South of Midnight is, as far as video games go, pretty standard. It plays like you’d expect a linear action-adventure to. You’re pushed through a linear world, doing some light puzzle-solving and platforming to get where you need to go. You gain abilities along the way, pushing and pulling objects where they need to be. You fight enemies in set arenas, plodding through the fairly mediocre combat.
It’s formulaic, even boring. After an hour or two in its world, I found that the appeal of its story and its world’s undeniable beauty wasn’t enough to make me want to slog through the less than stellar gameplay. While I likely won’t be spending much more time on it, I have to give it credit where it’s due. It’s one of the most beautiful games I’ve played in a long time, and it does that with bold artistic direction and stylisation.
What Makes A Game Beautiful?
As you well know, gamer, the definition of ‘good graphics’ is woefully narrow nowadays. For a game to be impressive in this sense, it has to look as close to reality as technology can possibly allow. There have to be hyper realistic facial animations facilitated by top of the line motion capture tech, ray tracing to simulate the way light bounces in real life, and perfect animations so that you never have to be reminded you’re not actually watching a movie.
South of Midnight is not a graphical showcase, unlike many modern games. As a double-A game with a relatively brisk runtime, South of Midnight passes over graphical fidelity in the style of Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2 in favour of stylisation in the vein of Harold Halibut. You’ve likely already heard this, but the game’s art style is based on stop motion animation, and its characters are made with clay maquettes.
As you might imagine, this leads to some truly striking visuals. Its characters are more cartoony than realistic, but they’re incredibly expressive. The world feels imperfect, lived in, and strangely tactile – like you can imagine what it would feel like to reach out and touch the clay. The lighting is beautiful, especially in how it diffuses off surfaces, like the rough edges of a doorframe, the velvet of a couch, or the bark of a tree. The combined effect makes South of Midnight’s world surreal, which perfectly captures its Southern Gothic fairytale vibe.
Style Is Storytelling
More than this, South of Midnight tells its story through stylisation as well. The game is broken up into chapters in a storybook, each chapter opening with a series of gorgeous illustrations and wonderful narration. It’s certainly not unique in this way – many games tell their stories in chapters, after all – but it helps to tie together the illusion of not realism, but fairytale. It’s a prime example of form and content coming together, framing its storytelling in an interesting and novel (ha) way.
South of Midnight is by no means a perfect game. It’s not one that I foresee myself finishing, despite all the things I like about it. But in an industry increasingly focused on bringing graphics as close to reality as possible and pushing consumer hardware as far as it possibly can, South of Midnight is a breath of fresh air. Its aesthetics are focused, serving the game instead of serving the increasingly lofty expectations of players who’ve been spoiled by picture perfect graphics. If only more double- and triple-A games would in its footsteps, revolutionising art direction instead of just graphics.
