South of Midnight Steam Charts & Stats

I like it. The gameplay technical is mediocre, but the story it tells accomponied by the graphics and the outstanding soundtrack, makes the game overal a good experience.

South of Midnight is a gem of a game! The game blends lore and magic with local history as it builds its story of Hazel trying to be reunited with her mother after a hurricane. The game feels special, full of wonder and imagination, and I found the whole thing to be charming. It was also an extremely pretty game, and I found myself taking lots of screenshots of the environments. The music, voice acting, and overall art design is excellent. Play this game if you like story-driven games. The tale is heartfelt, the characters interesting and likable. It leans lightly on some common tropes, but not in a way that felt trite or obnoxious, and it's wrapped in enough magic that I would be surprised if anyone didn't find themselves immersed in the world. The actual gameplay is pretty simple. There's minor platforming (sometimes under time pressure in chase sequences), regular mob fights, and periodically big boss fights. The combat has a ton of options for varying levels of difficulty that can be fine-tuned on many levels, as well as the option to skip them entirely. You can, for example, still do all the fights while invulnerable in order to experience them but without the difficulty, or you can make your damage really low and the enemy damage very high for a challenge, or you can bypass those segments all together. The combat is pretty basic and not particularly exciting, but that's not the reason to play this game anyway. The chase sequences were fun, but are also skippable if you're stressed by platforming under time pressure. Overall, the actual mechanics of gameplay are nothing innovative or special, but are simple, intuitive, with responsive controls. I started the game doing the combat but unfortunately found it was making me a bit motion sick, so I ended up enabling the option to skip it after several chapters in. I feel like the game did a good job at allowing you to skip the fights without any detriment to the story, although I will probably try again to replay and at least do the boss fights since those are with more critical lore figures. Unfortunately around chapter 9, I began skipping the chase sequences, too, as I encountered a bug multiple times where my abilities would stop working and I'd fall through the terrain with no way to get out or die, requiring me to replay that chapter. This was a bummer since I actually enjoyed these sections but got too frustrated after the third time it happened to me. This bug is the only thing negative I can say of the game, and hopefully it is something that is rare and/or fixed soon. I didn't encounter any other issues, so hopefully that some exist don't put you off from experiencing this delightful game.

I enjoyed this game a lot. It truly was a well woven experience told through the music, the characters, and the game play. It's a great game for people who aren't as interested in combat. I can't emphasize how much I loved Hazel and her design! She was so fun to play and I can't wait to see future games from this company.

It's not that dream Beasts of the Southern Wild x Big Fish mashup that you imagine on sight, but the audiovisual presentation comes damn close. Full of soul even if a bit short of greatness.

This is genuinely the most conflicted I have been in reviewing a game. I have decided it's a recommendation, but it's a recommendation with some caveats. First of all, I hate to say it, but unless this is on a good sale, I don't think it's worth it. I played the whole game through in about ten hours, and while I spent 3/4 of the game hunting down every optional side "floof" that I could, I ended up skipping the optional stuff and even the boss fights towards the end of the game. Forty dollars for about ten hours is not worth it to me, and I had so many issues with the core gameplay of this game that I do not want to go back and replay it for more achievements. First, the positives. Holy cow, the music. The art style, the color palettes, the voice acting. The art of this game is so genuinely beautiful and breathtaking. The story was great, the script tight. I NEED more games in this kind of setting, with deep south myths and realistic people. I love that the protagonist is black, and black culture runs deep throughout this game. It is badly needed diversity. The sorrow of slavery and the stories of all these people's pain hit me hard. It's emotional and it makes you feel so connected to the world of the game and the people in it. That is why it grieves me that the core gameplay of this game was so absolutely JANK. First of all, I have a pretty decent computer and GPU, but I was SUFFERING in this game. I spent an hour at the beginning trying to get it to run somewhat decently, and finally after tweaking, got it to work. But I kept having issues throughout the game. When I defeated haints, flowers would grow in the air and not in the actual ground. Places that would look accessible would have invisible walls that I would get hung up on and have to finagle my way out of. The game encourages you to not follow the guiding strands that lead you to the main story beats in order to find "floofs" to upgrade your abilities, but when you do so, a lot of times you end up hitting pockets of corruption in the wrong order for the main story quests, leading me to a lot of confusion as to what was happening when. And do not get me STARTED on combat. Running, jumping, and sprinting already feel weird (I had to turn my mouse sensitivity up to almost 200% to get it to behave somewhat normally) but then when you add the strange targeting system and camera jank into it, I died so many times in ways that were incredibly unfair because I couldn't dodge out of a space or away from a monster because the targeting just wouldn't let me. There was so much potential for good combat here, but it just feels clunky and awkward. I think the takeaway is, more games like this please. It's clear that so much love was poured into this. Just... maybe a little more time in the oven to fix bugs and smooth over things like combat?

