South of Midnight is like a good ol' southern potluck-you gotta go back for seconds, and maybe thirds

In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2025, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks each day throughout the rest of the month. You can find them all here. (Image credit: Compulsion Games) (Image credit: Compulsion Games) 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. (Image credit: Compulsion Games) 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 lo and behold, what's crudely scribbled on the vessel that got them there? The Cajun Navy. Maybe more people know that one, I think it became a more popular term...

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