South of Midnight Is Almost Good

Well, everyone, it's been a while since my last video. I know. I kind of spent most of my time building a recording studio in my garage so that I can record drums and get a decent sound. And actually, this is the first video that I'm doing voice over in out there. So, I don't know. We'll see if it sounds any different. And I played Assassin's Creed Shadows and I thought about making a video about it, but by the time I quit, like 2/3 of the way through, I ended up thinking that there wasn't actually much to say that I haven't said about Assassin's Creed before. The map is still way, way, way too big. The two protagonist thing is actually badly implemented. And the game's too repetitive with barely above average combat. You know, at the end of the day, the game is fine. Not bad enough to be worth talking about, and not nearly good enough to be worth talking about, and not really even remotely interesting enough to be worth talking about. It's fine, I guess. And I mean, it's fine, I guess, isn't a particularly compelling video to watch or definitely not one to write. Uh, I played Kazan, the first Berserker, and that game is amazing and maybe worth a video because it's the first ever Neolike. But as I was about to start writing about it, South of Midnight came out, and I was like, you know what? Let me just finish this and see what's what. And this game is interesting enough to talk about because South of Midnight has some stuff that's really good and a bunch of stuff that is really bad. So today, let's have a short discussion about Xbox's latest firstp party Game Pass title, South of Midnight. And hey, if you like what I had to say or how I sound saying it, do us both a favor and like, share, sub, yada yada yada. South of Midnight after the logo. A Compulsion for Great Ideas. South of Midnight is the second game from Compulsion, and we need to take a second to talk about this developer because while each of their games are extremely different from each other, they all also have strangely similar problems. Compulsion was founded by a developer who left Arcane Studios to make his own business. And in 2013, they released their first game, Contrast. I didn't hear of this game when it came out, but funny enough, a few years ago, I went to my daughter's room to demand that she clean up the mess she made in the kitchen again, and she was playing a game that I thought looked really unique and interesting. My daughter's favorite game ever is Alice Madness Returns, and she's always scrging around for a game that feels similar. contrast had been in the Xbox store and she thought the art style was great and it gave her a similar vibe. So, she bought it probably with my credit card. I don't know. And I was struck by how cool this game looked and like what an interesting idea it was. And when I asked her, "Well, how is it?" She said, "Well, it looks cool, but the game's actually pretty annoying." And that is the core of each game Compulsion has made. Contrast is a super interesting idea with a totally unique visual presentation held back by glitches, floaty, imprecise movement, and gameplay mechanics that seem like an afterthought compared to the premise and presentation. Contrast had a middling reception as most reviewers loved the visuals and found the gameplay annoying or boring, and its player reviews were split right down the middle between people who thought it was the greatest thing ever and everyone else who were disappointed that the game looked so much cooler than it played. I guess Contrast sold well enough to not tank the studio, but not well enough to fund their next project, as Compulsion's second game would be crowdfunded on Kickstarter. We Happy Few was a much more ambitious project that once again featured a truly fantastic art style and a brilliant premise for its world and story. The game surpassed its funding goals, raising $315,000 from over 7,000 backers, which was nowhere near enough to actually make the game, but was enough to demonstrate to publishers that there was a lot of interest in the title. Now, there was some controversy over pricing and stuff like that with We Happy Few, but I don't care actually. And to be honest, I actually find it really annoying when gamers think they have any idea how much it costs to make a game or like how a studio should run their business. A studio is a business with employees and 401k contributions and health plans and all sorts of responsibilities beyond making sure a game cost exactly what they said it would years earlier in a Kickstarter campaign before a publisher dumped millions of dollars into marketing. Now, what did end up being an issue though with We Happy Few was that we were in the glory days of the video game hype cycle. This was a couple years before No Man's Sky, and We Happy Few might have been one of the first huge hype Kickstarter games. It had an art style and a narrative premise that caused a tremendous overwhelming amount of hype. Once Gearbox became the publisher, however, they brought the full power of AAA marketing to the project, which created even more hype. The art style got the game compared to Bioshock, which was a real problem cuz it's nothing like that. It got so intense that Compulsion started doing interviews attempting to set expectations lower. They were not a AAA studio with hundreds of employees. They