South Of Midnight has been designed with a single, guiding vision, one where thought and care has been put into every decision. In this game, story suffuses everything – combat, boss design, art, even music. Ask the team about any gameplay element, and they won't just tell you why it's fun, they'll tell you the narrative reasoning behind it. Key to all of this is that Hazel's story is about repairing a world, and the individuals caught up in its newly-darkened corners.

It might sound like a heady message, but the way this ties into the game is fundamental – and it's what makesSouth Of Midnightso unique. With such a clear goal in mind, it means that a game in a very familiar genre can feel wholly unfamiliar.

TakeSouth Of Midnight's world, for a start. Compulsion describes the game as "wide-linear," a series of distinct chapters, with a set beginning and end, but with opportunities to explore along the way:

Each new region will come with its own biome, a reflection of the South's wildly varied landscapes. All of those biomes are inspired by real-world locations – Sears won't go into detail about the later game yet. However, the magical realist approach allows Compulsion to play with expectation as you travel through its world.

Locations will feel deeply rooted in what we know of the real world – in fact, to help create this section of the game, the developers took a trip to a real Mississippi ghost town, itself infested with alligators (only one of them braved the trek across amphibian territory to get into an abandoned church and take reference shots). But as we travel, we'll see how these areas have become overtaken by the game's mythical creatures, bringing twisted change with them.

Of course, most folktales need antagonists and in the trailer we meet one of them. Two-Toed Tom is based on real-life campfire tales of ancient, giant, seemingly unkillable alligators, and he will – as Clayton puts it – "haunt" this chapter in Hazel's tale. What we've seen are the very edges of his hunting grounds, but Tom will repeatedly reappear as you explore his region, eventually leading us to a showdown. It allows not just for a "boss fight" that effectively spans a whole section of the game, but also allows the team to turn each creature into a full-blown character, rather than a simple mechanism for conflict.

The idea, like everything else here, doesn't seem to be that Hazel will kill the creatures standing in her way, more that she'll be curing them, removing the hurt that turned them into monsters in the first place. And in perhaps the most starkly unexpected part of the trailer, we even hear the game's music reflecting the story that made Tom what he is.

South Of Midnight has also gone gold!

Compulsion Games has reached a major milestone, with the game’s development now complete and approved for release.

South Of Midnight’s soundtrack, created by Olivier Deriviere, is available today on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Bandcamp. To celebrate, Xbox Newswire spoke to Deriviere and Audio Director Chris Fox to find out how they created a unique gaming musical experience.

Pre-order The Art and Music of South of Midnight, developed in collaboration with Dutch design house and publisher Cook and Becker. The box set includes a two-LP vinyl with the full soundtrack of the game presented in a beautiful gatefold – alongside a 160-page art book, a comic book inspired by the game, and more.

Xbox Wire spoke to Composer Olivier Deriviere, and Audio Director Chris Fox.

In most games, the soundtrack is something like a mood board – something to prompt you on the fact that you’re in an important battle, or experiencing the joy of exploration. But Compulsion Games has woven music far more intricately into the experience of playing South of Midnight. As you progress through its levels, melodies and harmonies repeat, snatches of lyrics float like a breeze through the experience, offering hints at the wider story you’re taking part in. And, as you reach each level’s crescendo, taking on the game’s mythical creatures, it explodes into life as a fully performed track, ebbing and flowing, reacting to your actions, and telling the creatures’ tales through lyrics.

It was, as you might imagine, a complex task. “It’s the biggest music production I’ve ever done,” explains Deriviere. “But, at the beginning, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

Musical Introduction

Compulsion did a huge amount of research in the early parts of production, with Creative Director David Sears and his team undertaking multiple trips to the American South in order to properly capture the look, feel, and stories of the region they aimed to depict. And it was at the end of one of these trips that Sears returned with an idea.

Audio Director Chris Fox tells the story that started it all: “David came back from one of his trips to the South and said, ‘I really feel like I’ve had this epiphany – players’ actions should equal musicality.’ So that was kind of the first big challenge, and then I had to go away and kind of think about what that meant.”

Music is a huge part of the identity of the South – blues, country, jazz and more can all trace their roots to the region – and that was always going to be represented. But the gauntlet thrown down to Fox and Deriviere was to create a game in which that music needed to feel tied to what the player was doing, where they were, and what story they were unravelling.

