I first played South of Midnight when it was initially released on the Xbox back in April of last year, and even reviewed it at the time. I had a nice time – it’s a decently fun game, after all – but it’s not without its issues. The Switch 2 version of the game shares those same fundamental issues, while introducing a few of its own in the process, but it’s still quite an impressive port. 

South of Midnight is an action platformer game that has you following the story of Hazel, a teen girl and resident of Prospero, a fictional town that acts as an amalgamation of any number of locales in the American Deep South. Hazel lives a fairly normal life with her overbearing mother, until a storm hits and washes away her home, and her mother with it. 

Hazel rushes into action, and promptly discovers that there’s more to her lineage than she first thought. After a chance encounter with her partly-estranged grandmother, she finds some magical hooks and finds out she’s the latest in a line of Weavers, a group of magical people who help others by weaving the broken fabric of the world back together. The Weavers have existed for a long time – Hazel is just the latest – but they’re intimately tied to the identity of Black Americans in the game’s lore. Weavers helped slaves escape from abusive owners in the 18th and 19th centuries, they helped drive social change during the Civil Rights movement — they basically show up whenever America is messed up and needs adjustment. If only they were real. 

What follows Hazel’s magical awakening is a fascinating story of self-discovery and identity, told through exploration, self-reflection, and song. See, South of Midnight, for the most part, is an action platformer — but scattered throughout are a series of musical sequences that make it border on a full-blown musical. These musical interludes are gorgeously composed, written, and performed, and they add a lot of texture and depth to the game’s storytelling. 

South of Midnight’s biggest strength, however, is in its mythology. On the surface, South of Midnight’s boss monsters and world-building fantasy might seem like little more than a giant crocodile, a talking catfish, and a cavalcade of weird and wonderful creatures, but if you dig a little deeper you start to uncover real myths from the Deep South. There are stories and myths in this game that barely exist outside of a dinky town you’ve never heard of in Alabama with a population of 2000 people, and they are superbly researched and faithfully implemented in-game. It’s a mythology that gets so rarely represented in any kind of media, let alone games of this scale, so it’s a fantastic setting and mythos for South of Midnight to lean on. 

Unfortunately, an interesting story and a fascinating mythology aren’t enough to carry a game on their own, and South of Midnight’s gameplay is where the stitching starts to come unraveled. To put it bluntly, South of Midnight’s gameplay feels like it was stripped wholesale from a long lost PS2 game. There are some good things about that – I have a lot of nostalgia for games like Kya: Dark Lineage – but there’s no denying that it feels dated. 

Platforming is floaty and imprecise, combat feels clunky and often frustrating, and there’s a layer of jank over everything that’s impossible to ignore. If it weren’t for the stunning, modern visuals, you could easily be fooled into thinking this is a long lost PS2 game that’s just been sitting in storage for the last 25 years. Again, I have nostalgia for these kinds of games, but like games of old, this dated approach to game design comes with very real frustrations that rear their head when you’ve missed the same jump three times in a row, or struggled against the camera during a tight platforming section, or couldn’t get a boss sequence to trigger because you didn’t stand in exactly the right place. 

These problems become more apparent on Switch 2, where the game runs at 30fps, compared to the 60fps of the Xbox release. It’s not quite an even 30fps, though it gets there most of the time, and the lower frame rate means that it feels even less responsive — something that was already somewhat of a problem with the dated game design. There are also some weird issues with cutscenes, which are prone to stuttering and the occasional audio desync. I assume this is because in-engine cutscenes are running at a higher resolution than gameplay, but for such a story-heavy game, it is disappointing. 

Still, despite these performance woes, South of Midnight is a looker on Switch 2. The gorgeous, almost painterly art style is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and the stop motion-style animation is a wonderful stylistic choice that pairs well with the pseudo-horror vibes that are present in the game. It seems to be pushing the system to its absolute limits to deliver these kinds of visuals, though, since video capture is disabled, which was a somewhat common trick on the original Switch to claw back just a tiny bit of extra performance. As far as I’m aware, this is the first Switch 2 game to use this trick, and hopefully it’s not something we see often going forward. 

South of Midnight’s Switch 2 port isn’t perfect, but with its lovely visuals intact and an understandable cut to performance, it’s not all that bad either. A fascinating story and lore, gorgeous visuals, and a mostly solid port unfortunately aren’t enough, however, to shake the feeling that the gameplay itself feels outdated and often frustrating. It’s worth playing for the story nonetheless, and the Switch 2 is a fine enough place to play it, as long as you can live with it feeling like a long-lost PS2 game. 

Rating: 3/5