Like A Good Ol' Southern Potluck, South Of Midnight Had Me Going...

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Very rarely do I have the time or energy to play a new game more than once. Replays are usually something born from necessity, like work-related tasks, or my insatiable nostalgia for old RPGs. Anything else is an anomaly, but I'm happy to report that, at the behest of no one, I played Complusion's gothic action adventure game South of Midnight three times over the last eight months, so I reckon that means I like it.

To be clear, that's two more times than I was asked to play for our South of Midnight review. I went at it a second time at my own leisure, then followed up again with a third replay so a friend could watch me, but I'll be damned if I didn't find some easy-to-miss, tiny detail with every press of 'new game' that made me fall in love with Hazel's journey through the American South all over again.

And when I say it's in the little things, I really mean the stuff you may miss just strolling by. Hazel's journey is just as fantastical as it is familiar—I felt that the moment she went through the motions preparing for a hurricane in South of Midnight's opening moments—but the sense of déjà vu really hit me in Chapter 3. I knew I'd been to this place before, I just couldn't nail its real-life counterpart. It wasn't until my second visit that I noticed a small, painful detail in the eviction notices plastered throughout an abandoned community:

Every cruel order to vacate was issued by the Chickasaw County court. It's a tiny place in northeast Mississippi, and not one I'd expect to hear referenced by anyone not born and raised there.

When I saw it, it felt like someone knocked the wind right out of me. It's not far from where I spent a lot of my childhood summers in Leake or Leflore counties, though all of them have something in common: a shared look of inhospitable decay and hostility. It's a place you'd wonder why someone would even bother with an eviction notice, but it's still home to a lot of very real people and generations of poverty.

I had a lot of those moments where I didn't realize how far South of Midnight's authenticity extended until I stopped to inspect details hidden in the cracks. There's a later chapter when Hazel is reunited with her neighbors seeking hurricane relief at a local church, and

Source: PC Gamer