Soaring improvement prices; protracted manufacturing cycles; cautious C-suites trying to ship dependable returns for shareholders: for a lot of causes, there’s a dearth of authentic programming in big-budget video video games. Already this yr now we have seen the arrival of the seventh mainline Civilization sport, the 14th entry within the Murderer’s Creed franchise, and, most brain-melting of all, the twenty seventh Monster Hunter title. However look: right here’s a magical-realist story set in a moody, hurricane-ravaged imagining of the American deep south, whose title, crucially, bears no numerical suffix.
South of Midnight makes a brilliantly atmospheric first impression. Winds bludgeon flimsy abodes; rain lashes down on tin roofs; the world is rendered with the macabre and crooked particulars of a Tim Burton movie. Inside minutes, a home – that of high-school athlete Hazel and her mom, a social employee – is carried away alongside a roiling flooded river. Taking part in as Hazel, you give chase, bounding with a lanky teenage gait throughout varied platforms till the storm abates. In its wake lie miles of stagnant, fetid swamps. At one grisly level, you discover a farm stacked with the carcasses of pigs who didn’t survive the storm.
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