South Of Midnight review

Running from the past

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

• Developer: Compulsion Games
• Publisher: Xbox Game Studios
• Release: April 8th, 2025
• On: Windows
• From: Steam , Microsoft Store
• Price: £35/$40/€40
• Reviewed on: Intel Core-i7-11700F, 16GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060, Windows 10

In the boss fights of South Of Midnight , you’ve got to find a pulsing wound on the body of the monster and strike it to cleanse the giant beast of its “stigma”. In truth, these creatures are analogues for human characters, sometimes people who have literally transformed into beasts, afflicted by a thorny curse that drives them into frightening states of rage or panic. This is a game about festering trauma - history as a painful wound you’ve got to poke in order to eventually heal. Strip back the scales and feathers of folk allegory and these are human tales of shame, hunger, neglect, and abuse, some more effective than others. It’s a gorgeous game with a killer approach to music, if sometimes hobbled by the ropey trappings of its action adventure genre.

You play Hazel, a track runner of the US south. A hurricane is coming and she’s packing up her family’s belongings to escape. But her home is soon washed away in the storm, with her mother inside, and Hazel sets off to find it, discovering along the way that she has the magical powers of a “weaver” - someone who can mend the corruptive stigma that is growing in harsh brambles around the swamps and forests of her homeland. Of course, this is an action game, so those same powers also let her batter shadowy “haints” who appear with claws and fists and bloated flies to fight her.

It’s a game of glamorous good looks. Humans with deep, expressive faces and fanciful costumes meet giant catfish with ornate whiskers and glittering eyeballs. Foxes and rabbits scurry about as you run through the foresty corridors, herons take off handsomely into the sky, dragonflies buzz, alligator snapping turtles grunt by the water’s edge. A stop motion effect heavily advertised in trailers doesn’t feel as transformative as it might in the animated Spider-Man movies, mostly because it’s not applied to the game in a truly consistent way, and even a bit of hanging can make it look like your graphics card is having framerate issues instead of it being an intentional style choice. But even putting that visual gimmick aside, it’s still an often stunning thing to look at.

The game really has a thing for trees and tree bark - you’ll see. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

It’s also sonically off the charts. There are brief haunting hymns that sound with every use of your weaver abilities - double jumps and dashes have rarely sounded so good - and most chapters feature a musical number that rises from choral chants to a full-blown folk song as you discover more about the characters involved in whatever folk story you’re currently fight-healing your way through. Honestly, the music and sound design here will probably win awards, if the people in charge of such things have any ounce of taste.

You might sense a “but” coming. You’re right. The sights and sounds, and its stylish sense of magic, are enough to recommend it. But my hands aren’t half as impressed as my eyes and ears with what is otherwise a very plain third-person action adventure. The imaginative approach to character design, musical score, and narrative theme isn’t matched by the actions you’ll be performing throughout the game, which are mostly an undemanding collection of third-person runalong mainstays.

The Uncharted-style wall clambering feels particularly dated, as does the squeezing through small gaps, the obvious combat arenas, the overlong Prince Of Persia style escape sequences, the straightforward box-pushing puzzles… It’s far from the only game guilty of following in well-worn footsteps, but I still spent a lot of time with South Of Midnight feeling that, for all its visual and aural splendour, I’ve seen a lot of this done before and done better. It’s a game that is eye-catching and, importantly, deeply emotionally literate, yet I found it unambitious and undemanding in a lot of its step-by-step movements.

There’s also a feeling like it has little trust in you as a player, such as when it wrests the camera from you to focus on something in the distance, or snaps throwable objects straight to destructible hazards instead of letting you aim yourself. It sometimes has the same dearth of trust in you as a reader, in moments where it spells things out in bold or explains the entire level you’ve just played in loading screen storytime sequences (to be fair, these are skippable).

Hazel also loves talking to herself in that protagonist-with-no-filter kind of way, pointing out solutions and next steps before you’ve even had an opportunity to look around. “You can squeeze into small spaces I can’t!” she exclaims when meeting a small companion who will become a usable skill. It’s as if Hazel is a player too, and has access to the game design document. There are lots more of these distracting “player direction” lines of dialogue muddying otherwise compelling chats between characters. Every moment when this puppet companion needs to be used, the instructions will flash on screen anyway, further proof that the game wants to shepherd you through its world rather than let you explore it on your own terms.

