A Beautiful but Framerate-Prone South of Midnight Preview

As I sat down to play the 90-minute South of Midnight preview, I had one major question: Why does the framerate look like that? The trailers display a purposefully choppy animation style that’s meant to be reminiscent of stop-motion, but it wasn’t clear how this effect would be applied in the game’s cutscenes, combat, and traversal moments. After playing the preview, I’m still unsure.

A Bias towards Compulsion Games

I should state my bias at the top: I am super primed to enjoy South of Midnight. I’ve been a fan of Compulsion Games since the studio debuted Contrast in 2013, and I eagerly followed the development of its follow-up, We Happy Few, through 2018. Compulsion’s games are stylish, with an emphasis on polished 3D graphics and lanky characters in fabulous outfits. Microsoft acquired Compulsion in 2018, and the studio has been working on South of Midnight ever since. My intrigue has only grown in the past year, following a drip-feed of trailers with luscious Southern Gothic settings, a bluesy soundtrack, and the game’s magic-weilding protagonist, a young Black woman named Hazel.

A World of Dark and Surreal Beauty

First, let’s talk about what the game does well. The preview begins at chapter three, after Hazel has discovered the basics of her magical abilities but has not mastered the power flowing through her veins. Hazel is a Weaver, capable of manipulating the invisible strands that hold reality together, and she’s looking for her mother, Lacey, after a hurricane swept through their hometown of Prospero in the American Deep South.

The environment is Hazel’s co-star: The swamps of Prospero are lit with a rich, golden hue and they’re buzzing with surreal life. Towering cypresses, lush ferns, and thorny vines the size of tree trunks weave their way through the forest, and its cloudy pools. The houses, half-demolished shacks connected over the bayou by crumbling wooden platforms, are filled with rotting trinkets and faded photos, and many have eviction notices stuck to the front doors. Car-sized peaches dot the landscape, plump pinkish skin sticking out of the swampwater and buried at the bases of trees. This land is drowning in magic.

A Lanky and Agile Protagonist

Hazel always looks cool, regardless of the framerate. She moves her long, thin limbs with the haphazard confidence befitting a teenage track star, and her clothes — a waffle-stitched sweatshirt tied around her waist, denim jeans, a tank top with a sports bra, leather arm bands, and a holster across her chest — are heavily textured, lending each piece a tangible feel. Hazel’s dialogue is delivered with a hefty amount of adolescent snark, too, and I laughed out loud when she met the giant talking catfish and immediately was like, "Nope," and turned to walk away.

Combat and Exploration

The fights flow just fine, and a lock-on system allows Hazel to swap her attention among the haints on the fly. Parrying projectiles is the toughest ability to master in the preview, but with a little more time to practice, I think it’ll become second nature. 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. A second screen contains Hazel’s collection of magical objects (five slots), patterns (six slots), readables (104 slots), and storybooks (14 slots). By the end of the demo, I’d collected four magical objects and one readable.

A Framerate that’s Hard to Ignore

Now, let’s talk about the game’s animations. South of Midnight begins with a gorgeous, handcrafted stop-motion intro movie that brings Hazel and her storybook adventure to life, but after that, the game’s stop-motion conceit only half-works. Hazel’s movements and the world at large are supposed to render at 60 fps, while her facial expressions in cutscenes render at something closer to 15 fps, mimicking the "animated in twos" style of Into the Spider-Verse. This appears to be true for anything in the game with a face, and it’s particularly apparent with the catfish character, which is basically all mouth.

In practice, the stop-motion effect is inconsistent during third-person exploration moments and close-up cutscenes, and it tends to feel less artistic, and more like the game simply has an erratic framerate. It’s possible to turn off stop-motion effects, but honestly, I couldn’t spot the difference. Even with stop-motion turned off, Hazel is rendered at an unpredictable rate that often dips well below 60 fps. 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, filled with particles and visually stuttering all over the place.

A Performance that’s Still a Long Way Off

South of Midnight targets 4K/60 on Xbox Series X, but my preview at times felt like it struggled to maintain 30 fps. What’s more troubling, though, is the screen tearing that appears throughout the preview, spawning from the game’s use of a-sync. The tearing often appears close to the center of the screen, suggesting the game is far away from its performance target. Of course, Compulsion is still working to optimize South of Midnight, and there’s some time to address these problems before the game comes out on April 8 — but they’re cutting it close.

A Beautiful but Flawed Game

I think the stop-motion effect is a grand idea and it would work well if Compulsion committed to the bit. If the framerate is supposed to be low, keep it low, rather than popping in and out of higher framerates, which makes everything feel like a mistake. Consistency is the key, and South of Midnight hasn’t nailed that yet.

This is Compulsion’s first attempt at building a game with all of the resources and attention that Xbox provides, and the studio has crafted a beautiful, mysterious 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.