South Of Midnight may have come and gone, but it turns out Hazel made her mark after all.
As shared by Klobrille on Twitter, the game has earned an exceptional 94 % Steam Player Rating. Jumping on to Steam shows that 2,546 reviews of this game, which represents the 94 % percentage, has earned it the rating of Very Positive.
Breaking it down further, out of a total of 2,757 reviews, 2,608 are positive, leaving only 149 negative reviews. Klobrille also points out this is the highest rating of any Microsoft game since last year’s Pentiment. Checking out that Steam page shows that after two years, it’s earned an even higher Overwhelmingly Positive rating, with 7,466 reviews, representing 95 % of reviewers, giving it a positive rating.
If you didn’t notice that South Of Midnight came out at all, we couldn’t blame you. It’s April 9 release date came days after the big Nintendo Switch 2 Direct, which definitely ate all the attention, not only for that week, but the rest of the month. It must be said that South Of Midnight did reach a respectable one million players a month after its launch, which is a decent showing for a game of its production scale and ambition.
But more than that, it’s vindication for the developer Compulsion Games, who can say that they now have an unqualified commercial and critical success to their credit. The sentiment around the studio surrounded on concerns if it could ever reach its potential, particularly after its release of We Happy Few.
That was not always entirely fair to the studio, who has a background making more conventional action games like the first Darksiders. But, in terms of the careers of the developers and the direction of the studio, it was not an unfair assertion.
It absolutely felt like things had completely changed for the studio when they were acquired by Microsoft in 2018, shortly before releasing We Happy Few. Instead of making a sequel, Compulsion set to work on a new game idea, focusing on their strengths while also taking new risks.
The game’s staff more than doubled in the process of making South Of Midnight, and hindsight may be 20/20, but theirs was one of many games that Microsoft held back so that it could be properly completed, even thru the rough first years of the Xbox Series X|S when Microsoft just didn’t have first party games to show.
Who knows where Compulsion Games or South Of Midnight will go moving forward. In our honest opinion, this game has a story that is begging for a Hollywood adaptation, animated or live action. But Compulsion, like Ninja Theory, has secured the enviable position of being able to make the kinds of games they want to make, with the backing of the company publishing Call of Duty and Overwatch.