“So I was like, ‘OK, how can someone make music while they play, but not [just make] a music game?’” explains Fox. “That was how it started, and then we just went into lots of brainstorms.”

David came back from one of his trips to the South and said, ‘I really feel like I’ve had this epiphany – players’ actions should equal musicality.’

Chris Fox, Audio Director

It’s rare for an action-adventure like South of Midnight to try something like this, and it’s rarer still for the songs created to have lyrics. This wasn’t just about creating a technical system for how music reacts to the player, but for how it told distinct stories around them.

“We started with story, of course,” says Fox. “We needed to know the story of the creatures first, which then spawned the narrative – our version of the [real-life] tales – which in turn spawned the lyrics. The lyrics and the narrative have to go hand-in-hand. We worked with the narrative team, and then we had to make sure Olivier had what he needed. I was very pleased with the content that we got – it’s always a worry at the beginning when you talk about making original songs, it’s not something that’s normally done. Anything could happen – and the most important thing was just to put trust in everyone.”

That trust meant that Olivier was given another unusual task – to create a concept song, in the same way a game’s production will often begin with concept art.

“This was the first time I’ve had to think of [traditional] songs within a game,” Deriviere continues. “How can we make a song happen, and how is this relevant? How do we arrange the song? The starting point was this concept song – and I had to sing it. And when the song was there, just by me, it was enough for David and Chris to be like, ‘OK, with that, we can go into production.’”

The Art of Science

From here, the team worked together to create the full suite of songs you’ll hear in the final game. And unexpectedly, at least for Deriviere, the practical element of getting the game to adjust its music to how you’re playing was actually one of the easier parts of the process.

“Technology in video games has immensely improved over the time, and we are now able to very much tailor – throughout any situation in a game – [how the music reacts to] whatever we want. The difficulty is that you have the technology, but you still have to have the creativity and the coherency of using the technology in the right way. For instance, for music, you don’t want the system to be complex [to the point where it] doesn’t make musical sense. It’s just years and years of practicing and experimenting. And we did experiment – it’s fail-and-retry, basically.”

The systems Fox and his team created mean that the soundtrack will ‘know’ if you’re stopping to explore, or charging headlong into a combat section, adjusting the track around that to feel right, while still carrying the core themes.

“We had to deconstruct each song to make it work within the levels,” Deriviere continues. “At the end of the level, you visit the creature and you have this song at its peak – but previously [in the level], you have sections that are building up, and it’s not in the same form as the final song. It’s a completely different form, with different harmonies, different melodies. Sometimes there’s even a corrupted aspect to the melody, because the world is corrupted, and we wanted people to feel this way.”

In effect, it’s turning music into a part of the wider soundscape – the same way a game will have different sound effects for walking through water as opposed to mud. “I think that’s why I wanted to work with Olivier,” enthuses Fox. “He sees the audio and not just music. It’s music woven into sound effects, sound effects woven into music. It’s the audio experience for the player, and they’re not separated necessarily.”

Pushing that idea even further, in South of Midnight, music is quite literally a character: “At the end of the level, the song is always performed by a top-talent singer, but within the levels it’s by a kids’ choir,” explains Deriviere. “The kids are basically the star of the show – they’re all over the place, and they mean so much to the game. These are the Strands, the entities, whatever magic you want to call them, that are helping [lead character] Hazel find her way through this magical world.”

Southern Charm

And to add to the complexity of all this, there was a final piece of the puzzle for Fox and Deriviere – going all the way back to those original research trips, the music needed to feel as if it belonged in the South, across multiple regions, while still offering up a single, coherent soundtrack.

“At the beginning, you know, talking with Chris and David, it was more about trying to find something that would be interesting, get something inspired by the Deep South, but create something that was unique for the game,” explains Deriviere.

He realized that, in order to do that, he needed to look outwards, not inwards: “Oh, we may need to hire some talents to record live music. But [then it became] multiple talents, on a scale that I’ve never done. [We had] more than 50 people involved, not even including the orchestra.”

This was a much bigger task than the team had gone in expecting. ““It was something that evolved over time,” says Fox. “We started with like an hour of music, or something ridiculous like that, which was obviously way too little. But at the beginning of a project, you just don’t know what the needs are.

