South of Midnight is one of those games that's pretty good but frustratingly close to greatness

I was really looking forward to South of Midnight when it was announced. Not only did it look great graphically, but a game steeped in the underexplored legends of the Deep South full of magic and mythos seemed like a tantalizing change of pace. It was also by Compulsion Games, which made Contrast, a game that holds a special place for me because it was the first PS4 game I played and the first game I ever got all the trophies in.

There was some buzz around South of Midnight but I feel like it came and went without a lot of attention, and there's a reason for that. It's yet another Xbox Studios game that's pretty good but has some glaring flaws that hold it back. To be fair, it's priced at $40 so it's not intended to be a AAA game, but even as a AA experience it falls short of what it could be for a few pretty major reasons.

South of Midnight makes a mixed first impression. The game looks great, though the stop motion effect highlighted in the trailer doesn't actually appear much in the game. Nonetheless the detailed but stylized visuals present a rich world full of lush greenery and run down, decaying, buildings that's perfect for the sort of Southern story it wants to tell. The audio is also quite good, with some excellent music and good vocal performances from the entire cast. In terms of presentation it's not quite AAA because it doesn't have the bombastic cut scenes or highly detailed animations you see in something like God of War Ragnarök, but for a $40 AA game it's pretty much top of the line.

The problem with the first impression, then, is that the game takes a long time to get started. You're introduced to Hazel Flood (one of the best protagonist names from recent history, especially given the context of the game) just as a hurricane is hitting the trailer park she lives in with her mother, and you spend the first part of the game sort of packing your things and talking to some characters in the park. It's kind of boring. Then your house gets swept away by the water with your mother still inside and you start chasing it, doing some rudimentary 3D platforming as you try to save your mom.

This is when I learned that the game, which I thought would be built around combat, was actually mostly a linear 3D platformer. That's one of my favorite genres, so I should have been excited, but the problem is that the platforming just isn't very good. This is clearly a narrative first game by design, and almost all the gameplay seems built around giving you something to do between story segments. That's not to say that the platforming is bad, it's just pretty basic and rarely particularly exciting. It features old cliches like Uncharted style ledge grappling, and its favorite thing to do to you is hit you with hidden damage traps, like exploding mushrooms that blend into the environment, or spikes hidden by annoying camera angles, especially in areas where you possess Hazel's childhood doll and explore rabbit warrens and other underground areas. It has no original ideas, and executes its standard ones with pedestrian level designs and some annoyances. 3D platformers are back as a genre, and we've seen a lot of excellent games in the category recently, with Astro Bot winning Game of the Year from many publications last year. Playing a very basic 3D platformer with Uncharted style climbing and a very limited move set just feels kind of boring in comparison to some of the games we've seeen recently that have pushed the genre forward and reminded us of how good it can be at its best.

Then there's the combat. There's no way to sugar coat this, South of Midnight has bad combat. It's all arena based, where you walk into a circular area and have to kill waves of enemies until you can destroy the enemy spawner at the center of the arena. You get a few powers and upgrades along the way, but there are only about half a dozen different enemy types and I was bored of fighting way before the game's credits rolled. Not only is the combat extremely repetitive but it also feels bad, with enemies not really reacting to your hits and often being able to get cheap shots in at you, using homing attacks that close enormous distances. It's not difficult because you can regain life pretty easily, but it's annoying and makes everything feel sloppy and bad. Fighting in this game almost always felt like a chore. I say almost because there are 3 major boss fights in the game, and I would say that two of them are pretty good. But two good boss fights is not enough to save a combat system that feels underbaked and like it's there just because the devs felt combat was needed.

So if the game is not really about the gameplay but rather the story, how does that fare? Better, for sure, but not good enough to make up for the rest of the game's flaws. Hazel is actually quite a good character. It took me a little while to warm to her because she's a bit immature, but she's supposed to be in her late teens or early 20s so that's understandable, and she does grow during the course of her adventure. She's not one of my all-time favorite protagonists, but she's well above average, and the idea of a high school track star as a platforming character is kind of clever. The various characters she encounters on her journey, human and magical, living and dead, are all compelling in their own way, and the stories she uncovers range from inspiring to tragic to rage inducing. Hazel is a weaver, able to see and manipulate the strands of reality, and one of the game's major mechanics is her trying to resolve lasting trauma from tragic events in an area's past. Often you will go to an area and have to defeat a few enemy arenas to uncover a short story, then try to put thiings right. These substories are generally pretty strong, and the game's main narrative is simple enough, but also satisfying.

The major issue with the game's storytelling is how it tiptoes around race. Hazel is biracial, with a black mother and a white grandmother (her white father died well before the game starts) and her relationships to those two women drives her narrative forward. Her grandmother rejects her until she feels she can use her, but the racial element of this rejection is never addressed. That's despite the fact that the game does feature lots of themes around race, including Hazel following the ghostly memory of a prior weaver who was a member of the underground railroad, and even making comments on a dilapidated old riverboat about how if she had been on the boat she would have had to be a staff member because her skin color would never have allowed her to be a passenger.

Setting a game in the South with explicit racial themes and making a central narrative conceit about a white grandmother rejecting her black granddaughter but avoiding the racial dynamics feels like an enormous cop out, and makes the narrative fall a little flat. It's not that I demand "wokeness" from my games, but what I do want is authentic addressing of the issues the game raises. This feels like a cowardly cop out.

That is, of course, not the only issue with the game's narrative, but it undermines that narrative's strengths and makes everything feel like it's dancing around the actual topic at the heart of the story. This is a game about black southern life and legends, and explicitly shunting racial issues into some non-threatening substories that all take place in the past is a cop-out. Even if you want to make it clear that the grandmother's rejection is not about race (and to be fair the grandmother also rejected Hazel's father, who was entirely white) at least address it head on. Don't hide from it.

The combination of the mediocre gameplay and the narrative issues serve to weaken what could have been a truly great game. In terms of presentation the only real flaw is that some of the songs are a little on the nose lyrically, making subtext into text, but overall it's excellent. Hazel is a compelling character and there are fun villains and allies in her journey. The main story isn't even bad, it just feels a little incomplete and cowardly. If there was more variety in things to do, better combat, something, it could have come together into the special experience I was expecting. Instead it's enjoyable but mildly disappointing, and not good enough to break through into the zeitgeist. I wouldn't mind seeing Hazel Flood again in a sequel some day, but if they do bring her back I hope they give her more exciting things to do, and put her in a story that doesn't feel like it's hiding from its own themes. She deserves a little better than what this game can offer.