South Of Midnight Is A Reminder Of A Games Industry We're Never Getting Back

By 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Stacey Henley

Published Apr 4, 2025

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Sometimes you just don't like a game. That's fine. Maybe it's because you don't vibe with the genre, or because you can't get the hang of its mechanics. Maybe it's because the story doesn't interest you, or because the game is just bad. Maybe you're bad. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:I would know! That's why I don't like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Elden Ring! But thinking a game is bad is not the worst thing you can think about a video game, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:South of Midnight taps into what is.

P🌠laying South of Midnight, I had an okay time. The story had me, even if it sometimes wandered off the sole narrative thread the game sets up in order to bring in extra characters who are cut loose as quickly as they clamber aboard. The mechanics were enjoyable to engage with, even if they didn't really evolve once they were introduced and quickly became repetitive. The whole thing looked nice, even if the stop motion gimmick never went far enough to make it feel unique or purposeful. It was capital O capital K. But it's the sort of game that would have been great 15 years ago, and that always stings.

Video Games Have Always Innovated

Though it can 🅷feel like gaming has stagnated as we see the biggest budget games chase photorealism with increasingly minor leaps each year, gaming has always co♓ntinued to evolve. It has gotten better at telling more rounded stories with more complex characters, it has the technology to offer far broader and more varied mechanics, it has the scope to offer depth to its edges that would have seemed impossible just a few short years ago.

Of course, you can point to outliers. Hideo Kojima's early work on 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Metal Gear Solid showed that games can tell more cinematic stories inspired by the☂ history of film, not just inspired by the need to reach the next objective with lots of gunshots and explosions. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Super Mario took one small step and one giant leap as it went seamlessly from 2D to 3D, altering the course of the entire platform genre. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Pokemon Gold & Silver managed to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:fit Pokemon R🀅ed & Blue inside of it, despite both launching for the same machine.

I think this is part of the reason it feels as though games have stagnated. Leaps used to be major events, they were bold and brash and memorable. These days, the cutting edge tech that sees 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 have the most realistic rope physics ever, or 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Red Dead Redemption 2's much-memed horse balls, doesn't seem that exciting. But rather than once in a generation leaps, w🍨hat we're seeing now is a rising tide that raises all boats. A⛎nd, fittingly for a game where a house is washed away by a flood, South of Midnight finds itself underwater.

South Of Midnight Is A 2015 Game In 2025

Again, it's not that South of Midnight is bad. It's that you've played it all before, and many years ago. And while🐎 sure, that means a better time will be had﷽ with it than with a game you just, for whatever reason, don't like, it's a thought that feels bad underneath it all.

Firstly, it feels bad because you’re always aware of South of Midnight's potential. With an impressive aesthetic, interesting characters, and a more unique tone than most of gaming offers these days with its grey shooters o♏r high fantasy, South of Midnight could have been great. Instead, it's good-to-okay. That's more disappointing than a game that looks okay and plays okay leaving you thinking it's okay.

But it also highlights a rift between desire and practicality. We've long known that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:the games industry is too expensive, full of games that take 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:too long and cost too much to make, trying breathlessly to keep up with the pinnacle, only to see that shift eve💜r further away from them. South of Midnight does not feel like that. It feels like Compulsion saying "let's do Contrast again, but better", and if that is the humble aim, it has been achieved. But Contrast came out in 2013, an era 💦it feels like South of Midnight is pulling its ideas from.

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Obviously, there were better games than Contrast in 2013, and thus there are better ways for a game to launch in 2025 and be enjoyable but dated than South of Midnight. But playing it reminded me of the subtle ways gaming has moved on - we don't know exactly how long South of Midnight has been in development, but the studio's last game was 2018 (168澳洲幸运5开奖网:We Happy Few) around the time it was acquired by Xbox. Concept art leaked in 2021, and it's now 2025. This might feel like a game from a decade and a bit🍸 ago, but it doesn'ꦚt seem to have been developed to that timetable.

I believe gaming is close to a plateau 𓂃where, in terms of graphics and scale at least, we ൩don't see many improvements. Instead, advancements start to go towards speed - to getting cutting edge results faster, cheaper, more readily. That might be gaming's next giant leap. Right now though, you want to look to games like South of Midnight as an example of another way to live. While I'm sure the game was significantly less expensive than Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet will be, I'm not sure South of Midnight's timeline makes it look much like a viable alternative for an industry desperate to plug the gaps between its biggest releases.

Ultimately the main feeling South of Midnight will generate in people is nostalgia, and while there's nothing wrong with that, it's a shame in some ways that a game that doesn't do anything new and gets in and out within 12 hours feels like 🎉it no longer has a place in gaming. It makes me wonder about what South of Midnight would be like if it had reached its full, modern potential, but it also makes me wonder what gaming would be like if more games were a bit more South of Midnight.