‘South of Midnight’ Devs Talk DEI Backlash and Black Representation

Compulsion Games, the studio behind indie titles Contrast (2013) and We Happy Few (2016), has been under the Microsoft umbrella since 2018, but their upcoming action-adventure game, South of Midnight, isn’t your average Xbox title. Aside from providing the budget, Xbox has been relatively hands-off as Compulsion works on its bigger, bolder follow-up to 2016’s retro-futuristic romp, We Happy Few. 

That freedom is likely why South of Midnight feels wholly unique: a stop-motion-style, narrative-focused game set in a Deep South town recently ravaged by a hurricane, led by a young Black woman who uses healing magic to repair the broken buildings and heal creatures populating the land’s swamps and rolling hills. Couple that singular premise with an in-game soundtrack worthy of its bayou roots, a team of actors led by Star Wars’ Ahmed Best, and South of Midnight is like nothing the industry has seen before. 

Compulsion Games knows that they’ve made something very special, so they’re determined to let their game do the talking. Earlier this year a swarm of rightwing hate hornets descended upon Compulsion Games devs and its community manager after identifying South of Midnight as a game worthy of scorn for its inclusivity and alleged ties to a consultancy firm they believed was forcing diversity into the industry. 

Recently, Rolling Stone went to Compulsion Games’ Montreal studio for an inside look at South of Midnight, and spoke to several developers, its lead actors, studio head Guillaume Provost, and general manager Delilah Robinson about imbuing their game with the incomparable vibes of the deep South, the importance of Black representation, and supporting each other when faced with bad-faith criticism.

Gamifying the Southern Gothic vibe

Whether you’ve ever felt the weight of the Deep South’s impossibly humid air on your skin, or combed through tombs of Southern Gothic literature from Flannery O’Connor, or just devoured the blood-soaked, softcore vampirism of True Blood, you know there’s otherworldly energy surrounding the region that Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina call home. There is magic woven into its gnarled tree branches, emanating off its fireflies’ wings, and imbued in its populous. 

South of Midnight embraces that enchantment, from protagonist Hazel’s ability to weave lacy magic that can mend broken objects or dispel baddies known as Haights, to the endless chorus of swamp sounds that echo while she explores her world, and the improbable creatures plucked from Southern lore, legend, and literature. 

“I felt the South was interesting because I thought it was not something that was covered extensively inside video games,” Provost says. “There’s Kentucky Route Zero and there’s some representation inside Red Dead Redemption, but otherwise there’s no game whose focus was in that region of the United States.” 

But Compulsion Games couldn’t be farther from the Deep South — Montreal is more European chic than Bible Belt — and the team was incredibly anxious about getting the setting just right. 

“We couldn’t have done it without help,” art director Whitney Clayton says. “We have people on the team from the Deep South, but once you start getting into it you realize, ‘Whoa, this needs a lot more voices to do it justice.’” Storyteller and author Donna Washington came up to Montreal to spend several days telling tales of cryptids and magical realism, immersing the team in the fables and folklore of a part of the world that has historically tied to surviving hardship — whether that’s slavery, poverty, or climate change.

“It was important that we take things people can connect to, but give them a heightened, celebratory twist to them,” Clayton explained. “I think we do that with our style, the folktales, the magic, but for me, the really personal part is just nailing those details that people really will relate to… And we just saw so much diversity on our trips in terms of landscapes, food, the people are super warm — so we just wanted to get that beauty.”

Clayton’s visuals include the colorful bottle trees (a staple of the south whereby vibrant glass bottles are hung from tree branches) said to ward off evil spirits, dilapidated houses full of knick-knacks and knits, and a world teeming with life, all done in incredibly textured, stop-motion style animation that looks like something Guillermo del Toro would adore. And the sounds of South of Midnight add even more depth to this already beautiful game.

“I wanted the soundscapes to be fully authentic,” audio director Chris Fox says. That’s why the team spent weeks recording the ambient sounds of Appalachia and the swamps, and why they employed Southern musicians for South of Midnight’s score. 

“The voices and the music and the performers that we chose to use for the songs were where we wanted to grab the Southern authenticity and work with people from there,” Fox says.

That music is catchy as hell, as evidenced by what plays during the big boss fight against a big alligator named Two-Toed Tom shown during the preview. In the sequence, a children’s chorus whispers “Toe-Toed Tom” as Hazel approaches before the score swells into a massive, cacophonous theme song for the giant gator that I still catch myself humming more than a week later.

But it’s the little things in South of Midnight that will charm players, and the details that will dazzle: At one point during the demo, Roy stops moving Hazel so he can answer a question, and she absentmindedly waves away a mosquito flying around her head while she idles, turning to look at it with disdain as a chorus of cicadas emanates around her. South of Midnight’s moment-to-moment gameplay won’t shatter expectations or reinvent the wheel — it’s a fairly run-of-the-mill action adventure, with some light platforming and combat focused around a basic set of abilities that are on a slight cool-down — but the world it weaves will envelop you like a warm hug from your local church lady.

Hazel And Black Girl Gamers 

South of Midnight is so very Southern, and it’s also undeniably Black. Its protagonist, Hazel, is a young Black woman, a successful track runner, and a “weaver” capable of deploying a knitting-like magic that heals the world around her.

