Start playing this music while you read about a brand new fairy tale.

I just rolled credits on South of Midnight, Compulsion Games’ fairy tale set in a storm-stricken deep south. You play the on-the-nose Hazel Flood, champion runner, and accidental weaver. A person who sees strands of emotion and trauma around her, and who helps them heal.

In another part of the world, and certainly in the works of the magnificent Terry Pratchett, Hazel Flood would be a witch, and in Prospero she shares many of the witch’s tribulations. Folk start off distrustful of her, and it’s up to her to help them whether or not they want it.

Refreshing then that in this fairy tale, everybody believes Hazel. The boogeyman is real; your parents weren’t lying to you. The mysterious critters she encounters are the swamp’s quotidian. It puts Hazel in the peculiar situation where she’s the least credible character in the game. After all, how could she not know about the alligator big enough to chomp a church in its vast jaws, when her mother’s colleague raised it?

Soon enough, she stops questioning and starts accepting, and grows her Weaver powers to help people. By bottling up stigma and haints, and finding patterns of trauma, Hazel outruns the demonic Kooshma to excise emotional scars from the swamp’s monstrous residents. As the game is quick to note, cutting the trauma out isn’t healing, but it’s healing’s start.

A cast of colourful characters, including the incredible Catfish voiced by Walt Roberts, propel Hazel on her quest to find her mother, and features a bunch of creatures from deep south legend. It’s impossible to review South of Midnight without mentioning the music. Music is everywhere in the game, and more often than not it’s bespoke to the situation. Every boss has a song encompassing the creature’s mythology. My particular favourite is Hugging Molly at this article’s top, but Two-Toed Tom is also a banger.

It’s not all rosy in Prospero. The gameplay, while varied, is ultimately secondary to the excellent plot, but the characters and dialogue lift it enough to lope along past the next climbing segment. I’m on record as hating climbing segments at the best of times. They add nothing to a game except to pad its runtime, and let me tell you, South of Midnight’s traversal is not the best of times. The combat is also dull. It takes the soft-soulslike mechanics many narrative games adopt. You have a dodge you want to perfectly time, and you get a heavy and a light attack and single combo. But, like the traversal, it was never the game’s focus, and it suffers for it. It feels better than most story-focused game combat, but I switched off during fights. Combined, traversal and combat became parts of the game I had to endure to get to the good stuff.

Still, South of Midnight is a wonderful experience, even if it’s just a mediocre video game. Extract the combat and the climbing segments and you have a beautiful story, expertly told and marvelously scored. But do that, and you don’t have a game. As such, it’s a challenging recommendation. If you don’t mind a return to late 2000s gameplay, of traversing a little too slow and getting into random fights that don’t feel great - if you can endure that for a fantastic story¹, then South of Midnight is for you, and you’ll have a wonderful time. But if you need your games to be fun, I suggest you look elsewhere.

There’s another point I’d like to make, but it’s an end-game spoiler. Be warned! Click away, and come back when you’ve finished the game!

Towards the end of the game, you enter Kooshma’s Realm, a broken pleasure-city reminiscent of the carnival of the damned from Pinocchio. Instead of debauchery, this domain feeds off dreams and nightmares. Here is a land of people stuck fast in their past, in their regrets, and in their grief. A man repeats a proposal he never made ad infinitum; a woman welcomes her husband home from war, apologising for their fight just before he left. Fantasy wool we drag over our eyes to comfort us. I still dream sometimes of seeing my father again, of shared jokes or perhaps a cocktail as the sun sets, of his warm smile, of his laugh, of his protection. He’s dead, of course, and the dreams are nothing but a blanket for my frightened inner child to hide behind.

Like every cryptid in South of Midnight, Roux - Kooshma’s proprietor and the closest the game has to the devil - is also a little good. He runs Kooshma’s to drip-feed a cosmic terror, Kooshma himself, whose power is beyond mortal ken. He does this in part to keep Kooshma at bay, in part out of fear, and in part to offer succor to those who can’t move on. Here, Hazel’s mother dwells, traumatised by looping nightmares of her daughter chasing her through the storm. Of jumping in the dark, an impossible leap. Of her falling, drowning.

But that moment is real. The game’s tutorial, as Hazel’s weaver powers awaken, throws you a jump you can’t make. Hazel’s mother watches on in terror, begging Hazel not to try it, it’s too dangerous, but Hazel tries anyway. This is how you unlock the game’s double jump, and how it teaches you the respawn mechanic.

The twist I thought was coming? I figured maybe Hazel failed and this is Hazel Flood’s afterlife. All the weird stuff? Not real. You drowned, Hazel, and this is your mother’s grieving. While that makes a cool moment, reminiscent of Bioshock’s use of the linear nature of video-games for a memorable plot twist, it would have burned the game’s message. Not worth it for a twist, because that message of empathy to those some call monsters? It’s more important.