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Interactivity in South of Midnight

  • Writer: Nathan Savant
    Nathan Savant
  • Jul 25
  • 15 min read

Getting to see Louisiana in a video game was going to elicit a strong response from me no matter the content, given I was born there, but South of Midnight manages to do quite a few things in a way that I feel merits discussion. The story is excellent, the characters are entertaining and well-performed. There is so incredibly much to love about this wonderful game, but what’s most interesting to me (as it usually is when trying to learn) are the parts where the game stumbles. Specifically, South of Midnight does something I’ve been trying to understand for some time. It has an extremely linear approach that I should hate, but a story so good I don’t want to stop. 


For context, I am an open world narrative fan. I love games for being interactive, which means that I am inherently against the idea of a purely linear story being told in the medium. Why bother telling a story that could be a film or a book, why not make your game’s story interactive and thus more suited to being a game? 


I don’t even play Interactive Fiction. I feel so strongly in this opinion of mine, I truly cannot enjoy things which are only meant to be experienced linearly. So why is it that I enjoy the very linear story of South of Midnight? 


There’s an element of nostalgia, of course, I’m from Louisiana so a game set there is going to hit me harder than most. We could stop there, except this isn’t the first game to do this to me. I enjoy Dragon Age games and Mass Effect. I think Last of Us is quite good even if I criticize its linearity so heavily. There are many games in this AAA genre of purely linear storytelling that I find quite good. Hell, Half Life 2 fits here and it’s one of my favorite games of all time.


Today we’re diving into this subjective, personal experience that I have when playing linear games, but also elevating a bunch of design concepts that are much more universal. I doubt you agree with my stance on linearity in games, but let me borrow some of your time to help us all to understand linearity a little better. Hopefully at the end of this you might better understand the friction linearity can create in an interactive story, and be able to use that friction with more intention than before.


Let’s go heal some Haints, y’all!


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So the first task is to figure out what we’re looking at here. I’ve learned through playing a variety of games that I don’t mind a linear story if it’s presented in a nonlinear way. The Zelda series is almost 100% linear but I love nearly all of them and find their stories quite a lot of fun. What you tend to see in these semi-linear games is that the overall story happens along a set of rails but there’s a section somewhere in the middle where you can accomplish 3 or 5 different things in whatever order you like. Modern Zelda games have been letting you do an intro dungeon, then setting you free to complete the next 3 or so however you prefer. You then get a mid-game plot moment and then a handful of more dungeons before you hit a final boss. Nothing during the “pick a dungeon” sections advances the plot, so there’s no need to care which order those things happen. All this to say that this does not bother my sensibilities at all. Some amount of choice is fine for me.


Linear games like Half Life 2 are also fine for me, but with a caveat that I’m a lot pickier. I’m not a big fan of Last of Us because it’s on such tight rails and there’s so little choice it feels silly that it’s a game and not a TV show (well…. Was, anyway…). My line appears to be somewhere between Half Life and Last of Us in terms of interactivity, but what’s the difference?That’s what Midnight has helped me to understand. I chafe at certain parts of South of Midnight’s gameplay, and I started to recognize a pattern to my irritation. Many of the game’s puzzles are such that the solution is simply to walk up to an object and press LB or RB or some other input when prompted with an icon on-screen. As long as you press that button, you succeed. 


Every sequence in the game that uses Crouton is built around this. Simply navigate the little guy through some obstacles and press a button while standing next to some object that needs to be dissolved or activated or whatever. As much as I love the character of Crouton (who is my perfect son and has never done a single thing wrong), the gameplay of Crouton is excruciating. Every time you use him, you simply walk along a meandering line avoiding hard-to-read red spike plants and little bugs you can’t see at certain angles. What bothers me most about these spaces is that there’s so little interaction here, you just walk along a path and sometimes the game slaps you if you walk too fast or too far to either side. It’s technically interactive, if you act in the wrong way the game responds with a slap, but punishment alone isn’t super fun.