were still a small indie studio making their second game. As release got closer, they still hadn't really explained what the game was beyond that art style and premise. And when it finally released, the world found that the game was a kind of rogike survival game with a strong narrative. Now, the game released and funny enough, its reception was extremely similar to Contrast with the difference being a bunch of people felt massively let down this time. They had gotten AAA marketing and expected a AAA game, not a smallcale weird rogike survival game. Reviews again were extremely middling with media and players loving the art, world, and premise, but very much not loving the janky movement, buggy interactions, bad AI, floaty combat, and gameplay that's nowhere near as interesting and polished as the art and world building. I myself did not finish this game, so I was like, "Eh, nah, I just, you know, I probably played it for five, six hours and just moved on." But, you know, that's fine. I'm an action game guy and I'm just not super into survival games. After two games, Compulsion had established themselves as a studio with fantastic art and narrative elements, but disappointing mechanics and polish. After the moderate sales success, but controversial early access and hype cycle of We Happy Few, Compulsion sold itself to Microsoft and became a first-party studio. They seem to have greatly expanded the headcount in the studio, but still remained about double A size. A few years ago, they announced they were making a narrative action game. And lo and behold, the game featured a bold and impressive visual style, an extremely interesting premise and world, and an interesting narrative hook. Now a part of Xbox Studios, South of Midnight seems to have been an effort to make a conventional console adventure game and meld it with the studio signature art and narrative elements. Now, that would be a heck of a game if Compulsion was able to pull it off. Let's see if they did. The gap is shrinking, but it's still there. Like their first two games, the visual presentation of South of Midnight is beyond reproach. The game is beautiful. In the early presentations, I found the much lower FPS of the characters and cutscenes to be kind of jarring, but very much like Into the Spider-Verse, your eyes adjust to it pretty quickly. And while I'm still not sure it was needed, it definitely creates a unique otherworldly aesthetic. The game drips in top-notch art design, and that art creates a totally unique experience that you're not going to get anywhere else. But convulsion has always had that top-notch art design. Contrast was visually arresting and we happy few generated totally insane hype purely on the power of its world and art design. The key here was whether Compulsion had finally married that art design to an actually enjoyable video game. And on that front, man, it's complicated. First off, once again, let me preface this by saying I didn't read any of the reviews of this and definitely no player reviews because the game is very obviously going to piss off the farright woke people. I don't like left-wing wokeism and I don't like right-wing wokeism. If you can't play a game without being pissed off about madeup culture war [ __ ] you're on the wrong channel, man. I just don't care. I'm not even going to comment on it. Stupid. However, this game doesn't just feature a black female protagonist. The narrative touches on a bunch of stuff about slavery and capitalism. And as always, I'm not going to talk about whether someone talking about slavery makes me so mad I want to put their studio out of business, but rather about whether the game itself has anything interesting to say about that stuff and whether or not the narrative is good enough to be worth playing. As with the other two Compulsion games, this is hard to tease apart because while the art and story are actually really good, the way the game is executed does every single thing within its power to annoy you. We're starting with the story here, so let's begin by stating the things that are good. The art design does an amazing job of evoking the deep south at the start of the game and then slowly twisting the artwork so that before you realize it, the levels have become almost a weird hybrid of high fantasy and southern gothic mixed together. I'm sure the concept art for this game is like ridiculously awesome. And this never waines the whole way through. The creature design, the boss design, the geometry, all that stuff is just unbelievable. So so cool. No matter what else the game does badly, this art design does carry all the way through, and it keeps the game interesting through a nice short runtime. This game goes on just long enough. But the game is right on the cusp of a great story that's badly held back by some totally baffling narrative design choices. First off, I think I can honestly say that this is the first game in history that's about social worker burnout. The entire game revolves around rescuing Hazel's mother, who is a child welfare worker at like the State Department of Children and Families, and a bunch of that story is about her mother's burnout doing that job, which is actually pretty cool. The game's about fixing people's trauma to end the cycle of poverty, violence, and despair. And, you know, that's a really interesting idea, but it doesn't have the wherewithal