Montreal-made South of Midnight is one of Xbox’s most promising games

Of all the teams under the ever-growing Xbox Game Studios fold, Compulsion Games is certainly among its most unique.

Since Xbox acquired the Montreal-based developer in 2018, it’s been one of the gaming giant’s few Canadian developers and its sole office in Quebec’s massive gaming scene until Activision Blizzard and its Quebec City Beenox subsidiary joined the company last year. On top of all that, the Montreal-based developer currently employs just 90 people, making it by far one of Xbox’s smallest teams.

But above all else, what unites Compulsion’s catalogue are richly textured and vividly realized settings that are distinct from those found in most games. In 2013’s Contrast, Compulsion created a noir puzzle-platformer inspired by Belle Époque and Art Nouveau, and in 2018’s We Happy Few, the team offered up a retro-futuristic action-adventure experience featuring a British dystopia reminiscent of the one in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. 

Now, Compulsion is building on all of that impressive groundwork with its latest and biggest project yet, South of Midnight. It’s an action-adventure game set in the American Deep South that’s rooted in dark Gothic folklore. The game follows Hazel, a young woman whose hometown of Prospero is devastated by a hurricane and overrun by folklore creatures, leading her to discover magical new Weaver powers as she fights to protect her community and locate her missing mother.

As creative director David Sears told Xbox Wire, South of Midnight is inspired by his childhood escapes in Mississippi, discovering all sorts of fascinating old architecture and artefacts. However, outside of a couple of Sears interviews with Xbox and the first gameplay trailer in June, Compulsion has kept South of Midnight pretty close to the chest — until now. Last week, Compulsion invited a small group of media, including MobileSyrup, to its Montreal office to see a first-ever South of Midnight gameplay demo and chat with several members of the team. After spending a good chunk of the day learning more about the game, I’ve come away incredibly impressed by the overall vision behind it.

Here are my big takeaways.

The Compulsion Factor

What immediately struck me with South of Midnight is just how stunning it is. With its gorgeous Coraline-esque stop-motion aesthetic and refreshingly unique Southern environments, South of Midnight really feels as though a folktale is springing right off the pages of a book. But of course, it’s easy to say something looks good, but it’s another to understand all of the painstaking work that goes into making it so.

“The first thing we do at the studio, typically, is to settle on locale and time, just because it forms the whole basis for us to do our research,” explains Guillaume Provost, Compulsion’s founder and studio head, in a group interview. That research, he says, includes a trip to the Kedron area around Louisiana and another in the Appalachian areas of the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee.

“That’s what we love doing — going to places, finding what’s iconic, what’s the vibe of the place. I found a lot of places felt like they were lost in time,” he said of his response to visiting these places. “Like, you walk through some of the smaller towns, and you can’t tell if it’s 1970 or 1990.” He added that these trips helped the team confirm the research they had done from Montreal. “We’ll see actual people put bottles on trees. We’ll see people paint their porches that specific hue of blue, which is meant to keep Haints [a Southern word for ghost or spirit] out. So we heard about these myths, but are people actually practicing it in the country? Are we actually seeing a sign for it in the country?”

That said, he admits that while some local residents were excited about the project, others were “anxious” about how Compulsion might represent the area. Naturally, this led the Canadian developer to work with a variety of experts from the South, especially those from Black communities. “We surrounded ourselves with the people we needed to talk to for everything, bringing them on the team, and trying to make them a part of the process as much as possible,” explains Whitney Clayton, art director on South of Midnight.

Clayton’s role at Compulsion is particularly unique. As Provost notes, she was the very first employee he hired, and so she’s had a particularly defining role on the studio’s games when it comes to their aforementioned eye-popping visual styles. “In We Happy Few and Contrast, there was already a style that we were doing that is kind of my natural inclination, which is stylized, things are pushed and pulled and exaggerated. It’s not hyperrealistic. It’s not super cartoony in terms of how the characters look,” explains Clayton. But as the team grew, she said that required “more precise” direction, and “stop-motion and maquettes felt like the natural progression” that was also “super appropriate” for the Deep South setting. To help with the stop-motion work, Compulsion enlisted Clyde Henry, a local production company that specializes in animation techniques.

For Clayton, the key to successful art direction is that everyone from the team comes together to contribute.

