South of Midnight’s Southern Gothic folklore world is rooted in authenticity

It was hard playing a preview of South of Midnight because, 20 minutes in, I just started bawling. The demo for the action-adventure platformer starts at the beginning of chapter three. The protagonist, Hazel, is working her way through a swamp trying to find her mother, who, along with their house, had been washed away in a hurricane. At the same time, she comes to learn her newfound powers as a Weaver — a person who can manipulate the metaphysical strands that connect all life — from the ghostly echoes of an enslaved woman who used her powers to escape to freedom and help others do the same.

With all that weighing on me, I held it together pretty well. But as I went through the double jump tutorial, a choir started singing a hymn in the background and I just lost it. It wasn’t that it was an emotional hymn; I didn’t even recognize it. But I knew the song was of me and for me even without having heard it before. That’s the kind of cultural weight the developers at Xbox studio Compulsion Games have invested in South of Midnight.

The authenticity that oozes from the game was intentionally cultivated. Its story draws upon American Southern Gothic folklore, which itself is a mix of tales and characters from indigenous, African, Creole, and Cajun traditions. Nailing the tone of such a rich and nuanced tradition in a respectful way was important to the narrative team. “If we’re going to tell the story, we have to go to the source,” Zaire Lanier, a writer on South of Midnight, told me.

Lanier spoke of the reference trips the development team took to Georgia, Tennessee, Louisiana, and Mississippi. She and the other members of the narrative team drew on their own experiences growing up in the American South and consulted with experts versed in Black southern traditions, like award-winning children’s author and storyteller Donna Washington. They applied this principle not just to the game’s narrative, but elsewhere as well.

“Same thing with the music, our audio director and our composer, we went straight to the source,” Lanier said. She explained how the team consulted with blues and other southern artists and told me that the performance that ultimately caused my joyful breakdown was a Nashville gospel children’s choir.

Voice and motion capture performance also benefited from Compulsion’s quest for authenticity. “The thing that I really love about Compulsion … is the fact that they were like, ‘we know what we don’t know,’” said Ahmed Best, director of South of Midnight’s voice and motion capture performance. Best is most known for his role as Jar Jar Binks in the Star Wars prequel trilogy but has spent decades directing films and teaching directing at the University of Southern California. South of Midnight is his first time in the director’s chair for a video game.

“I was very happy that they were looking for African American voices and direction,” Best said.

But hiring Black voice performers, as Compulsion did for a lot of the cast — including Hazel and her mother, with Best lending his voice to the project as well — is only half of the equation.

“Physical behavior is just as much of a storytelling tool as the script,” Best said. He spoke about working on bringing Hazel to life through her movements, right down to the specific way she stands. Nailing something as simple as how an actor stands is a detail most players will likely miss, but for Best, that’s okay. “That’s kind of the point,” he said. “The point is for it to kind of be invisible to everybody else. It’s the subtleties that you capture in motion capture, and it’s the subtleties you capture in voices that really put the authenticity over the top,” Best explained.

The reason Compulsion’s quest for authenticity comes off so well is a curious mix of humility and ambition. In my conversations with Lanier and Best, they each expressed the sentiment, “we don’t know what we don’t know,” regarding the team’s approach to South of Midnight’s storytelling. Compulsion is headquartered in Montreal, Canada — an area not particularly known for its gumbo, if you know what I mean.

South of Midnight could have been about anything, but its team chose to tell a story rooted in a culture not often depicted in video games. Then, rather than relying on personal anecdotes and generalities to tell that story, Compulsion empowered its developers to go find and heed the subject matter experts. That effort shines so brightly and thoroughly that it got me sobbing on the strength of its 90-minute preview alone — I can’t wait for the full game to utterly destroy me.

_{South of Midnight launches on Xbox, Game Pass, and PC on April 8th.}