to actually deal with the implications of its narrative. You defeat bosses by literally melee attacking their trauma until you win. And this sounds much, much stupider than it actually is, I promise. Each of the little vignettes is an interesting mystery. You unravel through a few cutscenes until you beat a boss and cleanse the trauma. Actually, you untie their knots. That's the narrative conceit of the game. And you know, that's a neat idea. Sadly though, the game never deals with the darker side of this issue. The first story, for instance, that you encounter is given to you by this guy. Over the level, you learn that he was a great violin player who was held back by the town's reaction to his disabled brother. Eventually, he boards his brother up in a tree where he dies slash turns into a big tree monster. Now, as this played out, I was thinking, "Wow, man. I wonder how they're going to deal with this guy after we found out why he's so guilty and depressed. We fixed the tree man, but what are we going to say to the brother who's been traumatized for decades over what he's done to his brother? I mean, that sounds pretty interesting, right? But the answer to that question is, uh, nothing. We're not going to see that guy ever again. We're not going to cure his trauma or confront him or anything. And this is not something that happens by accident. It only happens because the writers didn't think they had a good answer to the narrative questions they'd created. So, you know, they just uh they just, you know, let it go. They just didn't deal with it at all. And this happens every single time. Bonnie Flood never has to answer for what she did to her son. This guy never confronts the people he killed. It annoys me. If you're going to write a story like this, please just finish it and don't leave me thinking, "Oh, they were too afraid to deal with that. That's lame." Instead, what you have here is a pretty neat little fable, but nothing deeper. It like wants to reach for these deep, difficult issues, but it doesn't want to take a chance of actually dealing with those issues. But man, when you're playing around with heavy [ __ ] like slavery and brother murder and child abuse, it's kind of cowardly to skirt around any of the hard answers because you're afraid as a writer. Still, I do want to make it clear that the narrative and world here are really cool. It weaves a bunch of old Gothic southern urban legends and myths into a modern story. And it's good enough to at least be entertaining. It's not good enough, however, to be anything even remotely more than entertaining. It's not particularly thoughtprovoking because they don't want to provoke any difficult thoughts. Beyond that, there are some other issues with the story. The biggest of which is this. Now, I've got this bottle and uh I'll do something with it. Yeah, must have been a land grab, [ __ ] I have never played a game that has more spoken internal dialogue than South of Midnight. It's one thing to have the player character occasionally say how they're feeling, but it's another to be constantly bombarded with pointless dialogue. South of Midnight. Never trust the player to be in silence more than 15 seconds. It blows my mind that a studio thought that this was a good idea. You've built this beautiful world and I never have even a second to soak it in because Hazel will not shut up ever. It never trusts me to stop and look at stuff. It doesn't trust me to discover anything. And it doesn't trust its own narrative to let me decide how I feel. I don't need the writers telling me how to feel at every single moment. It's annoying and even worse, it's downright insulting. This is so bad. It comes very close to ruining the entire game. This is already an extremely blunt narrative, and all the interesting gray areas that are implied by the story are just flatout ignored in favor of a very simple American fairy tale. to then bloat this very simple narrative with a non-stop assault of internal dialogue like looks like I need to go over there or oh that's so sad is malpractice man the story of South of Midnight would have been significantly improved by removing 95% of Hazel's dialogue outside of cutscenes just baffling gameplay the more things change South of Midnight was presented as something of an action game. And I suppose it sort of is. I mean, there's a bunch of combat and a few boss fights for sure. And there's also a bunch of like uh quote unquote platforming. Now, when I first got control of the character in South of Midnight, I honestly was not sure I'd be able to finish this game. Movement is amazingly awful with controls that are some of the worst I've played since the 360 generation. After about 4 hours, I had gotten used to it enough that I wasn't constantly annoyed at how bad it was, but man, it is never good. Combat is always annoying as the lock-on barely works. There are a total of six enemy types in the game and you have two attacks. If I had to choose a word to describe the combat, it would be peruncter. It works sort of. It has a progression system that doesn't matter and only exists to hold up the very modest exploration. And it's both very easy and fairly annoying because the game feels so bad in your hands and the camera and lock-on system are so borked. That would be fine if there's only a little bit of combat, but there's quite a lot actually and