Contrast that with Half Life’s side areas and you start to see the shape of the line I’m trying to define. In Half Life 2 when you find a side area, it’s a small interactive puzzle for you to explore and attempt to understand. Perhaps you have to put heavy objects in a pulley system to lift up an even heavier thing blocking your path. Rather than simply walking along a path dodging punishments, Half Life engages your mind and asks you to explore their physics system. Given these are side areas, neither one is particularly difficult but South of Midnight requires no thought at all, just some timing to your movement. That said, I think that mechanic could work if handled better. Mario games are entirely about jumping at the right time and there are many puzzles in those games which demand precision movement. Bringing in the Mario comparison also highlights one thing I think contributes to the Crouton segments not quite working for me; Crouton’s gameplay is one-dimensional. He has a tiny little hop you use to add a slight second dimension, but it’s not enough to dodge obstacles and there’s no platforming to be found. All he does is walk from point A to point B along a differently-shaped line each time. You can polish the timing challenges more, you can make the visibility of the bugs and spikes better, but I still don’t think it would be enough. Walking along a path at just the right timing is a bit too simple to be fun, even Mario shies away from that kind of puzzle.


I think back to those games where you walk along a thin dungeon path over a pit and axes swing down from the sides. You don’t see those for long stretches in games because they’re more frustration than fun. They can be entertaining in short bursts, it’s kind of a classic trap, but even Dark Souls only uses them lightly.


This observation and line of thinking is what brought me here today. I realized that this gameplay is, as I said earlier, just walking along a path and getting slapped if you walk wrong. This kind of design is the game designer creating a path where there is a correct way to act and the only alternative is a quick punishment. Imagine you’re talking to someone about the weather but if you mention your pet cat they start screaming at you. You’re trying to let the conversation flow naturally along the pathways of what your mind perceives as a pattern, and your conversation partner is being unreasonable and violent. This is what this type of gameplay is doing when you interact with it. You either do what it wants, or you are violently punished. It’s technically interactive, but if you choose anything but exactly what the designer wants, you fail.


I make this comparison for a very specific reason: Game Design is a conversation.


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The player is telling the game what they think is reasonable, and the game is responding in kind. TTRPGs are built around literal conversations, the GM describes a scene and the player will respond to what they hear. A good GM will follow the same “Yes, And” principles you might see in an improv performance, and there’s tons of advice around the internet about learning improv for GMs. This is because a good GM is a good conversationalist, someone who will roll with the punches of whatever topic or idea might arise while gently steering the participant towards their desired outcome. A GM who tries to force a specific interaction or moment, someone who writes scenes rather than situations, will quickly find themselves with a miserable table. A person in a conversation who just refuses to talk about anything other than their vacation last weekend will similarly find themselves with a miserable audience. So within this comparison we find the solution to our problem; We must focus on the outcome rather than the interaction, allowing the player more open actions but only rewarding the one we want.


“Why does that matter?” You may be asking “This is a video game and we have to program the game. It can only work in one way!” and of course you’d be right. I won’t debate the obvious reality that a game must be made in advance and cannot be as responsive as a live GM doing improv. However, there’s a difference between a game mechanic that only allows one interaction and a game mechanic which allows for open exploration, and this is the difference between Half Life and South of Midnight.


Let’s look at a similar puzzle the two games share and discuss their approach. In both games you see a classic puzzle where you have to move a box to create a ledge you can jump on to continue. This is a very standard puzzle seen in any number of games, so it’s a good place to start.


Half Life is all about its physics simulation so the game allows you to move a box with physics controllers that let the box bump into other objects, twist and rotate and generally go wherever the player likes. 


South of Midnight does not use a physics simulation, or if it does it’s tied down to be more predictable, a completely reasonable restriction. When you’re moving a box in South of Midnight, the freedom of this puzzle design is very similar to Half Life. You have a force blast that moves the box instead of a gravity gun, but the interaction is much the same. Move the box however you like, but the game only rewards a single action in the end (similar to half life). South of Midnight does a pretty solid job here, no notes. What really contrasts the two games is when we look at the other version of this puzzle in South of Midnight. There are also carts in this game that are essentially the same interaction except the cart is on rails. Because the cart can only move along one path, the interactivity is much less interactive. The player doesn’t have any options to explore this mechanic, it’s just about finding the right spot to put the cart, and that spot can only be 1 of about 3. If this were a conversation, it’d be with someone who will only talk about their vacation, the weather, or rock climbing. Hardly someone you’d enjoy spending much time around unless you also happen to love rock climbing.