“I appreciate the belief in us that when I said, ‘We’ve got this really cool idea, we need to we need to go with live performers.’ And then later on, ‘Oh, actually, I know I said we weren’t going to use an orchestra, but we actually need to go and record an orchestra now.’

“For the higher-ups here at Compulsion to say, ‘This wasn’t necessarily budgeted, but we think you’ve got a strong vision, and what you’re doing with Olivier seems really good, so here we go’ – that was something I really appreciated from Compulsion and Xbox, to roll with us on that.”

You can feel, hopefully, when you’re listening to the soundtrack or the songs, that there are people there. It feels like they’re there, and they want to provoke emotions, move you, tell the story, bring you into this world.

Olivier Deriviere, Composer

But even with all of this in place, Deriviere needed to create music that managed a tricky balance:

“We worked with various established musicians from the South, but we were never willing to copycat – it would have been inauthentic, because I’m not from there, you know? It was not the goal. The goal was to be inspired and to turn the music into something else. So yes, there is of course influences from country, bluegrass, blues, jazz. But the best reaction was from these [musicians] – one of them plays blues, one of them country – and they were playing the songs, and they were like, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t do this, but this is super interesting!’

“They were doing what they were used to, but with the twist that I would do. I thought they would be a little bit lost in the process, but it was completely the opposite. They embraced it so much. For me, that’s the success in this production, working with these people, getting their genuine, authentic vibe from the South, and [bringing them] into the world of Compulsion, the world of this music.”

The result is a soundtrack that Deriviere and Fox believes represents the South, but doesn’t simply copy its homework – this was a true collaboration with the real musicians from the region:

“You can feel, hopefully, when you’re listening to the soundtrack or the songs, that there are people there,” says Deriviere. “It feels like they’re there, and they want to provoke emotions, move you, tell the story, bring you into this world.”

It’s an idea that lends extra weight to the idea that South of Midnight sings with you – it’s not just the game itself singing, but the many, many people who made that music.

Composed by Olivier Deriviere (A Plague Tale: Requiem, Get Even), and with lyrics by Sears and the writing team, each song will be woven throughout the Kingdoms, growing in complexity and systemically responding to your actions, until full-blown lyrics begin telling the stories of the creatures you're trying to evade and, eventually, cure. It's rare to hear voiced songs in games – but it's rarer to hear them originally composed to support the narrative throughout a whole game.

Of course, setting and music are one thing, but combat and exploration are often more coldly mechanical pieces of game design – how do you ensure you're still storytelling when you're hammering buttons to take down a Haint or a boss?

Compulsion have utilised a few tricks here. For a start, it's in how Hazel fights and gets around. Everything she can do is powered by her Weaving, and this links your actions intrinsically with that core goal of fixing what's broken. To that end, it comes with a very neat bit of game design – while we see traversal powers (gliding using a Weaver sailcloth) and combat powers (like Unravelling enemies), Hazel will also gain a set of spells that show off Weaving's utility. During the trailer, we can see three abilities available the top-left of the screen, and they come with some mechanical ingenuity:

The powers we can see are Weave, Push, and Pull: Weave can be used to fix objects in place to help traversal, but will also bind enemies; Push and Pull can be used to move objects in the world to help solve puzzles, but also affect combat dynamics, letting you control enemy placement to an extent. You'll unlock more as you go, all with this multifarious functionality. Turning your spells into something that can be used in any situation is a neat metaphor for how Hazel's powers aren't simply about destruction or survival.

The result is a game where the look is as powerful a part of the storytelling as the characters themselves – and the almost uncanny effect of how South Of Midnight moves is a part of this, too. Last year's trailer introduced us to Compulsion's maquette-like designs, and stop-motion inspired animation, but seeing it as a working game is proof that the story trailer wasn't just for show.

While the team has tweaked exactly how pronounced the effect is between cinematics, exploration, and combat, one of South Of Midnight's biggest differentiators from other games is in how committed the team has been to that look:

And here's the most important point – Compulsion aren't doing things differently simply to be different. There's a guiding principle behind all this: Hazel's story, the reflection of the Deep South, the real-life research that's gone into it, and the myriad ways that storytelling leaks into every bit of design. This team believes in what they're making, and has put thought into, well, everything.

South Of Midnight will be released on Xbox Series X|S and PC on April 8, 2025 – and play with Xbox Game Pass on day one.