South of Midnightwas just recently released this past April. Canadian developer Compulsion Games' latest title is part magical realism and part Deep Southern Gothic tale. Boasting a striking stop-motion animation style,South of Midnightsends fans on a journey through the aftermath of a devastating storm that sees protagonist Hazel Flood searching for her missing mother and encountering a variety of strange creatures, each with their own tragic story to tell.
Game Rant caught up with Compulsion Games Studio Head and CEO Guillaume Provost atGamescom LATAM2025to talk more about the studio’s recent title. Provost, who was formerly at Arkane before founding Compulsion in 2009, discussedSouth of Midnight’s origins and how the studio pulled ideas and extensive research together to create an authentic and distinct game set in a lesser-explored area that has resonated very positively with players.The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: As a studio head, what did day one ofSouth Midnightlook like for you?
A:Well, I was creative director on our first two games,We Happy FewandContrast. We startedSouth of Midnightshortly after the acquisition by Microsoft. We were acquired in 2018, and for 2019, we spent the year working on all the DLC andseason pass forWe Happy Few. I was spending a lot of my time with lawyers and accountants at the time, so I took a step back from being the creative director on the next project. I assembled a team of: creative director David Sears, art director Whitney Clayton, and narrative director Alex Epstein for the project.
Typically, the first thing we do in our creative process is we look at picking a location and a time period to do all the fundamental research for the game that we’re trying to build. The team had multiple proposals in terms of choosing an original location setting for us to build on, and one of them was the Deep South. David had been raised in Mississippi and was pretty familiar with the area. And I’d say our job as a studio with Microsoft isn’t to makeblockbusters likeCall of Duty, but to provide games that add distinctiveness, where we can either serve audiences that haven’t been served before or create projects that add diversity to the portfolio.
I thought when we had the discussion originally that that specific region in the United States was pretty underserved in the video game market. You’ll get smaller budget titles that are set there.Kentucky Route Zerois a good example, and you’ve seen itportrayed inRed Dead Redemption. But no one had really kind of dived in and mined the mythology of the area and looked at what made it iconic. So that was kind of the first step in our decision process.
We’ve had cases where we would start a project and pick the locations we thought would be great, then we’d go visit and come back, and we realized that there’s no way we want to live in that world for the next 5 years. So, the second step was just like, “Well, this looks interesting, it looks like it’s an opportunity for a studio of our size to make something in a region that isn’t really served in video games.”
We went on two research trips at the time, one in the Louisiana area and the other inparts of Appalachia, to see what the vibe of each space was. Things like how people who are actually in the area are, how many churches there are per square meter, and what’s on the billboards. But also, just getting a sense of what day-to-day life is like to decide whether we’re seeing a reflection of the myths and folktales. Are we seeing them in the actual road trips we’re doing, and do we want to live in that space for the next 5 years? Because that’s the investment in making a game that’s true to any area. It means doing the homework and going back to the region on a regular basis to make sure we’re doing our work well.
Whitney, our art director, and I would go visit all the different regions together, and we saw some really interesting, iconic, and distinctive things, like the bottle tree that’s on the logo. We saw people painting their porches in that shade of blue. I was like, “OK, it’s not just crazy and weird, there are real, tangible myths and history, and we can go from there with our creative process.”
Then she’ll pick out what she thinks is really iconic about those places and kind of dial that up to 11 to make a bit of a mishmash of what we feel are the things that make that region the most interesting. We did the same withWe Happy Few, and we had a little bit more time and research to do that on this project.
Building Authenticity Into South of Midnight’s World, Writing, and Presentation
Q: A lot of the stories Hazel works through inSouth of Midnightare about bottling up pain. Could you talk a little bit about where that idea came from?
A:This is a tough question to answer accurately because there’s multiple things that led up to that inspiration. When we started working on the project, we realized that it’s a sensitive region to cover appropriately, and we wanted to make sure we’d done our homework to do that properly. We couldn’t ignore all the history and the overarching story of the region itself in the game without doing it justice. We realized we needed writers from the region that could write authentically with regard to what the lived experience would be.
