South of Midnight is an action-adventure platformer with a unique narrative: It jumps with both feet into the Deep South and its folklore ties to Southern Black culture.
The game follows Hazel Flood, the teen daughter of an overworked single mom. Hazel’s biggest claim to fame when we first meet her is that she’s a pretty decent high school runner. But after a massive hurricane hits her small town of Prospero and washes her mom and their trailer home down a raging river, Hazel is called upon to use much more than her athletic prowess.
For one thing, the teen must come face to face with the fact that the normal, ordinary world she thinks she knows is actually filled with mythical things she’s always denied. There are monsters here, huge and deadly creatures that suddenly peek through into the real world in the heat of the current disaster.
Hazel must also come to grips with the fact that she is genetically gifted to be a Weaver—a guardian who can see spiritual strands that connect life together in a Grand Tapestry.
She must learn special skills so she can fight dark spiritual entities called haints. Hazel will also unravel twisted knots of pain and trauma in the world, eventually restoring peace to her small town. But most importantly to Hazel, she must use everything she has to find and rescue her endangered mom.
As Hazel runs through flooded pig farms and swamped-out juke joints and churches, she realizes that her Southern world has been transformed into something fantastical. She rescues and gets advice, for example, from a truck-sized catfish. She battles an alligator as big as an island. And she pursues someone who’s part woman, part spider creature who steals away children wrapped in skeins of red yarn.
South of Midnight is a single player game. It does require an online connection to download and/or play it on Xbox Game Pass. (Purchased digital copies, though, can be played offline after downloading.)
Hazel uses enchanted hooks and other discovered tools to tug and pull apart tangled knots in the spiritual strands she perceives. Those knots represent pain and trauma created by selfish and hateful actions of others.
Through this narrative device, the game suggests that someone’s real-world choices can not only cause pain that potentially lasts for generations, but also might help create real-world monsters, too. And Hazel’s actions are in a sense bringing peace to that long-lasting spiritual turmoil.
Hazel’s journey also helps her see her mother’s emotional struggles, as well as the woman’s deep desire to help others, in a new light. And the two are drawn closer because of it. “Everything I do, I do for you,” Hazel’s mom declares.
The game itself is graphically impressive. And through atmospheric visuals and original songs (in the form of soulful blues and spritely honky-tonk tunes) it presents a compelling take on Deep South folklore.
There is combat in this game, but the gameplay here is much more story focused than battle centric. South of Midnight also offers several difficulty settings, including the option to skip combat encounters altogether.
All of the above said, this game can feel very spiritually dark at times, too. You can interpret the gameworld’s physical corruption and deadly creatures as metaphors for the dark choices people make as well as the grief, loss and regret they cause. But gamers still have to play through those creepy and foul situations.
One monster-vanquishing quest, for instance, deals with the guilt a daughter feels over facilitating the bloody death of her abusive father. Another quest focuses on a mother’s life-gutting pain and rage over losing a beloved child in an accident. The anger and guilt-fueled stories all lead to deadly folklore horrors that Hazel must eventually vanquish.
She’ll face off against shapeshifting beasties, boogeymen, ghouls and powerful individuals that show up in the form of demonlike cryptids in the Southern swamps. And all of them must be battled or somehow satisfied through mystical means. Players use hooks, arrows and spiritual blasts to viscerally attack monsters and their throbbing, open wounds.
People die or are killed in terrible ways. A drowned child’s body is pulled up out of a river; another child is beaten with a tree branch. One man gets consumed by an alligator. A flood-decimated pig farm features scores and scores of rotting animal carcasses. Animals and people are attacked and eaten. We see dark, spurting gore.
There’s quite a bit of swilled beer and brew in the mix, too. And the in-game language can be quite foul as well, including f- and s-words and uses of “h—,” “d–mit,” “a–hole,” and misuses of both God’s and Jesus’ names.
South of Midnight delivers a visually impressive gaming experience that creatively addresses the pain and anguish caused by people’s horrific choices. And it’s all clothed in a sweltering Southern folklore that’s rarely seen in video game form.
But the corruption- and death-focused storyline players must work through isn’t always an easy slog.
After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.