<img loading=“lazy” src=“https://assetsio.gnwcdn.com/south-by-midnight-review-11.jpg?width=2048&height=2048&fit=bounds&quality=85&format=jpg&auto=webp" onerror=“this.onerror=null;this.src=‘https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEhe7F7TRXHtjiKvHb5vS7DmnxvpHiDyoYyYvm1nHB3Qp2_w3BnM6A2eq4v7FYxCC9bfZt3a9vIMtAYEKUiaDQbHMg-ViyGmRIj39MLp0bGFfgfYw1Dc9q_H-T0wiTm3l0Uq42dETrN9eC8aGJ9_IORZsxST1AcLR7np1koOfcc7tnHa4S8Mwz_xD9d0=s16000';" alt=“Hazel in combat faces two enemy “haints”. - 10”>

There are different types of haints to fight, and you can regain health by cleansing their defeated corpses. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

Combat can also feel a little stiff. It’s mostly a case of locking onto an enemy and slashing them with your weaving tools, then dodging away just as they strike to deliver a big blast of energy that stuns them. But that dodge can feel a little sticky and unresponsive, probably since you can only dodge-cancel out of certain moves. You get special attacks that yank an enemy closer, or push them away, but the relatively long cooldowns for these powers mean that you can’t use these more satisfying tactics more than a few times each fight, at least until you unlock the means to quicken said cooldowns.

I have other fighty nitpicks. Hazel’s recovery time after being knocked down often feels painfully slow, the gossamer swishes of enemy attacks can make busier brawls unclear, and I wish you could lock onto an enemy sooner as they spawn in, instead of waiting for them to fully materialise. As video game smash ’n’ slash combat goes, it’s serviceable but stodgy and, as with much of the game, it becomes repetitious in a way that could be cured if there was simply less of it. And as meaningful as it is to have each boss’ trauma manifest as a specific wound, I found the process of actually fighting those bosses a plainly patterned going-through-of-the-motions.

Many fights reward you with a flashback from a character’s past, revealing more about what caused them to accrue painful “stigma”. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

And this is all housed within a repetitive structure that reoccurs every chapter. You enter a level, cleanse roughly four arenas of enemies, do an escape sequence from a fog chasing you, then (sometimes) fight a boss. Chapters rarely deviate from that rhythm, and the sense of repetition is worsened by heavy use of exploding mushrooms and urchin-like expando-thorns that litter the levels, both of which are employed in abundance, almost right up until the end of the game. South Of Midnight is by no means long, at 10-15 hours to complete, yet I felt much of it could be safely cut away to result in a leaner game. For me, its repeating hazards and patterns of storytelling started to feel overworked by the halfway point.

That’s a lot of my curmudgeonly muttering out of the way. None of the above concerns may matter to anyone who wants to stick it onto story mode and play a chapter every night like they’re indulging an episode of a TV show about giant spiders with a taste for townsfolk. As I often point out, having to rinse through a game for review warps your perception of its pacing somewhat. I’m glad to report one important thing didn’t buckle under that pressure: the strength of its main character.

Hazel is simply a decent human. She’s down to earth but knowledgeable about the history of her homeland, its roots as a sugar cane plantation, and the tremors of slavery that still linger (sometimes as literal ghosts) in the forgotten ruins she stumbles upon. Her track runner attitude and demeanour manifest in some fun ways, as when she stretches her hamstrings after a fight, or shakes off her legs when idle. She is mouthy yet refreshingly non-judgmental. She makes plenty of jibes at rich folk but when faced with flashes of other people’s backstory (a swamp man’s past or her own granny’s troubled era of motherhood) she displays sincere understanding and empathy. Her warmth extends even to people who’ve done awful things. There’s something comforting about controlling a person this open-hearted. Even murder, neglect, and betrayal do not ruffle her feathers, and her emotions only truly boil over when it comes to the health of her own mother.

