South of Midnight Review: a southern black game that is worth shouting on

Blacks are loud. We laugh strong, we love strong, we protect strong. But when we really want to show our approval, we calm down first. When we laugh at something fun, like In fact Laugh, it sounds like a thin panting before the sound explodes like a storm. And within the seconds of starting South of midnightwhile walking through the house of the protagonist Hazel and seeing a work of art that was an obvious and deliberate tribute for the painter Annie Lee's's Blue MondayWithout words, I put my steam cover and took a quiet return around my living room before starting shouting.

South of midnight It is the latest compulsion Games title, a best known Canadian study for doing We are few happy. Follow Hazel, a young woman who must rescue her mother after a hurricane sweeps her home. Throughout her trip, she enters her powers as a weaver, or guardians who can see the threads that connect all life in what is known as the great tapestry and can repair it when those threads are knotted by pain and trauma.

The game is a game of action platforms. Hazel progresses using his weaver skills to cure the ruined landscape and defeat the enemies called Haints, a southern term used to describe ghosts or monsters. He helped his search for Crouton, his children's stuffed toy life for a powerful magic. It can take care of the bodies of the enemies, make them fight on the side of Hazel and can get into places that she is too big to achieve.

I love it when a piece of media speaks to me like a black person. A television program, cartoons or even a video game will have small visual references or phrases that are like a secret code. I see or listen to them and I know that a black person left this to find him. What he did to me shout To the south of midnight it was that their writers were by the deep cuts. They put the kind of things you only know if at least three of your four grandparents were blacks. Back in the past, all On both sides of my family I had Annie Lee Artwork at home. If it weren't Blue Mondaywas Sixty pounds – That my mother had hanging on the window of our kitchen.

That type of recognition is everywhere in the game. It is in the way Hazel and his mother, Lacey, talk to each other, the words they use and their intonation. Hazel mutters somewhat disrespectful, and his mother calls her immediately: “I thought you had grown.” It is in the way the catfish, the magical and too big catfish that guides Hazel in his search, reminds me of my two very Field uncles. Earlier this year, when I spoke with Ahmed Best, the director of voice capture and movement for the game, spoke about how it wanted to guarantee that each aspect seemed authentic, to the way people were. I saw that appears in the way Hazel covers the same just so To keep the heat of Mississippi at bay. Instead of standing directly, he leans his head to the side while greeting his hand exactly in the same way as aunts born in Memphis.

The details were very small, but they accumulated in my heart like the waters behind a dike. Every time I discovered something new, how to notice one of the titles of the game chapters referred to the novel by Zora Neale Hurston His eyes were looking at God – Emotion would explode like an avalanche of tears.

And it is not only the narrative that pays tribute to tradition and black and southern culture; The game also does. Rather The defamed yellow painting (and unfairly) used to denote an escalation surface, South of midnight Uses A very specific blue tone – The color that black people in the south used to paint their porches to keep evil spirits away. There was a time when I saw blue butterflies floating on a cliff surrounded by water that kills Hazel if it touches him. Knowing that the game uses blue to show you where you can go safely, make a jump of faith to the edge and found a secret power. The game spoke to me using the language of my ancestors, and I heard it. Once again, I shouted.

How much South of midnight He made me scream, his fight made me moan a little. Each combat encounter follows the same extremely basic formula. The enemies appear in a sand, the kills, the wound that makes the enemies appear, repeat the nausea and with particular emphasis on the part of the nausea. It is so formula that combat feels vestigial, as if it were a late occurrence to give the players more to do. Hazel's skills do not feel particularly fun or interesting to use and, sincerely, the game does not even need combat at all. The narration is so strong that South of midnight It would be as convincing as a purely narrative experience with a light platform action.

In many cases, for black media to receive generalized attention or critical acclamation, it must focus on the trauma that represents calmly. The opposite is not so good, in which a piece of black media corrects and completely refuses to recognize traumatic realities that report our existence. South of midnight He skillfully spinning those two schools of thought in a pointed way that he had never seen before.

South of midnight He sees me. It catches me. Its creators wanted to elaborate a love letter to a culture that is not often represented in video games, and did exactly that. At a time when my government is trying to do everything in its possession to erase my people, Its historyand His contributions to the United StatesI cannot exaggerate the power that lies in being seen, especially coming from a place like video games, which is often violently hostile if it bothers to recognize people like me.

This game came out just in time, just at the time a narrative like this was needed. South of midnight It is a song of love and adorable praise of culture and people who represent what made it difficult for me to remain silent for a long time.

_{South of midnight It is now available in Xbox, Xbox Game Pass and Windows PC.}