that turns the whole thing into a walking sim for anyone who just wants the story.
The Combat Problem
Here is where the love letter gets a postscript full of apologies.
Hazel fights with a hook and a growing set of Weaver abilities — a force push, a force pull, a kind of telekinetic grab. You string together light melee combos, dodge on reaction, slot in an ability when the cooldown resets, and finish weakened enemies for a health refill. On paper, it’s competent. In practice, it’s rigid. Moves don’t chain with any fluidity; there’s no flow state, no rhythm, no moment where the system clicks and you feel like you’re improvising. You’re executing a rotation.
Worse, the enemy roster is thin. Four, maybe five distinct types recycled across the entire runtime. By the midpoint, every encounter feels like a chore you’re completing to earn the next story beat. Boss fights fare better — they’re visually spectacular and tied to the folklore in smart ways — but even they rely on pattern recognition so transparent it borders on patronizing.
Platforming falls into the same trap. Hazel gets a double jump, a glide, a wall run. The ingredients of a mobile, expressive traversal kit. But the level design never asks more of you than “jump here, glide there, wall-run to the obvious ledge.” It’s the videogame equivalent of coloring inside the lines — technically correct, emotionally inert.
Twelve Hours and the Question of Enough
South of Midnight is not a long game, and I respect that. Twelve hours, give or take, with minimal padding. No crafting trees, no gear scores, no open-world question marks littering the map. It tells its story and ends. In an era of seventy-hour live-service bloat, that restraint is a small act of courage.
But restraint cuts both ways. Twelve hours isn’t enough to develop its combat into something satisfying. Twelve hours isn’t enough to give every folklore creature the narrative weight it deserves — some show up, fight you, and vanish before you’ve absorbed what they represent. And twelve hours certainly isn’t enough for the mother-daughter relationship at the story’s core to earn its final-act catharsis without leaning on shortcuts.
Hazel and Lacey’s arc is the emotional spine of the game, and Adriyan Rae and Cynthia K. McWilliams perform the hell out of it. But the writing asks you to feel a reconciliation that it hasn’t fully built toward. You get the destination without enough of the road.
Is it worth it?
South of Midnight is a gorgeous, soulful game trapped inside a merely adequate one. Its art direction is fearless, its soundtrack is extraordinary, and its commitment to Black Southern folklore as a legitimate narrative framework — not a costume, not a backdrop, but the actual engine of its storytelling — is something I haven’t seen done this well in the medium. I wanted to love it without qualifiers. But every time the world pulled me in, the combat pushed me back out.
Play it for Prospero. Play it for Derivière’s score. Play it for Hazel Flood, who deserved a better game around her. And if you’re on PS5, turn on Combat Skip if the fighting frustrates you — Compulsion clearly knew.
A breathtaking art piece with the soul of a great game and the mechanics of an average one. Recommended for atmosphere chasers; a hard sell for anyone who needs their combat to sing.
