From swamps to Appalachia, how South of Midnight captures a seldom-seen America

After a slow start to this console generation, Xbox is looking to make its mark starting in 2025. Major entries in franchises like Gears of War, Doom, and Fable are on the way, alongside an ambitious Perfect Dark revival. The most intriguing game in its lineup, though, isn’t a glitzy game from a pre-existing franchise; it’s something entirely new.

South of Midnight is the latest game from We Happy Few developer Compulsion games, and the studio’s first project since being acquired by Microsoft in 2018. The action-adventure project, set to launch in 2025, is unique in two key ways. For one, it has a unique visual style that makes it look like a playable stop-motion film. It’s also a video game set in a place that few big-budget games have ever deeply explored: America’s deep South. It’s a magical realist story inspired by Southern gothic literature and folktales from the region.

Today, Xbox released a new documentary about the project and its aim to both capture an authentic Southern story and make that tale relatable to all players. Ahead of the reveal, Digital Trends visited Compulsion Games’ studio in Montreal, Canada, where we saw a fresh gameplay demo and spoke to several members of the creative team about the project. The conversations painted a picture of a team that’s well equipped to tackle such a unique project thanks to unbridled creative energy at every stage of production.

“Creatively as a studio, we’re more like a jazz band than a person who comes in and directs everything,” Compulsion studio head Guillaume Provost tells Digital Trends. “It doesn’t matter if the pianist starts playing or the singer starts singing. It doesn’t matter which portion of the creative team gets that first foothold on a creative project.”

Creating the deep South

South of Midnight tells the story of Hazel, a Black track and field star living in the South who discovers she has magical powers. After a hurricane rages through her community, she sets out on a quest to heal different biomes inspired by areas from New Orleans to Appalachia. With such a specific setting, Compulsion knew it had to do everything it could to make sure it was truly capturing the sights and sounds of the American South.

Authenticity was the name of the game, and Compulsion went to some serious lengths to achieve it. The first thing that stands out to me during the demo isn’t the stop-motion style but the dense soundscape. In Chapter 5, Hazel finds herself in a swampy area that’s been ravaged by the hurricane. The sounds of mosquitos buzzing pours out of the speakers in a realistic density that I’ve never quite heard in a game before. There’s a reason it sounds so real: Compulsion did significant field recording around the South to capture the exact atmosphere you’d hear on a hot summer’s day. Audio director Chris Fox describes it as a “sound painting.”

That philosophy extends to its soundtrack, which takes inspiration from folk music of the region rather than entirely leaning on traditional orchestral music. The latter does appear, but only in moments that are meant to feel unnatural, like boss fights against evil spirits called Haint. Otherwise, the soundtrack is dotted with organs, acoustic guitars, banjos, and more rustic instruments that give South of Midnight a distinct soundscape grounded in Southern culture.

A big goal of the project was tying musicality to action. During the demo, Hazel fights an enormous alligator named Two-Toed Tom, a local legend that originated in the 1920s. It’s a thrilling battle where Hazel needs to dodge its gnashing teeth and use her magic to toss rocks at a church bell to stun it and open a weak point between its jaws. A high-energy folk tune plays in the background, dynamically switching to new movements as new phases of the fight begin. Chris Fox tells Digital Trends that this is just one of the ways South of Midnight ties music to gameplay.

“We’ve actually made a music system where when the player inputs a traversal ability, they’ll actually sing along to the backing track,” Fox says. “It works with MIDI and samples, and that’ll change depending on what backing music is playing at the time and what song is playing. So you’ll feel a musical expression and that comes back to the action equals musicality idea. It gives you a feeling that you’re playing music while playing the game.”

The same thinking was applied to its art, which turns familiar Southern locations into magical realist playgrounds. During the demo, Hazel passes through an old, rickety church that looks like something you’d see deep in the heart of Louisiana. The level is a mess of wooden planks and storefronts that have been thrown around the swamp by the hurricane. Crows sit on fence posts and thick vegetation lines the roads. Despite looking exactly like claymation models, these feel like real places.

That look comes from deep research, which included two week-long trips to the South (on one, Chris Fox had a close call with a bear). There were several cultural touchpoints that Compulsion drew from as well to capture the right feeling. During my interviews, I heard William Faulkner and Beasts of the Southern Wild name-checked, and the chapter I saw was named after Flannery O’Connor’s short story Everything That Rises Must Converge.

The most important design references, though, came from real folktales. The monsters Hazel encounters were built around various cryptids and other legends of the region. The tricky part about that? There aren’t a lot of firm illustrations of those creatures. That’s one of the places where Compulsion had to take creative liberty to adapt unseen creatures into enemies.

“Early on, it was about figuring out what their tone is,” art director Whitney Clatyon tells Digital Trends. “There’s this dark, eerie elegance that feels like a folktale atmosphere that permeates the whole world. We wanted that to come through their designs. We were definitely inspired by Guillermo del Toro and his creatures. They’re twisted, they’re unpredictable, but they’re elegant. He was one of the earliest references.”