the arenas are just amazingly similar the whole way through. Almost every encounter plays out exactly the same. And I don't mean that in the broad way like every encounter in Kazan has her using a few skills and parrying a lot. No, no. I mean every encounter plays out exactly the same because the exact same enemies spawn in almost exactly the same groupings in an arena that is basically exactly the same almost every single time. This is really very similar to like a double A game from the 360 generation, but with AAA, quadruple AAA art design and high quality, highly stylized graphics. There were times that I thought to myself, man, this would probably be better if there was no combat at all. I don't think that's actually true, but it's a reasonable thing to debate, and that's kind of a problem. That is how bare bones and shallow the combat is here. When you're not fighting those seven enemies or the amazingl lookinging but pretty mechanically uninspired bosses, you're doing that platforming I was talking about. And I use scare quotes on platforming because it is also really peruncter in that it's pretty much impossible to fail and the game never asks anything of you. The first time I encountered ledgers to shimmy across, I groaned, "Man, why? What is the point of uncharted ledge climbing? This is nothing more than a form of very slow walking. Except instead of looking at this amazing world full of unbelievable art design, I am now staring at a [ __ ] wall. Why occasionally? I mean very very occasionally. The game's platforming will feel good. I kind of like the air dash. The double jump and glide feel good to use, which makes it a massive shame that the game never asks you to actually do anything with it. I do not understand why this game is so afraid of actually asking anything of the player at all. It doesn't ask you to think because Hazel just talks the whole time and it doesn't ask anything from you in the game play. Everything outside of the art design in South of Midnight is grudging. It grudgingly has combat that feels like a waste of everyone's time. It grudgingly has uncharted ledge climbing to pad the runtime. It grudgingly has platforming because that's expected in an adventure game. It grudgingly has a progression system so that they have something to hide in the levels. It's all really thin when you look at it, and it never rises to more than the sum of its part. Wrapping up, I promised myself I would make this one super short, and that's easy this time because there's just not that much to say about this game beyond that stuff. This is another Compulsion game. Its premise is fantastic. Its art design is unbelievably great, and its gameplay is a weird afterthought that feels awkwardly bolted on to a game that's actually just an art style and a story idea. Now, this is easily the best video game Compulsion has made, but it's still very mediocre. The story idea is fantastic, but the execution wobbles from pretty good to annoying as hell. The gameplay feels like it was the very last thing they considered, and that's not a great way to make a game. The progression is pointless. The platforming is so simple, it is meaningless. Every section ends with an AI style escape sequence, but the platforming is so absurdly easy that I don't know why these are in the game. Eventually, I stopped and turned around to see if anything was actually chasing me. And it occurred to me that you probably actually can't fail these sections, that it's all just kind of fake. Now, the exploration is occasionally decent in that every so often you have to figure out how to jump up and get something, but for the most part, the simple puzzles and platforming are just filler. And god forbid you take even 3 seconds to look at something, pause for even a moment, and Hazel will start telling you that she needs to get up that hill or I need to go over that bridge. Yeah, I know, dude. There's one path in the whole game that you cannot deviate from. It's like one thing when Aloy is telling me about a puzzle that annoys the [ __ ] out of me, but it's a form of a hint at least. It would be another if Horizon Zero Dawn was one corridor with no doors on either side and Aloy kept saying, "I need to walk down the corridor. I need to walk down the corridor." It is insulting and absurd. I I honestly don't understand how this happened. You even wasted money cuz you paid this woman to record a million lines that are unnecessary. The bottom line here is this. The world building and fablelike story are interesting enough to plow through all the mediocre slop. If you have Game Pass, if you have Game Pass, at some point this year, I would give it a shot. It's definitely not worth 40 bucks on Steam, though. It's probably maybe worth $20 for the art design, I guess. I mean, I don't know, man. It's like a 6 and a half out of 10 with 8.5 of that being for the art and story and negative -2 being for gameplay and being nagged by the player character and not having even a moment of silence to soak up the unbelievable atmosphere that the artists at Compulsion Games have created again. This is however a slight improvement over We Happy Few. So, you know what? I still hold out hope that next time Combulion will finally find a way to combine their art and world building with, you know, like a video game or whatever. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.