“First, you have the genres, and you have the time period, the location, but also like the cultural genres. So for us, it was dark fantasy, Southern Gothic. And then you have pillars in those genres that are super iconic and you find things that you mix that are like, ‘Have people seen this mix before? Have they seen it mixed before in a game? Does it work well together?’ And then you have architecture, biomes, character… all those bits and pieces. And to me, that is the whole thing. People say it’s art direction, but I always think it’s world direction. And then you have style —you need that realization to make it look good. So there’s a lot of different facets to it.”

One of those facets is sound. Chris Fox, the audio director on South of Midnight, was one of several team leaders who went on the research excursions to the South. His goal on those trips was to capture as much of the “lusciousness” of the soundscape as possible for reference back in the studio. “It was really the idea to establish the authentic Deep South and actually have people from there play the game and be like, ‘Oh my God, it sounds like outside,’ or people that don’t live there anymore fall right back home,” he explains.

To capture the authentic nature sounds of our various regions, we sent field recordists Andy Martin (@NWSoundscapes) and Thomas Rex Beverly (@trexbeverly) into the forests, mountains, hills, and swamps to record the animals, insects, and ambient sounds of the Southern wilderness! pic.twitter.com/bnNDKNQPVJ

— Compulsion Games (@CompulsionGames) October 1, 2024

For Jasmin Roy, game director on South of Midnight, the preparation process was a little different. While the game has been in development for nearly five years, Roy joined the project about three years ago, meaning he never went on those early scouting trips. That said, he says he drew heavily from the notes that the team had compiled from these trips and their other research.

“From my perspective, I looked at all the scouting trips they had, and especially when I started, we were looking into the environments,” he says. “So the biggest thing that I saw was how drastic each region can be and how many extremes there are across the whole South, in terms of, ‘Oh, there are mountains, swamps and everything,” and then to try to have a journey that goes through that. So that was really interesting for us on the design side, being like, ‘Okay, there’s so many environments, so many things — how can we inform the game mechanics through [them]?”

With that in mind, traversal ended up being the first gameplay pillar that the team worked on, according to Roy. Part of that has to do with Hazel’s status as a Weaver, which means she’s literally a magical mender who repairs the tapestry of the world. “Traversal sometimes involves environmental manipulation, which is something we wanted to showcase with Hazel being able to not only do platforming but being able to sometimes find objects, move them around, use them and navigate through that,” he says of how her Weaver abilities will encourage player engagement with Prospero itself.

Naturally, these powers extend to how Hazel can fight the creatures afflicting her home.

“When we started doing combat, we wanted to really focus on something that would feel rhythmic and a bit tactical, a bit deliberate, but still reward aggressiveness,” Roy explains. “We want to combine them with the spells, and we hone them down into these three spells that we felt had a good spatial awareness, so to speak, as you can freeze things, you can pull them, you can push them. So that gave us this kind of trifecta of, ‘Okay, that one does this, I want to pull it. Oh, this one does this, I want to interrupt it.’ So at one point, we went, ‘Yeah, the rhythm is good,’ and then we went with it. And all of them are really tied to the idea of fabric or manipulating strands.”

Admittedly, I did think that the combat looked a tad too simple in our demo, which takes place right after the June gameplay trailer in which Hazel pursues Two-Toed Tom, a legendary — and gargantuan — alligator. On a basic level, Hazel performs rather rudimentary melee attacks with twin hooks, and it didn’t look like there was much variation to those.

That said, Roy notes that he was playing on Easy to simplify his live presentation, so higher difficulties would surely require more varied usage of Hazel’s powers. On top of that, he explains that “there’s still some stuff we haven’t revealed” with respect to Hazel’s powers. And to give Compulsion credit, I definitely saw a degree of strategy in battle with respect to crowd control with her Weaver abilities. For instance, one slug-like creature was leaving inky trails that prevent Hazel from dodging, leading Roy to stun one of them while jumping and dashing over the other sludge piles.

And above all else, Compulsion is open about the fact that South of Midnight isn’t meant to be an intense action game.

“We wanted to make sure we had smooth, well-executed gameplay that gave you a right way of fabric to go through this interesting story and locale that we were building,” explains Provost. “But it’s not trying to outshine the locale and be the star of the show. It’s building a nice journey where we’re trying to be respectful of your time. I said, ‘I don’t want to grind for like 30 hours to get this stuff.’ The goal, when we’re reviewing the game, has been that if the level or story is overstaying its welcome, let’s not let it overstay its welcome and [instead] create something that’s compelling.”

That’s a great point, as I’ve found myself particularly burnt out on overly long games. In more story-driven experiences, prolonged combat sequences can also sometimes feel like busy work in between the meaty narrative bits, so I like the idea of having snappier fights to offer some variety without becoming overbearing. That’s also not to say that there aren’t some excellent setpieces.

