As days go, Hazel is having one for the books. Her mother was lost in a hurricane after they had a fight, there are dangerous black-and-red creatures called haints everywhere, and she discovers that she is able to see and manipulate the glowing strands that control reality.
Don’t even mention the talking catfish.
By drawing on American folk tales and Southern Gothic literature, the action-adventure video game South of Midnight stands apart in a field crowded with Vikings, spartans, samurai, knights and sorcerers.
Its world is filled with mythology that David Sears, the creative director of Compulsion Games, first learned from his grandmother. He grew up in Mississippi in a very ordinary suburb that he said felt like it was “airdropped” into wild swamplands. His grandmother’s disturbing tales about monsters of the South — the game’s haints look like shadowy, screaming tree roots — stuck with him. As he explored the wilderness around his home, clambering up vines to escape boredom, he began to tell himself stories.
“At the time I believed in monsters,” Sears said. “I still believe in monsters, but they were my friends. We went on heroic journeys together. And it’s part of where I learned to spin a good tale.”
American folklore is an oral tradition, making it hard to pin down definitive myths. But that also gave those working on South of Midnight the freedom to create, said Zaire Lanier, a writer and narrative designer.
“The South isn’t a monolith,” she said. “It’s a tapestry.”
One monster that Hazel encounters, the rougarou, is rooted in Cajun folklore and tends to be depicted as a werewolf. But the design team from the Montreal studio found other versions of the tale, and other stories about shape-shifters, in research trips it took to places like the Mississippi Delta, the Appalachian Mountains and the Great Dismal Swamp in parts of North Carolina and Virginia. The game’s audio designer, Chris Fox, said they got rashes from poison sumac in the swamp while they were recording the game’s ambient sounds.
Lanier said the designers stayed true to the core of the rougarou myth — it represents rage and a loss of control — while presenting it instead as an owl-like creature. This particular monster, she said, was once somebody who felt that he had “lost control” and that the “only option was to fly away.”
Every back story is important in South of Midnight. Sears wanted all of the creatures to have a soul, even the giant alligator Two-Toed Tom. He said the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, known for “Pan’s Labyrinth” and “The Shape of Water,” was fantastic at doing so.
“It’s more about finding the humanity in the monster,” Sears said.
Reckoning with pain runs through South of Midnight. Despite its stylized character design inspired by stop-motion animation, it is not a game for children. The themes it explores are those of tragedy, irrevocable decisions and the dark shadows that terrible events leave behind.
“We’re operating in the Southern Gothic genre,” Lanier said. “It’s always tragic: You live hard, you die hard, and it’s very depressing in between.”
South of Midnight, which releases for the Xbox Series X|S and the PC this week, has all the trappings of exploration and combat that are central to the action genre. But while Hazel battles deadly creatures, she is a healer at her core. Lanier said it was important that her journey did not feel nihilistic.
Though she does not know it when the story begins, Hazel is a weaver — a person chosen by the land to repair the fabric of existence, which the game calls the Grand Tapestry. The battles allow Hazel to heal the pain and trauma of the world around her. Every time she defeats the vicious haints, Hazel leaves behind light and fields of flowers.
Even Hazel’s weapons — which include a pair of weaver’s hooks, a distaff and a drop spindle — are derived from a creative force. They were inspired by American quilting history, including Black traditions going back to slavery that were their own form of storytelling and expression. Some quilts even contained coded messages.
In one section of the game, Hazel sees visions of the past in which a previous weaver leads a small group of escaped slaves to freedom. She learns that weavers are guides and healers — and fighters when they have to be.
Lanier said it was important that Hazel’s story departed from the more traditional “chosen one” narrative. Hazel’s powers do not come to her by right or bloodline. Anybody can be a weaver. All it takes is that, “in a moment of need, the land would chose you.” Weavers are champions of the oppressed.
But sometimes a wound is too great to fully heal. Sometimes all that can be done is to listen and acknowledge the pain.
When Hazel meets the talking catfish — appropriately named Catfish — who becomes an ally and a guide, he is hanging upside down, trapped in the grip of an enormous tree that is blocking the way forward. Freeing him sends Hazel on a quest that involves a scared and manic shell of a man living in an old shack in the swamp. There, she learns about bottle trees, which are hung with colored glass vessels that trap haints and other violent spirits; a bottle from that tree becomes a vital tool on Hazel’s journey. She also hears the story of two brothers, Rhubarb and Benjy.
As she explores, Hazel finds notes in abandoned houses that mention a talented, accepted brother and an odder one who was constantly bullied. In one scene from their lives, a bear trap is intentionally left for Benjy to wander into it. Hazel’s reactions include righteous anger and wonder at how people could be so cruel.
As the tragedies and pain build, the brothers’ story culminates in a shocking act of brutality that changes the very landscape. During a lengthy platforming sequence accompanied by a murder ballad, Hazel learns the full story. When she reaches the end, Hazel has been a witness and brought a measure of peace.
“Hazel’s superpower is her ability to see people,” Lanier said. “Literally, she can see the pain that people have gone through.”
