South of Midnight

Steam Reviews

Read all reviews on Steam

• Recommended Posted June 13, 2025 on Steam I would recommend this game with a caveat: this is a highly narrative game and feels almost like playing a movie. It's a gorgeous game with beautiful visuals, music, and characters. For the price, it is a short game, so keep in mind that you're paying for the labour behind the art and the music rather than complex gameplay. The story is fairly straightforward, nothing too complex, but if you like fairy tales and big beautiful creatures, then this is for you!
• Recommended Posted November 9, 2025 on Steam I'm new to gaming, I mostly play low effort games/cozy games, or games with my friends. South of Midnight was one of the few games I got into without someone else convincing me to play it. As a relatively new gamer, the game was challenging at times, but if you like story based games, lore, fantastic world building, hidden content, sad stories and good original music, I'd highly recommend this game. By the end of the game, I felt way more confident in what I was doing during fights and timed runs. There are few times a game has made me cry, but there were few times South of Midnight hadn't made me burst into tears for one reason or another (I literally cried when the credits started rolling, I loved it so much). It was my first play through so I didn't take my proper time to explore the world, but I'd recommend everyone doing so. 10/10 definitely am playing again.
• Recommended Posted September 8, 2025 on Steam There are so many reviews of this game that there is little I can add. Suffice it to say that South of Midnight is one of the best games I've played in quite some time. It is drop-dead gorgeous with amazing scenery, an incredible sound track, interesting characters, and a story that will touch your heart. It has some fun mechanics... gliding, jumping, grappling, casting spells, etc. It is also a difficult game for those who lack finesse in platforming and combat. There are multiple chase scenes which require fast reactions to changing terrain and four boss battles. Luckily, Compulsion Games provides options for those of us who are challenged in these areas. There is a 'story' mode which makes the game much easier. You can also choose to skip specific combat scenes, chase sequences, and boss battles. The game auto-saves on exit. South of Midnight has a host of collectibles. Some are used to upgrade your skills so it is worth the effort to retrieve as many items as possible. In addition, much of the lore is told through the notes you find. For missed collectibles, you can return to replay any chapter at any time. I played in Story Mode and skipped a couple of chase scenes. As a result, I was able to finish the game and enjoy the whole story. My hat is off to those who excel in action games. Since I am not in that group, I really appreciate this development team's efforts to make South of Midnight accessible to all. I highly recommend this magical experience!
• Recommended Posted April 5, 2026 on Steam South of Midnight is one of my all-time favorite games. I dunno exactly where it lands (top 10? top 5?), but it feels like something I’ve been waiting for for a long time. A big part of that is how fully it leans into Southern Gothic storytelling - a style rooted in the American South that mixes superstition and the grotesque with very real histories of violence, poverty, and generational trauma. As the character Hazel, you follow in the footsteps of a previous Weaver (a sort of magic mender of reality), who used her powers to help enslaved people escape their masters, and that alone says a lot about what this game has to say. It’s not just about aesthetics; it’s also about trauma, legacy, and the weight places carry. The game is set in Louisiana, but it pulls from folklore and culture across the Deep South in a cool and cohesive way. You see things like glass bottle trees (rooted in Congolese tradition) reimagined through Hazel’s ability to trap negative energy, which fits perfectly in a place like Prospero where everything feels haunted by grief and regret. There's Two-Toed Tom, the giant gator from Florida folklore, and even South Carolina’s peach water tower (the Peachoid, it's called, like WTF). It’s also one of the first times I’ve seen a Rougarou depicted in media, which is kind of wild considering how iconic it is. Even the basic enemies, called Haints (a sort of different way of saying "haunts), pull from the Gullah (an African American culture that lives in coastal areas of the South). The rest I didn’t recognize at all, which honestly made it even better, cuz I looooove going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. What really makes it work, though, is how grounded all of that is in real, often ugly history. You see the impact of wealth and power - how rich white families exploited and harmed Black communities through labor, entertainment, or outright violence. There are echoes of this everywhere: farms, lumber mills, steamboats. You also see how poverty and trauma carry outward, shaping families and communities in very painful ways. When you defeat bosses/villains, it's not by killing them, it's by coming to understand them. Even the worst characters are given context. People aren't ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ for no reason, you know? Sometimes a "villain" is simply a person forced to make an impossible choice. It’s a game about empathy more than anything else, and it commits to that fully. On top of all that, it’s a beautiful game. The stop-motion, claymation-inspired art style is incredible. Every character is unique and meticulously handcrafted, and the environments (swamps, farmlands, building interiors, etc) are packed with detail and so stunning to look at. The wildlife especially stood out to me - herons flying overhead, snapping turtles along the water, foxes darting off. The sound design sells it even more, with constant ambient calls from the cricket frogs to the Carolina wrens. And the music?? Banger of soundtrack. The game, despite intense themes, is just so... cozy. I’ve seen some complaints about the "simplicity" of the combat or the linearity, but that’s part of the charm for me. It’s a concise ~12-hour experience that feels like playing a classic PS2-era title. It’s just pure, simple fun, yanno? Also, Hazel is easily one of my favorite protagonists in recent years. While I wish the ending had a little more room to breathe and a slightly longer conclusion, the way everything wrapped up was beautiful and satisfying. I desperately hope we get a sequel, because this world is too special to only visit once.
• Recommended Posted December 28, 2025 on Steam Beautiful story game that is somewhat let down by mediocre gameplay. The traversal gameplay is fine. Nothing you haven't seen before in other games if you play a lot of action adventures (double run, wall run, grappling hook, an ability to glide, abilities to push/pull objects to climb on/clear the way), but it's solid and will keep you enganged. The controls are very smooth. I didn't have any issues with this aspect of the game. I believe I only ever got stuck on terrain 2 or 3 times over the entire course of the game. There's some very easy platforming puzzles that require you to push/pull objects to progess, usually combined with an ability to make intangible object interactable for a while. Nothing you have to think about real hard about and clearly not the main focus of the game. The combat is unfortunately very repetitive. It's not just that you're fighting the same 5 enemy types over and over, but that every combat encounter is the same. Combat happens only in designated combat arenas. The arenas are perfectly flat, no terrain interaction. You start by fighting 2 or 3 basic enemies and more waves enemy start spawning in waves. No variation. On top of that, the combat feels very floaty, meaning there isn't much feedback to your hits. There's a handful of bosses in this game and they look great, but unfortunately pretty much all of them are gimmick fights. The only boss fight I truly enjoyed was the one in chapter 7, since it's the only one that truly feels like a fight, because it's the only boss on which you're able to unleash all your combat abilities. The games strength definitely lie in the beautiful, colourful visuals, unique art style and the narrative. There's a few awkward moments in the beginning of the game in which I feel the dialogue could have been stronger and lingered a bit more on the characters' emotions, but these are some early hiccups. The dialogue, narrative and ambient storytelling become much stronger the further you progress in the game. The visuals of the mythical locations are creatures are simply stunning and only get more gorgeous as you progress through the game.
• Recommended Posted January 6, 2026 on Steam it's basically a reskin of Alice: Madness Returns but in a Sinners/True Blood-like setting and with a more positive vibe. so it gives a strange sad deja vu since the original Alice 2 was abandoned because of complicated rights and etc. and secondly, because South of Midnight is beautifully done as well and deserves more attention. animations, location design, music - everything is just pure art.