In the demo, when Two-Toed Tom first appears in the cutscene, a choir quietly chants his name like some sort of ominous warning before breaking out in full song when you begin fighting him. As you go through the phases of the fight, the singing becomes increasingly intense and even mixes in vocals from both children and adults. (You can hear a taste of this at the end of the June gameplay demo.) All told, the diegetic music is a brilliantly creative way of conveying Two-Toed Tom’s legend. Fox says the goal behind such pieces was to create “themes that you would sing in the shower,” and I did indeed do that later that night.

This level of whimsy and charm extends to Hazel herself. In particular, I enjoyed how her warm and vivacious personality shined through in the demo, both in her affectionate conversations with the elders in the church and her amusing banter in combat, like how she incredulously remarks on how she’s “out here tongue scraping a gator.” And at the end of the demo, when she’s swallowed by Two-Toed Tom, you have to leap between different remnants of civilization that the beast has eaten, including a real estate billboard, treehouse and even a flaming tire with a squealing pig. “Wish you had stayed quiet now, huh?” Hazel flippantly shouts at him. (Roy teased that there’s an entire fun backstory to the animal in the full game, and I’m now eager to learn more.)

But what stood out to me the most is the framing of Hazel’s quest to defeat the corruption that’s overtaken Prospero. In combat, she’s not actually “killing” anything; she’s merely purifying spirits and wildlife to restore them to their original, peaceful states. And with respect to larger beings, like Two-Toed Tom, Hazel will first be able to see visions of the past to learn their sympathetic backstories and how best to help them. While I didn’t get to see exactly how she cures Two-Toed Tom, this focus on humanizing the otherwise supernatural threats is incredibly intriguing. And honestly, it might sound corny, but seeing this cultural diversity and empathy-focused story so lovingly on display just one day after Donald Trump became the U.S. president-elect made it all the more impactful. After all, we know how he and his ilk have treated — and will sadly continue to treat — people of colour, especially Black women, and so everything I saw in South of Midnight took on an even deeper resonance.

Bringing Hazel to life

Of course, Compulsion alone isn’t enough to achieve all of this. As Clayton mentioned earlier, a key part of the development process has been bringing on the right people for assistance, especially when it comes to the performance talent.

First, that involves the two Black women who portray Hazel herself: Adriyan Rae (Chicago Fire) and Nona Parker Johnson (Fear the Walking Dead). Originally, Rae was set to shoot full performance capture for Hazel, while Johnson was tapped to do some dialect work with her. However, Rae’s eventual pregnancy meant that she would tackle voice recordings for Hazel, with Johnson stepping in to complete the mo-cap. The pair says it was a series of events that brought them closer both to each other and to Hazel herself.

“The more and more I learned about the character and the world, I realized there was so many things that paralleled my journey, what I was doing,” says Rae, noting a connection to Hazel’s story about a deep connection with her mother. “I was very much learning who I am, learning how to define myself in the best way so that I can have a strong container for my characters and a lot of self-reflection and self-growth. And I think that is definitely a huge part of Hazel’s journey, along with healing through healing.”

As she took on a more prominent role on South of Midnight, Johnson — a young Black woman from Jackson, Mississippi — soon realized just how much of herself was in Hazel. “It was really surreal. It was a Black girl from Mississippi Delta who runs track and field — a sprinter. It’s so community-based, and it was such a beautiful story,” she says. “I have this ritual that I do whenever I visit home in Mississippi. Before I head back to LA or wherever I’m going, I’ll record audio of the morning and outside, and it sounds like this game.”

Rae and Johnson also give immense credit to their performance and voice director on South of Midnight, none other than Ahmed Best, the man behind famed Star Wars character Jar Jar Binks. Best says he first learned of the project through a mutual friend, Janina Gavankar (Alan Wake 2), and was quickly enamoured by it.

“I really loved the world. I loved the fact that the lead was a young Black woman,” he says of what drew him to South of Midnight. “But end of the day, it was just a beautiful world, a beautiful premise. And I thought that it’s about time that we get more young Black women leads in video games.”

For Best, it was also essential that Black women like Rae and Johnson were the ones who breathe life into Hazel.

“That was important for me — that it was them. Because there is a specificity and an authenticity to having a Black woman character on a game being played by a Black woman. There are nuances and things that you only know if you grow up in the environment, if you have that type of experience,” he says. “And you can see aunties, you can see Grandma, you can see Mom, in every single one of their performances. And then the relationship with all the other characters are that much deeper as well.”

