South of Midnight Review

There are games you play. Then there are games you feel, games that haunt you not for their challenge or conquest, but because they press up against the soft tissue of memory, because they have the audacity to believe a story can be more than pixels and polygons. South of Midnight, available on Xbox and PC through Game Pass, is one of those rare works.

Over the course of 14 chapters, Compulsion Games delivers a master class in storytelling, a meditation not just on struggle, but on empathy. On what it means to see someone, truly, past the thickets of myth and misjudgment. This is a story about saving your mother, yes, but also about saving yourself from the inherited silence that trauma so often leaves behind. And standing in your path? The Haints, monstrous shadows of sorrow, grief incarnate, that sunder the land into something hollow and hungry.

But when you defeat them, when you stand in defiance of their pain, you do not merely win. You restore. The world breathes again, bathed in a kind of Southern Gothic beauty, a reclamation both literal and symbolic. And with each victory, secrets are unearthed. The people around you, neighbors, strangers, kin, are stripped of their veneers, and you see them in full: broken, tender, resilient. This is where South of Midnight shines brightest, not in its gameplay, which some might find familiar or serviceable, but in its relentless pursuit of truth.

Still, no art is without its fissures. The combat, while never outright poor, lacks the grace and evolution of the story it supports. The mechanics are functional, but rarely inspired, enemies become predictable, encounters blur, and the gameplay loop settles into repetition more than revelation. Yet it never becomes a burden. It is the scaffolding on which something far more poetic is built. The combat serves its purpose: to push you deeper into the heart of the narrative, and in that sense, it succeeds.

And yet, the gameplay never detracts. It is a vessel, a rhythm that carries you forward, often in lockstep with the game’s most magical invention: its music. The incorporation of magical music—songs that aren’t just soundtrack but spell, not just ambiance but ancestry—elevates the entire experience into the realm of the sacred. Music is memory, music is magic, music is survival.

Compulsion’s stop-motion art style and painterly landscapes astonish in every frame. There are set pieces here that linger in the mind like dreams half-remembered—strange, stirring, and achingly beautiful. But it’s the characters that stay with you. I met many in these digital crossroads, and in unraveling their stories, I wept. Because these weren’t just characters—they were echoes of the people we all know. The broken uncle. The strong friend who hides her softness. The mother whose silence was never absence, but armor.

South of Midnight did not simply entertain me—it moved me. In a medium that too often trades heart for spectacle, this game chose intimacy. It chose empathy. And in doing so, it reminded me why we tell stories at all.