South of Midnight is a game worth hollerin’ about

Black folks are loud. We laugh loud, we love loud, we protest loud. But when we really want to show our approval, we get quiet first. When we laugh at something funny, like really laugh, it sounds like a thin wheeze before sound bursts forth like a storm. And within seconds of starting South of Midnight, as I walked around the protagonist Hazel’s home and seeing a piece of art that was an obvious and deliberate homage to the painter Annie Lee’s Blue Monday, I wordlessly put my Steam Deck down and took a quiet lap around my living room before I started shouting.

South of Midnight is the latest title from Compulsion Games, a Canadian studio best known for making We Happy Few. It follows Hazel, a young woman who must rescue her mother after a hurricane sweeps their home away. Along her journey, she comes into her powers as a Weaver, or guardians who can see the strands that connect all life in what’s known as the Grand Tapestry and can repair it when those strands get knotted by pain and trauma.

The game is an action platformer. Hazel progresses by using her Weaver abilities to heal the blighted landscape and defeat enemies called haints – a Southern term used to describe gho …

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