Yahoo Lifestyle “South of Midnight” reveals Altamaha-ha boss, live-action music video, and how song plays a role in the game (exclusive)
Watch an exclusive live-action music video, recorded in Louisiana, for the Altamaha-ha boss.
Compulsion Games
The Altamaha-ha of 'South of Midnight'Music and myths feed each other, and together, they create one of our oldest forms of storytelling. It's the orator performing excerpts of The Odyssey for a crowd in ancient Greece; the lone bard entertaining a darkened tavern with tales of fantastical creatures lurking in the woods; a grandparent weaving together fables for the grandkids with a banjo in hand on the porch steps. That experience speaks to the heart of South of Midnight, a Southern gothic fantasy adventure game anchored by a soundtrack richly steeped in regional folklore.
The music inspires its creatures, and vice versa — like the Altamaha-ha, a legendary water beast that hails from stories told around the Altamaha River in Georgia. Rather than adopt its more traditional description of a Loch Ness-esque monster, Chris Fox, the audio director for South of Midnight, describes the new take on the entity to Entertainment Weekly as the “anguished spirit of a woman transformed by tragedy. Unearthed by a hurricane, she haunts the murky depths that swallowed a loved one.”
The main story of South of Midnight follows Hazel Flood (voiced by Adriyan Rae, physically performed by Nona Parker Johnson), whose trailer is swept away with her mother inside when a storm rips through their home of Prospero. To find her, Hazel must embrace her supernatural powers as a latent "weaver" to traverse a Southern Gothic-inspired world where reality and fantasy converge. The Altamaha-ha is one of various creatures that rule a specific region.
Compulsion Games
The Altamaha-ha of 'South of Midnight'Creative director David Sears guided the new vision for the Altamaha-ha, for which French composer Olivier Derivière then created a "concept song." Like how a piece of concept art informs the visuals, these songs guided the audio direction for each of the bosses that Hazel encounters.
"The idea of this creature was it's very, very old and it's attached to a long legacy," Derivière explains to EW of the Altamaha-ha. "So I was curious about, 'What was the creature?' There are two aspects to this song. One aspect is the story that is told, which is a very mournful story of a mother losing a child and then abandoning herself to the river as the child was. I didn't write the music first. I got the lyrics first, and it got very emotional. Then it was [about] how to connect this with the Deep South."
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Prospective Xbox players can hear the final version of the haunting, mournful Atlamaha-ha piece in EW’s exclusive reveal of a live-action music video shot for South of Midnight. Derivière and Fox’s team recorded visuals for three of their original songs with the actual singers in Louisiana. Including Altamaha-ha’s theme, all three will arrive as part of a 13-minute video included in the premium edition of South of Midnight.
Stacy Subero is the lead singer shown in the music video. Born in Trinidad before relocating to Nashville, Subero's unique accent lent to what Derivière calls the "fantastical" and "foreign" vibe he sought for the piece. "David was also asking for singers to sing with specific accents," he says. "So many of the different singers bring their own authenticity."
The music itself plays a distinct role in the game itself. Sears didn't want standard background music, but rather compositions that served "an illustrative function," Derivière recalls of their conversations. "As your goal as Hazel Flood, you need to learn about the creature before you meet with them. We deconstructed the songs into bits." The result is players will experience "a glimpse of the song" to begin with. "There are some notes that are not right with the song, harmonies that are weird, and it's sung by a kid's choir," Derivière explains. "You have the song that is unveiling itself as you're unveiling the creature, only to at the end get the final song and feel everything."
The team recorded two other music videos for South of Midnight, which will be released at a later time. They embrace different tonalities than the Altamaha-ha piece, Fox teases. "Something that inspired me early on was seeing porch jams — down in the South, people getting together on the porch could be zydeco. I wouldn't say that zydeco is necessarily in a music video that we have. It's not, but that kind of porch jam and the community of people getting together was super inspiring to me," he says. "Everyone singing and just the culture of music down there and storytelling being so prevalent."
"Very different from Altamaha-ha," Derivière adds. "Very, very different."
South of Midnight will be available April 8 on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox App for Windows PC, Steam, and cloud, and arrives on day one with Game Pass. The premium edition offers players bonus materials and early access up to five days in advance of release.
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