Microsoft has released a new trailer for South of midnight, a third-person action adventure from Compulsion Games, who created the Britpop dystopian survival game We Happy Few. I thought We Happy Few had wonderful ideas and presentation – it's sort of Fable by way of Clockwork Orange meets Bioshock – but I found its mix of satire and survival game mechanics self-defeating. South Of Midnight doesn't seem any less lively, but much more confident in its God Of War-style action… and it's perhaps a little less intriguing, as a result. But don't just sit there and read my opinions. Watch the trailer.
To quickly sum it all up, you play as Hazel, a warrior witch trapped in a “Southern Gothic world where reality and fantasy intertwine and ancient creatures of folklore emerge.” Some of these creatures are friendly, like the trailing ornamental catfish that seems happy to serve as your noble steed. And some of them are hostile, like the moving island in the distance that's actually a huge overgrown alligator. Closer, there's some sort of twisty tree boss with glowing weak spots that you can rush to and do combos on.
The punches and exploration of South Of Midnight seem quite familiar, but they have style. They opted for a cleverly jerky set of character animations that mimic stop-motion films, a la Into The Spider-Verse. Hazel can also launch herself into the air and glide using spooky retractable parachutes. And then there's the haunting, dreamy guitar music, which kicks in near the end just before Hazel finally confronts this marauding islander.
Again, the game feels more like a genre piece than Compulsion's previous creations, but if it's surrounded by a good story and doesn't turn out to be a massive swamp level, I'll probably be fine with it . I hope the game's slick (I know, I'm old) character animations are just the first of several mildly experimental visual flourishes, though I suspect they'll be divisive – I'm reminded a little of Sable , whose character movement made me nauseous (again, I'm old).
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