Other areas of this game are even more obvious in that there aren’t really any other kinds of puzzles to be solved at all. Many interactions in the game are just about finding the single point where an LB prompt will appear and then you press that button to win. In our conversation analogy, this is like someone who will only respond if you say the correct phrase in the correct way. It’s impossible to have a conversation with such a person. 


So here we have our spectrum:


  • LB to interact on the only place which will respond to the input

  • Use your ability to set an object to the correct of 3 possible options

  • Place an object freely until it allows you access to where you need to be


The first is not a conversation at all. It’s a person looking for a passphrase. There’s no interactive play here, you either do or do not offer the correct input. 


The second is a bit interactive, you can choose multiple choices in our conversation, but your conversation partner is a bit picky for most social situations. 


The last is more like the goal, we can say what we want to say but if we get close enough to what they want to talk about, our partner will be more interesting. This is the most naturalistic in our conversation analogy.


So all this is great if we’re building a game specifically for my tastes but I’m pretty sure those of you reading this are not, in fact, me. What do you get out of all this if you don’t mind this kind of gameplay the way that I do? 


Something I’ve spent some time trying to understand is how to convey narrative through gameplay, how to not need cutscenes, etc. This is still a part of that conversation, but it’s a part of the conversation I haven’t addressed as much. My preference is to remove cutscenes when we don’t need them, but the world doesn’t revolve around me and lots of productions are perfectly happy to convey their story the way things have been done for years. Within those kinds of productions, how do we enable ourselves to use our gameplay to convey our narrative even knowing that we are primarily focused on narrative through video and written lore?


Answering this question is why I was comparing game mechanics to conversations earlier. When we ask the player to walk to a specific place, we are engaging them in a conversation. We are implicitly stating that achieving movement is important to us. The protagonist of South of Midnight is an athlete, movement is a defining character trait of hers’ so it makes a lot of sense that much of her gameplay is about that same movement. If we want to engage the player in this mechanical conversation, we should be aware of what it is we’re communicating and how.


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So with that in mind, let’s ask ourselves a question: What do the Crouton sections of the game add to the story? Well they offer our protagonist a way of exploring spaces she is otherwise too physically large to reach. This emphasizes how important movement is to our hero. Not only that, but it tells us the story that she is determined to get into places she should not be, a nice complimentary addition in our story about unburying secrets to heal the damage they represent.


Crouton allows the protagonist to enter inaccessible spaces. Inherently, Crouton is a bit mischievous in that way, which suits the personality given to their animations. In an ideal world, that means we should probably be using Crouton to see things people don’t want us to see. The game does, indeed, lock progress behind Crouton so it’s very easy to say that is what’s happening here. However, because the game is so linear it never feels like this is mischievous. You simply have to do it in order to continue turning the story’s pages. Mischief means doing what you’re not supposed to do, so following the rules works against that. If we had a bit more nonlinearity in the gameplay, Crouton could be used to build that “Haha! I got where you didn’t want me to get!!” sensation more prominently, and use that to parallel the character’s narrative and mechanics. 


Now, is that the design goal the team had in mind? I have no idea. I’m not on the team. It is, however, something I feel fits well within the writing we see in the shipped game. It’s also something that’s not too hard to add in as an armchair design from the safety of my living room.


More importantly, it’s something that could add to the game’s narrative without shifting focus away from the cutscenes. Adding this narrative focus to the Crouton sections would be as simple as finding a narrative delivery method that fits within the scope of the game’s production capacity. I’m going to assume that scope can’t take much extra abuse, so I’m going to be as lean as I can. Something I noticed while playing is that the game has a bunch of letters written by characters who are not present and which speak to some aspect of the history of whatever damage we’re healing at the current story beat. We get a story about a person who was abused, and we’ll see letters from or about the abuser, or letters about the abused person’s friends or extended family. Basically just a bunch of extra info that helps paint the picture without disrupting the more essential info you see in the cutscenes. I’m imagining the Crouton sections as focusing on that exact kind of information. Since Crouton is so small, perhaps you find letters that have slipped through the cracks, literally. 


All of this is just a way to make Crouton more about mischief and finding information you weren’t supposed to find in places you weren’t supposed to be. This little add would give Crouton something more significant to contribute to the overall story, and would make his sections feel a bit more meaningful to the player.