It took time to ensure we understood what kind of structure we wanted to build. I’d say the overall arc of the game and the genre isSouthern Gothic. It’s split into 14 chapters, and a lot of them occur in different regions that are inspired by various parts of the South that we visited. In each of them we wanted you to meet a mythical creature that was built into it.
The stories really stem from understanding and trying to take the folktales that we researched and match them tomythical creaturesto build an actual history of those creatures and give an explanation for how they became who they are, and in some cases, humanizing them. You know, not everything horrific-looking is automatically a bad thing. We wanted to create a tangible story between each of these creatures that matched, or explained, their presence in the piece.
A lot of the individual stories you see inSouth Midnighthave elements that we researched and took from the folktales. In some cases, they are the original stories,Two-Toed Tom, for example. In other cases, we took folktales and mythical creatures and kind of put those two pieces together to try to make a cohesive world and universe.
Q: The Louisiana vibe ofSouth of Midnightis very strong, but you mentioned visiting Appalachia. Could you talk about how that specific region manifested in it?
A:We did this methodical picking of the different types of regions. We visited the Smoky Mountains, we went to Pigeon Forge. I don’t know if you know about Pigeon Forge, but that was definitely one of the highlights of one of our trips, seeing those areas of the South that we weren’t familiar with before. The Crow’s Nest, whereHuggin Mollylives, for example, is inspired by a specific region there. And then we have more of a Louisiana vibe, especially in the final chapters of the game.
Q: You touched on researching and hiring writers from the local area. Could you talk a little bit more about that aspect and what the process was like working with writers from the region?
A:It was a learning experience. It’s not something that we had ever done before. We worked with some British writers onWe Happy Few, but I think every process goes through a level of understanding. You start by bringing people into the creative process, and that means having different viewpoints, and different ones than the team might have.
We worked with consultants at the beginning, then I sat down with our creative director, and we said, “It can’t just be we got a consultant to come stamp it and say thestory is good.” I want to verify that whatever story we’re telling, it’s accomplishing two things: that someone who is from the region will feel like we’ve respected the material and done the research of trying to portray the area, portray the characters, and portray the storylines in a way that feels recognizable. And for someone who’s not, they’ll get a window into a culture that they may not have been exposed to, and the intimate details of what makes the space different.
And to me, that required hiring people who are from the South. We had a few already, one of our level designers is from Baton Rouge and our creative director is from Mississippi. So we had eyes on the team, but we wouldn’t have been able to tell that story without making an effective portion also on the writing team. Two of the main writers are from the region, and they helped uswrite Hazel’s script, sort through the folktales, and made sure things like the accents were right.
We worked with the musicians, who are all also from the region, to make sure that themusic inSouth of Midnightdidn’t sound too typical, like “let’s make a blues and a jazz song.” But getting contemporary musicians that could build their own sounds that felt authentically from the region and had the texture that you get from the South. So the actors, writers, musicians, and the handful of folks that we had on our team really helped us to absorb the culture and be able to interpret it faithfully.
South of Midnight’s Player Count Since Launch is Impressive
Q: To wrap things up, you mentioned your role with Xbox is not to make blockbusters, but to provide diversity in the portfolio. WithSouth of Midnightbeing out, how are you feeling about the results?
A:Good! Obviously, when making a game that’s so heavily tied to a specific region and culture, you’re going to have a lot of sales that are proportionately based on that region. I can confidently say we’ve had more than a million players onSouth Midnightsince its release. Gaming is for everyone when you have content for everyone, so we’re happy with the role that we’re playing within Xbox and actually creating that content and diversity.
I’m passionate about that being part of the mission for the studio moving into the future. In terms of what audience, what experiences, and what areas of the world we’ll represent next, I can’t tell you. But I think that’s animportant role within Xboxfor us to be a brand that appeals to people from all walks of life.
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