South of Midnight

South of Midnight is a 2025 third-person action-adventure developed by Compulsion Games — the Montreal studio behind We Happy Few — released April 8, 2025 for Xbox Series X|S and PC, day one on Game Pass, and on March 31, 2026 for PlayStation 5 and Nintendo Switch 2. It holds Metacritic scores of 78 on Xbox and 75 on PC, a 68% OpenCritic recommendation rate, a 94% Very Positive rating on Steam, and an awards record out of proportion to those numbers: Games for Impact at The Game Awards 2025, New Intellectual Property at the BAFTAs, Outstanding Achievement in Animation at the D.I.C.E. Awards, an Annie Award, Game of the Year at the Canadian Game Awards, and the Games for Change grand prize in July 2026. The split in those figures is the game in miniature. Critics and players agree that its Deep South folklore, stop-motion-styled animation, and Olivier Deriviere’s score are among the most distinctive things in recent games, and most of them agree that the combat is not.

It is also, as of this writing, a game that changed hands. In the summer of 2026 Compulsion Games left Xbox in a management buyout, taking South of Midnight and its back catalogue with it — the Reddit thread that ranks beside the game’s own store pages is about the Steam publisher field quietly switching from Xbox to Compulsion on August 11. This card covers the story, the systems, the reception, and what the buyout means for where to buy it.

Technical Specifications

Hazel, the Flood, and the Grand Tapestry

A hurricane hits the town of Prospero, somewhere in a fictionalised Deep South, and the flood that follows tears Hazel Flood’s house off its foundations with her mother Lacey still inside. Chasing it downriver, Hazel discovers she is a Weaver — one of a line of women who can see and mend the Grand Tapestry, the web of Strands that binds the living world — and that the land around Prospero is knotted with grief that has curdled into Haints, hostile spirits born of pain nobody dealt with. The journey to Lacey runs through the creatures of Southern folklore, each presented as a victim before it is a monster: a giant catfish with a story to tell, Two-Toed Tom, Huggin’ Molly, the Rougarou, and the shadow of Kooshma, the nightmare that has taken her mother. Beneath the myths is a family story — Hazel’s grandmother Bunny and the ambitions she has hidden for decades — and the ending leaves Hazel as Prospero’s protector, with Lacey freed and Bunny gone. Zaire Lanier’s script was the consensus highlight: PC Gamer called the game “an earnest, empathetic portrait of the Deep South” and praised its themes of listening, healing, and rebuilding over spectacle.

Strands, Bottles, and Crouton

Combat happens in lock-in arenas: Haints spawn, the exits seal, and Hazel fights with a pair of Weaver’s hooks and Strand magic — a push, a pull, a stun, a dodge-timed blast — until the last enemy is unravelled and the area’s knot can be released. Crouton, a ragged doll Hazel animates, possesses enemies and turns them on each other, and can be sent through gaps to solve light puzzles. Between fights the game is a linear platformer with a double jump, a glide, a wall-run, and Strand-powered grapples across levels that are far larger than the combat ever needs them to be. The emotional loop is the one that reviewers remembered: bottling a creature’s sorrow on a bottle tree, untangling the knot, and watching a stretch of blighted land bloom back. The stop-motion presentation — animation deliberately stepped at a low frame rate, built with clay maquettes by Clyde Henry Productions — can be turned off in the options, a concession that split players almost as neatly as the combat did.

“Great, But For Its Artistry”: The Combat Problem

The r/patientgamers thread in the search results puts the community verdict in its title: the game is great for its artistry, and would be less so without it. The critical reviews said the same thing more carefully. PC Gamer’s 83 found the fights “lack depth” and the arenas oversized; the mid-70s reviews that set the Metacritic average cited repetitive encounters and uneven pacing, with combat the single most-named weakness. The counterweight is everything else — the music, which turned every chapter’s climactic fight into a blues or gospel number written for that creature; Adriyan Rae’s performance; and the art direction that carried the game through an awards season in which it won for animation, music, new IP, and impact but never for design. A reasonable summary is the one most players arrive at: a ten-out-of-ten setting wrapped around a six-out-of-ten action game, and worth playing for the first number.

The Buyout: Compulsion Leaves Xbox

In June 2026, as Microsoft prepared another round of Xbox layoffs, Kotaku reported that Compulsion Games was slated for closure and Bloomberg reported that the studio was instead negotiating its independence. On July 6, 2026 Compulsion confirmed it was splitting from Xbox, and on August 11 studio head Guillaume Provost completed a management buyout that returned the studio, its staff, and the rights to South of Midnight, We Happy Few, and Contrast to private hands in Montreal. The same day, the publisher field on the game’s Steam page changed from Xbox to Compulsion Games — the change that produced the Reddit thread. For buyers the practical effect is small: the game plays identically, the Weaver’s Edition extras are unchanged, and purchases on Steam, PlayStation, or Switch 2 now go to the studio rather than to Microsoft. Two things are still settling. Some store listings — PlayStation’s among them — still name Microsoft as publisher, and the game’s long-term presence on Xbox Game Pass, where it launched day one, has not been publicly confirmed either way since the split. Anyone planning to play it through a subscription should check the catalogue first.

Where to Play It Today

South of Midnight is on Steam ($34.99; Weaver’s Edition $39.99), the Xbox Store for Series X|S and PC, PlayStation 5 (PS5 Pro Enhanced; the Weaver’s Edition was $29.99 on sale this week), and Nintendo Switch 2, with Game Pass availability to be confirmed. The Weaver’s Edition is the one to buy if the soundtrack or the making-of documentary interests you; otherwise the standard edition is the complete game. For anyone who valued Kena: Bridge of Spirits or Alan Wake 2 more for their worlds than their fights, this belongs in the same drawer — and buying it now, for the first time in its life, directly funds the studio that made it.