When I sat down to play 90-minute South of midnight Pre -viewing, I had one serious question: Why does the quadrire look like this? Trailers demonstrate the focused animation style, which is designed to remind you of a stop, but it is not clear how this effect will be applied at the moments of the game, hostilities and passages. After the game in preliminary viewing, I'm still not sure.
I have to indicate my bias at the top: I am very ready to enjoy South of midnightI was a fan of forced games since the debut of the studio Contrast in 2013, and I I watched with impatience Development of his observation, We are happyUntil 2018. CINKULSION Games are stylish, with an emphasis on polished 3D graphics and lanky characters in fairy -tale outfits. Microsoft acquired coercion in 2018, and the studio worked on South of midnight Since then. My intrigue grew only last year, after the drip of trailers with juicy southern Gothic conditions, the blue soundtrack and the main character in the magic of the game, a young black woman named Heisel.
First, let's talk about what the game does well. Preliminary view begins in the third chapter, after Hazel discovered the foundations of her magical abilities, but did not master the power flowing through her veins. Heisel is a weaver capable of manipulating invisible strands that keep reality together, and she is looking for her mother, Lishi, after the hurricane penetrated their hometown of Prospero in the American deep south.
If Heisel is the main character in South of midnightThe environment is a colleague in the film: the swamps of Prospero are lit by a rich, golden hue, and they buzz from surreal life. High cypresses, lush fern and thorny vines are the size of the trunks of trees through the forest and its cloud pools. The houses, half -trained shacks connected above the Bayu, crumbling wooden platforms are filled with rotten trinkets and faded photos, and many of them have notifications of eviction attached to the entrance doors. Persians the size of a car dash a landscape, chubby pinkish leather sticking out of marsh and buried on the base of trees. This earth is drowning in magic.
Although Hazel is on a linear journey to find his mother, there are many opportunities to study the light around Prospero. In the third chapter there are several hidden paths that end with luminous pieces of Floof, the currency of the game, to collect a heisel. These alternative routes are located in sight, but they are integrated into the landscape from the beaten path, so they are easy to skip if you do not pay attention. Heisel explores, running, jumping, double jumping, sliding and running on the wall, and her movements around the world feel completely natural. Her abilities rely on each other well, and they are completely responsive, creating a mini -flow of parku, which I did not expect in this game. Sometimes Hazel uses magic to turn ghostly objects into tangible platforms, and its combination with double jump and gliding is especially fun.
Hazel always looks cool, regardless of personnel. She moves her long, thin limbs with random confidence suitable for a teenage star, and her clothes -tolet with waffles, tied around her waist, jeans jeans, a T -shirt with a sports bra, leather hands and a holster through her chest – heavily textured, giving everyone a piece of tangible sensation. Hazel dialogue is also delivered with a huge number of teenagers, and I laughed out loud when she met a giant speaker and was immediately “no” and turned to leave. Actors Non Parker Johnson, who performs the capture and tricks of Hazel, and Adrian Rei, the voice of Hazel, did a fabulous work here.
In preliminary viewing, Hazel is faced with an eccentric local local, several magical creatures and, at least with one powerful ritual, and in the end she discovers that he was chasing the ghosts of two brothers, one of which was drew after she was filled into a tree trunk . When she hunts their memories and catches pain in a blue bottle, Bango's music seeps into the stage until it becomes a full -fledged folk song telling about the tragic history of the brothers. This is a unique and effective mechanic. The world around Hazel consists of dark and surreal beauty, and when I saw (and hearing) this piece of the gameplay, I really want to reveal all the hidden stories of Prospero.
Fight in South of midnight Preliminary viewing is at the restrained stages, when prickly grapes block outputs as soon as the battle begins, and Haints are ghosts, in the folk language Hazel. Enemies in this chapter are delivered in three main forms: high floating Khanty, a stationary nest and a floating drop. Enemies are made of sticky black tendons and red magic, and they attack in special ways depending on their type. The tall moves quickly and rushes forward, the nest is erupted with exploding beetles, and floating drops shoot with parked shells.
Heisel has a basic attack, evasion, therapeutic movement and four magical abilities: weaving, a push of the strands, the attraction of the strands and the last locked move. Weaving freezes the enemy in place, while the tension and push can be used to throw the objects back to the faces of the heint. Each combat stage begins with a healing totem, which Heisel can use once if it can reach him, and (on Xbox Series X) pressette Y. She also receives health regeneration, pressing a bunch of freshly fresh meat, unraveling their essence for slight increase. These heaps are available only within a few seconds after each murder, so there is some strategy of a mild strategy associated with surviving in the middle of the struggle.
The battles are simply excellent, and the locking system allows Hazel to replace his attention to the heads on the fly. Parry -lies is the most difficult ability to master preliminary viewing, but with a slightly big time for practice, I think this will become the second nature. South of midnight This is not an RPG with an open world or something like that, but Hazel has a small tree of skills with three updates for each of its magical abilities and nine slots to unlock movements like terrestrial blows. The second screen contains a collection of magic objects Hazel (five slots), patterns (six slots), readable (104 slots) and collections of stories (14 slots). By the end of the demonstration, I collected four magic objects and one readable. Just looking at the menu, it looks like South of midnight It is a contained, sub-20-hour experience.
Now let's talk about the animation of the game. South of midnight It begins with a magnificent, introductory introductory film manually, which embodies Heisel and its adventures on the collection of stories, but after that the vanity of the game in the game is only half. It is assumed that the movements of Hazel and the world, in general In the spider-underlyThis field seems to be true for what is the lick in the game with the face, and this is especially obvious with the character of Soma, who is mostly all the mouths. When all this is united, as coercion is intended, the effect looks and looks very cool. Unfortunately, this is a rare occurrence.
In practice, the effect of stop moving is contradictory in the moments of intelligence from the third-person and videos close-up, and it tends to feel less artistic, and more likely that the game simply has unstable personnel. You can turn off the effects of stopping the movement, and I tried it, but, frankly, I could not notice the difference. Even when the heisel is turned off, Hazel is performed by unpredictable speed, which often drops significantly below 60 frames per second. The problem of personnel appears on characters and vignettes, and this is especially shit during the brightly lit memory scenes, where NPC appears in front of Heisel as luminous white ghosts filled with particles and visually stuttering everywhere.
South of midnight Objects 4K/60 on Xbox Series X, but my preliminary viewing sometimes seemed that he was struggling to support 30 frames per second. Nevertheless, what is more alarming is the rupture of the screen that appears throughout the preliminary viewing, inaccurately from the use of the A-synchronization game. The gap often appears close to the center of the screen, assuming that the game is far from its productivity goal. Of course, coercion is still working on optimization South of midnight And there is time to solve these problems before the game is released on April 8, but they reduce them.
I think that the effect of stopping traffic is a grandiose idea, and it will work well if the coercion is committed to the bit. If the personnel should be low, keep it low, and not enter the higher frames, which makes everything feel like a mistake. The sequence is the key, and South of midnight I haven't nailed it yet.
This is the first attempt to build a game with all the resources and attention that Xbox provides, and the studio created a beautiful, mysterious world with ambitious mechanical vanity and tie the main character. The effect of the stop movement is still in the know, but this does not distract from other successes of the game. I remain incredibly pleasing South of midnightField
South of midnight must get to the Xbox Series X/S, PC and Game Pass on April 8.