Rae praised the team for providing a “creative freedom” to let her bring in “the small stuff” like ‘Golly!’ that she’s gotten from her grandmother and other family members. “Being able to throw those in there adds to the character being dynamic and real.”

If you want a character that feels “dynamic and real,” it also certainly helps to have a veteran like Best guiding you. After all, he was at the forefront of mo-cap technology working on Jar Jar Binks in the ’90s on The Phantom Menace. As Best told The New York Times earlier this year, the alien creature was groundbreaking, having predated fellow pop-culture stalwarts like Gollum (The Lord of the Rings), Thanos (Avengers) and the Navi (Avatar).

Naturally, then, that begs the question: how has mo-cap evolved in the quarter-century since The Phantom Menace and what sorts of elements of the technology does he wish he’d had back then?

“While I was working with [Rae and Johnson], I was just like, ‘Man, I wish we had this in the desert. I wouldn’t
have been so goddamn hot!’” he responds with a laugh. “I’d have just been in a studio, instead of running through Tunisia with foam latex chasing after Natalie Portman!”

After we all get a good chuckle, he gives a more serious and pensive answer.

“It’s really grown into an industry. When I do talk to George Lucas, it’s something I talk to him about quite a lot […] All of the things that we invented as a team during The Phantom Menace are now an industry,” he explains. “There never used to be a thing called a ‘cinematics director.’ There were never any of the positions and the technology that exists now that are in every game. George kind of invented [that]. In those early days of motion capture at Industrial Light and Magic, their ‘Volume’ [high-definition LED panels that create realistic backgrounds] was like three cameras on a tripod on stands in this old garage. And the Volume was just the size of the room, and we were just running back and forth, and the computers were thick.”

 

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He says this has made a “night and day difference” on the South of Midnight shoots, which took place in both Montreal and Los Angeles.

“There was so much I didn’t have to do. You don’t have to calibrate after every take. You can have characters interact with one another and cross in front of each other without losing one. And now, with the advances in artificial intelligence, you can track things like from your chest to your spine. So articulation is a lot better nowadays.”

Best is also happy that the advancement of technology means there is a greater understanding and recognition of the actors who bring these mo-capped characters to life. “When I first did [Jar Jar], I didn’t really get the credit as the actor. I got the voice credit, but almost no one knew that I did mo-cap, because nobody knew what mo-cap was, nobody knew what performance capture was,” he says. “So the fact that Nona and Adriyan are the actors behind Hazel is what makes the character come to life in performance capture and in the vocal booth. And it’s really, really, really important that you get good actors to do these things. That’s never going to change.”

Ultimately, the three hope all of the work that they and Compulsion have done connects with everyone, regardless of their background.

“I hope they learn that Black people can be the lead of a game, or they can be the lead of a movie. Black people can take up space, and it’s wonderful, and our stories deserve to be told. I hope that little Black girls, including my daughter, can cosplay and look into this game and play it and see that there is magic within them, that they are capable of more than they ever could fathom, and that they are beautiful, just how they are,” says Rae. “And I hope that overall, everyone sees the relatability of the game, regardless if you’re a woman, if you’re Black, that there are themes that can touch everyone. That self healing is important, that having empathy and care for your neighbour is important, that growth and openness and resilience is important.”

“For me, it’s seeing this person and relating to them and not believing that you can’t identify with them because they’re Black or because they’re a woman or because they’re from the south because I know what that feels like, too,” adds Johnson. “That’s what’s really important to me: people that don’t look like Hazel as well as people that look like Hazel seeing her and accepting that she’s real, she exists, and girls like her exist.”

“It’s a great story, and Hazel’s existence as a Black woman is integral to the story. So you get caught up in the story of it, and it’s a fun game to play,” says Best. “Just as a gamer and as a player, my son plays Spider-Man all the time, and he plays as Miles Morales. And the thing that I love about Miles Morales is the fact that he’s a Spider-Man that looks like my son, but to my son, he’s just Spider-Man. And when you have rich characters in beautiful games like South of Midnight, you realize that not all heroes wear capes; they wear braids. You can just be a hero.”

South of Midnight will launch sometime in 2025 on Xbox Series X/S and PC (Steam). It will also be available on Xbox Game Pass on day one.

For more on South of Midnight, check out a new documentary, “Weaving Hazel’s Journey,” that’s now available for free on YouTube.

Image credit: Xbox