South of Midnight preview: Stopped motion

South of Midnight has luscious Southern Gothic settings, a bluesy soundtrack and the game’s magic-weilding protagonist, a young Black woman named Hazel .

Hazel explores by running, jumping, double jumping, gliding and wall running, and her movements through the world feel utterly natural.

The game's dialogue is delivered with a hefty amount of teenage snark, too, and I laughed out loud when she met the giant talking catfish.

South of Midnight is not an open-world RPG or anything, but Hazel has a small skill tree with three upgrades for each of her magical abilities and nine slots to unlock moves like ground slam.

The game's stop-motion effect is inconsistent during third -person exploration moments and close-up cutscenes.

The framerate issue appears across characters and vignettes, and it's especially shitty during brightly lit memory scenes, where NPCs appear in front of Hazel as glowing white ghosts.

This is Compulsion ’s first attempt at building a game with all of the resources and attention that Xbox Game Studios provides, and the studio has crafted a beautiful, mysterious, unique world with an ambitious mechanical conceit and a badass protagonist. The stop-motion effect is still hit-or-miss, but that doesn’t detract from the game’s other successes. I remain incredibly stoked on South of Midnight . South of Midnight is due to hit Xbox Series X/S, PC and Game Pass on April 8 ..