She’s played by two Black actors: Adriyan Rae, who lent her voice to the role, and Nona Parker Johnson, who did mo-cap and stunts for Hazel after Rae learned she was pregnant and could no longer perform the physical feats required of her. They were led by performance and voice director Ahmed Best, best known for playing Jar-Jar Binks in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999), a role that led to the years of internet harassment he faced in the film’s wake. 

During a roundtable discussion with the trio, the conversation quickly turns to Black hair in video games, and how it has historically been either offensively bad or tiresomely redundant (like the now-infamous “Killmonger cut” popularized by actor Michael B. Jordan in Black Panther). They joke about the cliche cuts and how Compulsion went an entirely different, more grounded route.

“To Compulsion’s credit, like we really did have serious conversations about what her hair was going to be,” Best says. “She’s not going to have the like, general kind of asymmetrical mop,  or, like everybody has the same length dreadlocks.” That concerted effort meant a lot to the Black actors involved, who believe it will also translate to positive reactions from Black gamers.

“Zaire, who is one of the writers, what she said [in the tie-in documentary Weaving Hazel’s Journey: A South of Midnight Documentary] got me,” Best says. “She was like, ‘All the little black girls are gonna cosplay as Hazel with their hair that comes out of their head.’ And that was really impactful. “When it comes to Black hair, we’re discriminated against because of our hair. Our hair is considered unruly and untamed, and the hair stigma comes with a whole bunch of other stereotypes of what it means to be beautiful inside and out. And Hazel is beautiful with her natural hair running through this world, healing herself, growing up, healing all the people that love her, and it makes this game special.”

Rae, who brought her baby girl to the studio with her for the visit, echoes similar sentiments: “My daughter is going to be able to play this game and she’s going to feel represented, and that’s huge.” 

For Best, it was also crucial that Compulsion hired “Black women as actors and [didn’t put] Black skin over white actors.” 

“I can’t say as a director things to a white Canadian actor that will give me a performance that I like.” He jokes, “I can’t say ‘go put a little hot sauce on that.’”

The specter of hate

But the same Black representation that brings so much joy to the team has brought undue scrutiny, levied by a reactionary corner of the internet that still believes one consultancy company, Sweet Baby Inc. is forcing “wokeness” into video games. That rumor began swirling in March of this year and is still a rallying cry amongst rightwing gaming influencers on X (formerly Twitter), Reddit, and the darker, even more hateful, corners of the internet. 

Not long after South of Midnight gameplay was revealed during the Xbox Showcase at Summer Game Fest this year, Compulsion Games was targeted by the modern version of GamerGate, who insisted that Hazel was “race-swapped” from a previously white character and that the shadowy consultancy company had its evil, DEI (which stands for “diversity, equity, and inclusion” and has become the “ethics in gaming journalism” shorthand of today) fingers around Compulsion’s throat. As is tradition with this kind of hate movement, the studio was inundated with emails, and their community manager was ceaselessly harassed both online and off. 

While at Montreal, Compulsion gave me a chance to chat about the hate campaign with studio head Provost and general manager Delilah Robinson, who had to make several important decisions in the wake of the hate wave to protect their team and their work. For both of them, the initial frustration of dealing with an onslaught of harassment was quickly replaced by a desire to ensure the team at Compulsion felt safe and supported. 

“I’d love to say I was shocked,” Robinson says over a video call at a later date. “Obviously, I can’t control how everybody reacts to the game or the idea. My number one focus is the team at the studio and making sure that they’re supported and they’re protected because it’s very easy for individuals to get swept up in this. I think that’s an aspect that gets missed at times.”

“People will tell you, ‘Don’t feed the trolls and they’ll go away’,” Robinson continues. “And yeah, that works average over a large group of people, but there are still individuals who go through misery. My number one thing is to make sure the individuals I’m responsible for are protected as much as possible.” 

Protecting the team meant focusing on risk management and harm reduction, like screening emails and ensuring that the public faces of South of Midnight were comfortable in their role.

“One of the questions that was posed internally on the team [after the harassment] was who was comfortable being a public spokesperson for the project,” Provost says. “That’s where the strength of the product plays a role, right? The game will speak for itself, and I think that’s the voice of the studio. We speak through the work that we do and the art that we do.”

Both Provost and Robinson are open to candid conversations about South of Midnight but don’t find any value in engaging with those hurling insults based on conspiracy theories or prejudice. “Ultimately, I did not see a lot of criticism that was offered in good faith, in which case I would have been happy to address it,” Robinson says. 

And that’s the fine line developers and studio heads have to walk in the face of this newer, meaner, louder movement against diversity in the industry: whether or not to acknowledge its existence. “I don’t have the energy to engage with things where people are trying to get a rise out of people, or trying to generate these [negative] kinds of emotions,” Robinson declares. “It’s definitely frustrating for the team, there’s no doubt about it. I don’t think anybody wants to receive that at all. But the team supports each other.”

Despite the hardships the team faced this summer, and the (expected) wave of negativity that temporarily flooded social media after the tie-in documentary debuted last month, it’s clear that everyone at Compulsion Games believes in South of Midnight — the world it builds, the story it weaves, and its essential hero, Hazel. 

For the people who poured their heart and soul into this game, South of Midnight offers so much for players to connect with. Johnson hopes that everyone who experiences the game will be open to what it can mean for all people. “No matter what color you are, the journey of growth and healing is powerful,” she says.

South of Midnight releases next year for Xbox Series X|S and PC, although no official launch date has been announced.