Fighting and weaving

For its gameplay, South of Midnight isn’t breaking new ground — and that’s by design. The team’s focus was on creating a smooth action-adventure title whose mechanics flow from its story. The setting was the first element the team settled on during development and design decisions were informed by that choice. As soon as the team knew it would be dealing with a diversity of regions, from flat swamps to more vertical city streets, it decided that it should create a traversal-heavy adventure game that would show off those spaces.

The main hook is Hazel’s magical powers. She’s a Weaver who uses white threads to manipulate the world and move around. Outside of battle, she can reveal objects in the environment, grapple, and glide all with the same magic skillset. Her powers are shown off in a bit of side-exploration when she comes across a short platforming puzzle that grants her a Floof, a resource that’s used to upgrade her powers via a straightforward skill list.

Hazel’s magic is just as useful in battle. In addition to performing standard slashes with her hooks, she can use her threads to temporarily tie up an enemy, perform a healing Unravel finisher, and more. All of that action looks smooth too as South of Midnight targets 60 frames per second (though you may not think so at first since it’s replicating an “animating on twos” stop-motion style).

All of it gives me flashbacks to Kena: Bridge of Spirits, a similarly tight action-adventure game that honed in on game feel above all else. The general biome structure feels similar, complete with some optional exploration, platforming, and collectibles. But the more direct comparison comes from the way Hazel heals the world as she moves through it. After clearing a fight, she uses her magic to turn the poisoned landscape back to a vibrant American landscape, just as Kena does in her adventure.

That idea, like many others, is thematically motivated. This is a game about healing. While some creatures are evil spirits to be fought, others are humans so haunted by trauma that they’ve been warped into monsters. Hazel’s story is about finding out why they transformed and using empathy to restore them.

A relatable experience

Throughout the studio visit, everyone I spoke to hammered home how important South of Midnight’s themes are to every level of the project. Even something as small as the characters retaining the handcrafted imperfections of real stop-motion models is intentional; part of the tale is about how imperfections are part of what defines us. There’s a sincerity to the project that I can already feel in just a short glimpse of it.

It’s my conversation with the acting side of the project that really highlights what makes that approach special. When asked about what drew him to the project, performance and voice director Ahmed Best notes how important he felt it was for a video game to center a Black woman in the way South of Midnight does. Hazel’s two actresses, Adriyan Rae and stunt performer Nona Parker Johnson, both had similarly personal connections to the character. When Johnson mentions her track background, all three performers share a mutual laugh over their running memories. There’s a real experience there that they all connect to.

South of Midnight aims to make that story relatable to the player. When the topic of representation comes up, Johnson explains why it’s crucial for games to center heroes like Hazel. It’s not about telling a story just for Black women; anyone should be able to identify with what she’s going through.

“We’re constantly inundated with what the status quo believes is the universal human experience,” Johnson says. “What’s important about having characters like Hazel — and other Black female characters, Black queer characters, and other POC characters — be the ones who you’re guiding through a world shows you that this existence is also one that I can relate to. For me, it’s seeing this person and relating to them and not believing that you can’t identify with them because they’re Black, or a woman, or from the South.”

There’s a moment in the documentary that stands out most during the screening. A team member notes that what’s so moving about Hazel as a hero is that a young Black girl might be able to cosplay her and use her own natural hair to do so. For Adriyan Rae, details like that are what make the project so vital.

“I hope players learn that Black people can be the lead of a game, or the lead of a movie,” Rae says. “Black people can take up space, and it’s wonderful. Our stories deserve to be told. I hope that little black girls, including my daughter, can cosplay and look into this game and see that there is magic within them. That they are capable of more than they ever could fathom, and that they’re beautiful just how they are. And I hope that everyone sees the relatability of the game regardless of if you’re a woman or if you’re Black. There are themes that can touch everyone. That self-healing is important. That having empathy and care for your neighbors is important. That growth and openness is important in resilience.

“The game opens with a terrible hurricane. Us on the outside, we see the hurricanes hit over there and we say, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ But when you’re playing it and you’re invested in a character that’s invested in this world, it allows you a different level of understanding and empathy. When you have empathy and understanding, that’s where love thrives, and that’s where unity comes in instead of division.”

It’s answers like these that highlight why Compulsion’s drive for authenticity, coupled with smooth gameplay and inviting art direction, make South of Midnight stand out in a sea of upcoming action-adventure games. The creative lengths that the studio has gone on to truly capture a Southern experience makes for a story that feels custom-built for a dark, divisive era in American history. Diverse stories can help build a kinder and more empathetic world for everyone.

“My son plays Spider-Man all the time, and he plays as Miles Morales,” Ahmed Best says. “And the thing I love about Miles Morales is that he’s a Spider-Man who looks like my son. But to my son, he’s just Spider-Man. When you have rich characters in beautiful games like South of Midnight, you realize that not all heroes wear capes; they wear braids.”

“Period!” Rae adds, perfectly punctuating the thought.