South of Midnight: a well-crafted 60fps experience on Xbox Series consoles

Developer Compulsion Games continues its impressive streak of imaginative, stealth-focused projects with South of Midnight. Following its efforts on 2013’s Contrast and 2018’s We Happy Few, this time we transition to a gothic narrative inspired by the folklore of the American South. It’s a unique concept, and the studio’s third game to feature some form of artistic style – with South of Midnight’s twist being its use of stop-motion animation. To enhance this feel, the game imposes a specific frame-rate cap, especially noticeable during its cutscenes, mimicking the choppy movement of an actual stop-motion feature. It’s an Xbox and PC exclusive at launch, so how do the Series X and Series S versions stack up in delivering this visual style, and what is the extent of scalability for the PC version?

South of Midnight is a single-player journey that spans approximately 12 hours, perfectly fitting the criteria for a Game Pass title. Compulsion Games focuses on three main pillars of gameplay here: platforming, combat, and physics-based puzzles. Our protagonist Hazel, with her spell-casting abilities, offers us numerous options for tackling each aspect, allowing us to soar through the air, manipulate the environment, and ensnare adversaries in combat. Across all dimensions, the idea of interacting with the surroundings via threads is well-executed, resulting in an engaging experience as you gain powers from a skill tree. While there are more challenging sections, I found it to be a pleasurable run as it stands in the default mode. It is indeed linear – and there’s even an optional slow walk to your next objective if needed – but given the influx of open-world extravaganzas recently, it’s refreshing to have a more directed experience for a change.

In terms of technology, there’s no clear declaration about whether this uses Unreal Engine 4 or 5; however, examining the PC install list reveals crash dump files that strongly suggest UE4 as the foundation. The highlight this time is South of Midnight’s stop-motion animation style. Breaking this down, all cutscenes run at 30fps on Xbox Series X, Series S, and even PC. There’s no option to opt-out on any platform, but it is justifiable since it forms the cornerstone of the game’s distinctive visual identity. Within this 30fps frame rate, certain elements are reduced further for effect; facial animations run at 15fps, creating the appearance of face plates switching with every alternate frame. Meanwhile, most of Hazel’s body movements operate at 30fps, although some other components – such as creatures roaming the environment – seem to move at 15fps.

Overall, the stop-motion effect is striking in its presentation, creating an ethereal, disjointed movement that fits the narrative well. We’ve seen this style utilized in various UE games as well, most recently with Hi-Fi Rush’s vivid mimicry of a Saturday morning cartoon. Likewise, it authentically captures the anime influence on Arc System Works’ Guilty Gear Strive, with pre-battle sequences operating at eight, 10, or 15 frames per second – or more. South of Midnight takes this a step further by extending the effect into the actual controllable gameplay in certain respects. To clarify, gameplay runs at 60fps – as it likely should, given the emphasis on timing-sensitive combat and platforming – and all camera motion adheres to a 60Hz refresh as well. Nevertheless, you’ll still witness Hazel’s running animation and the environment’s creatures exhibit a sort of fragmented animation that locks movements at 30 or 15fps. If you’re not fond of the final outcome, you can disable the stop-motion effect entirely in the menus on Xbox and PC, although this toggle won’t impact the cutscenes.

Now, onto comparisons, and this is notably straightforward. The significant difference between Series S and Series X lies in their resolution targets. On Series X, resolution ranges from 1080p to 4K internally, while Series S operates between 540p and 1080p. This is then upscaled on both consoles to a fixed output resolution, 4K on Series X and 1080p on Series S, utilizing what appears to be Unreal’s TAAU method. Unfortunately, this means that Series S does experience a hit to image quality, particularly in one early storm scene where any flash of lightning reveals the underlying pixel structure for a few frames. Thankfully, in other sections, the Series S version holds up better. The differing resolutions have a knock-on effect on depth of field, and shadow quality seems to have been slightly reduced on Series S, but other visual settings remain consistent between the two systems.

A quick glance at PC can also be revealing. Even with all settings maxed out on ultra and the resolution set to native 4K,