The Crouton sections, however, are the easy part. Reworking the single-interaction LB prompt puzzles is significantly harder. The block pushing puzzles are fine the way they are, and even the cart pushing puzzles are ok if not amazing, but what can we do with an LB prompt? Well the truth is: not much. However, I don’t think the LB prompts are the problem so much as the game design around them. Mario games have you collect coins and stars, and if we put an LB prompt on those stars to make the player interact with them more intentionally, that would be ok. LB prompts are essentially just a “Turn the page” button. You wanna continue the book, you gotta turn the page. You wanna continue the game, you gotta press LB. It’s useful for places where you want a bit more intention behind the player’s actions, not just a potentially-accidental touching of a coin. Not always necessary, but not exactly a problem either.


So what is it about these LB prompts that feel empty? If we look at them in South of Midnight we start to notice a pattern. Take a look at this clip:



This clip shows a random player (this video was the first to come up on google, I am not affiliated) having a confused moment of uncertainty. How to progress in the game is unclear to them, they try several entirely reasonable solutions before realizing the one the designers wanted from them. None of that is the problem, though. It’s ok for a player to not find a puzzle’s solution to be clear, but is this a puzzle? The player is trapped in a big empty circle with nothing to do, immediately after a fight took place. Fights happen over and over in South of Midnight, but usually they end with a clear path opening up. This time, however, the player continued to be surrounded by unpassable walls with no clear exit marked. The solution in the video is to use Crouton to enter a small hole. The “Puzzle” here is just that it’s hard to see the hole in the wall. The player is not being challenged in their knowledge, I’m not even sure if the designers intended this to be a puzzle at all, it’s possible the designer thought it was easy enough to see the hole, or that a change in the overall lighting of the level during production left this moment unclear. Either way, it’s that lack of clarity that makes this moment a challenge.


“Good Design” is a term that’s so vague and subjective as to be entirely useless, but I would argue that “Good” just means that it is accomplishing the designer’s goal. So I leave it to you, dear reader; Do you think this moment is intended as a puzzle? Do you think this player experience is what they wanted?


If so, I would argue that the play space could use some work. It’s a flat empty circle with nothing to do other than press LB. Imagine if Nintendo locked Mario in a round room with no enemies, no obstacles, and nothing to do except pick up a single coin set off to one side in a shadowy corner where you can barely see it. I doubt that would be anyone’s favorite moment of whatever game it was included into.


The solution to this is the same as the solution to the previous example: Offer more types of interactions. Finding the single correct answer isn’t nearly as interesting as exploring possibilities within a system. Don’t make me follow a single path that leads to a single solution, show me my goal and allow me to figure out how to reach that goal. Let’s create a conversation together, don’t just force me to guess what word you’re thinking about.


Now, while I think the Crouton “fix” I suggested earlier is a simple rearrangement of assets that already exist and would be fairly easy to make work within the production, I will admit right away that my “solution” here for the LB prompt design would require essentially a ground-up rework of the game’s mechanics. You can’t just stop using LB prompts in this game without reworking how the levels are designed, how the core mechanics are used, and basically everything else. It’s possible that even trying to do this at an early stage of production would drive the whole project off the rails and crash and burn the budget they had. Still, I believe that thinking about this kind of thing can help us as we approach games in the future. South of Midnight is already a great game, no need to try and shoehorn my arm chair designs into it. That said, I think any future games attempting to lean into narrative in this way, but still wanting to plus their game design, could do so by focusing on the areas discussed here. 


I can’t say for sure any of this will benefit anyone but me, this design analysis was based entirely on my personal preferences for this kind of game. Still, I hope that some part of this discussion has helped you to understand how to expand your toolset for game design while making narrative-first titles. Even a game like South of Midnight is still a game, and you don’t have to interrupt your narrative to include game design into it. You just have to make sure that everyone involved is working together as closely as possible to marry your narrative needs to your gameplay needs, and that both sides understand the needs of the other. Hopefully this blog post has helped you to develop that understanding a little more. It’s certainly helped me to understand my own preferences.


Thanks for reading this experiment in navel gazing, feel free to drop a comment below if you’ve got any thoughts to add.

 
 
 

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