Underrated game with amazing visual design,game characters, environments. I'm not from South America, but it was an awesome experience with the music and the stories they told. We need more games like this, because right now too many games feel soulless and heartless. A game like this deserves to sell for more than $40. Thanks, Compulsion Games, for these 18 hours of an incredible experience. Truly enjoyable! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3477556075

I completed the game while playing on an easy mode with low graphics. I would absolutely recommend this game.

This is the game I wish younger me would have had decades ago. As a Blqck woman gamer this game feels like a milestone I’ve been waiting for and didn’t know it. It’s absolutely gorgeous and feels so relatable like every character reminds me of someone I’ve known in my life. The story is an absolute dream? It manages to lean in to the history of slavery while not being bogged down in to trauma and sadness but in to beauty and freedom. Not to mention all the accessibility features and options for how you play, it’s endlessly customizable. This game may have spoiled me for all future games. Thank you so much to the developers for giving us this!

Story and setting are great, although the combat can get repetitive.

5/10 - dropped ~50% of the way through the game I put the controller down after Chapter 6 - the midpoint of South of Midnight’s twelve‑chapter odyssey - and realized I felt nothing but fatigue. The game’s striking Xbox Showcase debut and a run of respectable early reviews had primed me for an atmospheric action‑adventure steeped in American folklore. Instead, I found a title that fumbles the two essentials of the medium: it is rarely fun, and it is almost never engaging. The positives deserve airtime. Visually, the stop‑motion aesthetic is a bold, memorable choice that immediately distinguishes the cut‑scenes from the usual Unreal Engine gloss. The score, while not headed for a pantheon playlist, layers tension nicely as it swells across the chapters. The fleeting platform‑and‑chase sequences - dodging a nameless void creature through collapsing bayou architecture - deliver genuine thrill; they evoked the best escape set‑pieces in Respawn’s Jedi series. And the premise itself, a dive into southern folk mythology, is refreshingly under‑mined territory in games. Yet every promising element is undercut by execution. Combat is the chief offender. Even on the default difficulty the melee system feels clunky, animation‑locked, and wholly unsatisfying. Enemies are sponges, combos refuse to flow, and the camera lags behind to such an extent that I maxed the sensitivity slider and still had to wrestle it through ninety degrees. By Chapter 4 I had toggled the built‑in “skip combat” option - a tacit admission, perhaps, that the developers anticipated players would want out. Story, ostensibly the backbone of a game so light on mechanics, fares little better. Hazel, our protagonist, reacts to cosmic revelations with the emotional range of a dial tone. Her mother is swept away in a flash flood; Hazel’s response is a tepid “guess I’d better chase the house,” delivered in a barely invested drawl. The disconnect between what a sane human would feel and what Hazel expresses ruptures immersion from the opening scene, and the writing never recovers. The chapter‑break narrator compounds the problem with an oddly stilted cadence - half bayou yarn‑spinner, half GPS - and dialogue throughout is as subtle as a road flare. The folklore bestiary, promising on paper, manifests as a parade of interchangeable haints whose designs blur together and whose AI seldom threatens. The weavers, threads, knots, and metaphysical jargon, gesture toward cosmic significance but never coalesce into a mythology worth caring about. I recently watched Sinners, a film that mines the same cultural well with infinitely greater menace and coherence. South of Midnight’s version feels like a first draft by comparison. I want to acknowledge the evident passion behind the project. The art team, in particular, poured love into every moss‑draped cypress. And I understand why some players have found the game resonant - its earnestness is palpable. But coming off the masterfully written, mechanically impeccable Expedition 33, and the cinematic gut‑punch of Sinners, South of Midnight never stood a chance. It is an intriguing concept executed with admirable style yet undermined by clumsy systems, inert storytelling, and lifeless pacing. Halfway through, I realized I had no reason to keep turning the pages. So I closed the book.