It’s hard to believe that it’s been seven years since We Happy Few. Easily one of my favorite games, I’ve missed Compulsion’s “handcrafted, hallucinatory adventures,” silently hoping that its Deep South-set adventure game South of Midnight will live up to expectations. With launch just around the corner, I sat down with game director Jasmin Roy and narrative director Zaire Lanier to ask if they’re feeling the pressure – especially given the divisive nature of their earlier games.
I fell in love with South of Midnight from the first trailer. Bayou setting? Check. Spellcasting and magic? Check. Adorable critters? Check. Compulsion’s upcoming PC game is easily one of the weirdest triple-A releases I’ve seen in a while, rivaled only by Capcom’s wonderful strategy game Kunitsu-Gami: Path of the Goddess.
But given it’s the brainchild of Compulsion Games, ‘weird’ feels like it’s part of the pitch. We Happy Few was an acid-trip adventure through a warped and twisted 1960s London that, while I enjoyed it, proved divisive. South of Midnight is similarly obscure, with its eerie puppet-like characters and stop-motion gameplay intriguing some, and leaving others out in the cold.
We Happy Few, while instantly recognizable, wasn’t exactly a critical darling – our own We Happy Few review gives it a middling five out of ten. From the polarizing Joy mechanic to myriad bugs and performance issues, it sits at 62 on Metacritic. But it’s a game that people wanted to succeed – the premise and the world were right there, brought to life by strong writing. South of Midnight promises the same, but given the studio’s track record gameplay-wise, you’d be forgiven for being slightly skeptical.
I ask Lanier and Roy about this: does the disappointment around We Happy Few, as well as the time taken to develop South of Midnight, mean that the pressure has stacked up?
“I don’t think it really adds pressure because that’s not how we approached South of Midnight’s development in the first place,” Roy tells me. “We were very focused on the fact that ‘we’re gonna do what we want to do, and the reception is going to be what the reception is.’ I think that’s just the way [Compulsion Games] is in general – when you make games that are trying to do something unique, you can’t get bogged down too much on putting up barriers for yourself, otherwise it’s going to influence how things go.
“We really did make the game that we wanted to make – we were aiming for a ten to 12-hour narrative-driven action-adventure game set in the [American] South with mythical creatures and folklore, and that’s what we did.”
“With any creative project I do, I want it to be good, so I always feel the pressure,” Lanier laughs. “We could have made a Pulitzer Prize-winning game before, and I’d still be nervous. But I think there’s an audience for [South of Midnight] – some people are going to enjoy elements of it, some people won’t, and that’s okay. For the people who like it, it’ll resonate with them, and if you don’t like it, there’s a bajillion games out there. I’m confident that South of Midnight will find its audience and that it’ll mean something to those people, and I’m excited for that.”
Roy mentions that the only real sense of “deep pressure” came when the team reworked parts of the story. Those sequences “have to be well-liked, they need to be the parts where people are going ‘yeah, that was good.’ It was an organic process of going ‘okay, this is the general idea we want to go with,’ trying a few versions, and seeing if people were like ‘meehhh, it’s a bit off.” Then we’d go back in and touch on some of the lines or the scenes.
“In terms of just videogame production, though, we went with what we wanted to do, and we’re really happy with the result.”
South of Midnight is easily one of my most-anticipated games of 2025, even beating out Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2, a sequel I’ve been waiting on for over a decade. Its quirky style, toe-tapping soundtrack, and believable portrayal of human themes have me hooked.
Check out our South of Midnight preview for a window into what to expect. It also drops on Game Pass day one, and we’ve got a list of all the upcoming Game Pass games that are set to join it.
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