South of Midnight is a third-person action adventure with dark and fascinating themes around Southern Gothic mysticism and the dangerous yet beautiful bayous of the American Deep South.

Available on Game Pass, Xbox and PC, it’s a modest 10-12 hour story- and gameplay-focused adventure that’ll only run you just over half the price of what you’d pay for a full-price, triple-A blockbuster franchise. Is it only just about half as good, though?

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In South of Midnight you play Hazel, a girl who loses her mom in a flood and finds out she’s a Weaver, a sort of generational chosen-one with special powers, sort of like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but with like – weaving equipment.

Instead of fighting Vampires like Buffy though, Hazel fights the physical manifestation of trauma, called Haints.

It’s true, when you’re not using your powers to get to your objective, or find side paths with upgrade points, you fight creatures born of people’s tragedies in set arena areas.

Haters gonna Haint

The combat itself didn’t impress me all that much at first – but once you unlock more enemy types and abilities, it gets really fun and slick, and feels like a sort of lighter version of the combat you might get from a game like Marvel’s Spider-Man.

The traversal and platforming is quite similar in that way, in that it all just starts getting better and better as you discover more equipment and unlock more abilities in your skill tree.

Over the course of Hazel’s story, you essentially make your way through linear locations with some minor side paths, identifying the source of the trauma corrupting the area and then trying to fix it, sometimes with large boss battles and other times with something more story related – and some of the stories are actually pretty heart-wrenching, and often deal with familial grief or childhood trauma.

Old-school vibes with new tech

In many ways, South of Midnight sort of reminds me of the good old days of the PS2; games like Sands of Time, Psychonauts, Soul Reaver and a few others.

Unlike PS2 games and despite being what’s essentially a Double-A and not Triple-A game, South of Midnight is absolutely stunning, offering no performance modes on Xbox, it just straight up delivers a gorgeous realised world with varied and interesting locations, beautiful high resolution graphics, a smooth 60fps frame rate and art design that is nothing short of inspired.

There is however, an attempt to sell this stylised visual idea of stop motion and puppets that doesn’t quite land, mostly because in video games – stop motion usually translates as poor performance, and because it doesn’t fully commit to the whole miniatures and puppets look throughout, so it sorts of sits in an awkward in-between place that you just ultimately get used to.

It doesn’t half-ass it when it comes to music though, and this is something that really elevates the experience tremendously in the way its used along with the narrative, moreso, there are brilliant and subtle little audio details that will easily go unnoticed, like how the child-like voices that are audible when Hazel uses her powers seem to actually sing in harmony with the musical theme playing on the level at the time.

What We Need Right Now

While many of the elements of South of Midnight feel familiar, it all comes together as an incredibly solid, fun, tight and polished package. There’s been a recent and major call for games to return to days where we see more double-A games, when budgets were smaller and it was less risky to fail, especially now that some games can take 6-8 years to develop.

In many ways I think South of Midnight is a perfect example of exactly what gaming needs more of right now. Its mechanics are fun and manageable, its skill tree isn’t massive and overwhelming, the story was tight and it was already in a polished state by the time I played it.

If you’re wondering what the difference is between AA and AAA, I’ll tell you a secret that I figured out: AA games are the ones where things that hang don’t move when you bump into them.

It’s just science.

Biggers Isn’t Always Better

This leaves me feeling really torn. In one way I feel like there’s something really unique here that could be nurtured and expanded into a grand sequel closer to something like God of War. On the other hand, one of the reasons South of Midnight works so well is because it kept things modest and didn’t bite off more than it can chew.

What I do know, is that I ended up absolutely adoring South of Midnight, its world, characters and gameplay. It could be even better though, so I really do hope that this isn’t the last we see of Hazel or the story of Weavers, Trauma and this mystical version of the Deep South.