A “kind” character sometimes risks being boring, but Hazel has enough edge and humour to keep you interested in her fate. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

Granted, sometimes that empathic tale and the game’s platformy action feel at odds. Moments of tonal whiplash between story and action, as exemplified when one particularly dark flashback of a childhood trauma is immediately followed by a Crash Bandicoot chase across thorny platforms. It’s not enough to completely undermine the power of the moment (another example of the cankered roots of history rotting beneath living memory) but it can be a little distracting to learn a horrible truth, then suddenly be dodging spikes to jaunty music.

Again, that feels like the result of the action adventure format. I complained earlier that the game sometimes lacks trust. But in the storytelling, at least, there is some faith in the player. It doesn’t bombard you with the inspirations behind its folk tales, for example (but you can always look them up ). The quilts that you sometimes magically wallrun across are based on stories of coded blankets used in the underground railroad, a folk history it also doesn’t plain-facedly explain. And there are deeper crimes against some characters that it does not name explicitly but which it does mercifully trust you to understand.

It’s here, when the game lets these suggestions exist without overtly commenting on them, that it retains most power. As a white Irish lad, I’m not the best equipped to talk about how it handles themes of race and class in the United States, or the echoes of intergenerational trauma upon black people down through layers of US history, but if you are looking for a game which is literate in those themes - while not shying away from the clear inference that rich, white people are behind much of that reverberating pain - then know that South Of Midnight does so with a lot of confidence. Its final scenes feel like a strong cocktail of understanding and accountability, coolly served by a practiced mixologist of myth.

Your stuffed toy sidekick Crouton can investigate burrower holes, where you often find wildlife sitting down to tea. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun / Xbox Game Studios

I will end with one thing I have loved about it: the endless use of wildlife as symbolism and set dressing alike. As I’ve said, foxes and opossums will consider you from afar and scurry away as you approach, but this isn’t always mere animatronic decoration. They will often lead you to hidden corners where you can slurp up energy to upgrade your powers. Crows are constantly used as feathery signposts to show you the right direction. In the burrowing holes that your soft toy sidekick can explore, rabbits and raccoons will silently peer at you through roots, as if through the windows of their subterranean homes, with small chairs and tables adorning these dens, like in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox .

Not only are animals woven into the hurt of humanity as symbolic spiders, mistreated gators, and tortured birds, but the closing shots of many chapters will see ordinary and silent forest creatures watching in quiet contemplation as Hazel drifts away on the back of her catfish friend. Towards the end of the game, these animals - the smallest unit of animated environmental storytelling - gather around Hazel in a way that signals support from a kingdom beyond her ken. It is one of the game’s quieter suggestions: we are part of a greater nature, and when that world is wounded, by storm or by human hands, we become wounded ourselves.

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South of Midnight

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All 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints and where to get them

These areas have the highest chance of giving you Blueprints

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Looking for more Arc Raiders Blueprints? It’s a special day when you find a Blueprint, as they’re among the most valuable items in Arc Raiders. If you find a Blueprint that you haven’t already found, then you must make sure you hold onto it at all costs, because Blueprints are the key to one of the most important and powerful systems of meta-progression in the game.

This guide aims to be the very best guide on Blueprints you can find, starting with a primer on what exactly they are and how they work in Arc Raiders, before delving into exactly where to get Blueprints and the very best farming spots for you to take in your search.

We’ll also go over how to get Blueprints from other unlikely activities, such as destroying Surveyors and completing specific quests. And you’ll also find the full list of all 75 Blueprints in Arc Raiders on this page (including the newest Blueprints added with the Cold Snap update , such as the Deadline Blueprint and Firework Box Blueprint), giving you all the information you need to expand your own crafting repertoire.

In this guide:

• What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?
• Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes
• Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders Blueprints obtained from quests Blueprints obtained from Trials Best Blueprint farming locations

What are Blueprints in Arc Raiders?

Blueprints in Arc Raiders are special items which, if you manage to extract with them, you can expend to permanently unlock a new crafting recipe in your Workshop. If you manage to extract from a raid with an Anvil Blueprint, for example, you can unlock the ability to craft your very own Anvil Pistol, as many times as you like (as long as you have the crafting materials).

To use a Blueprint, simply open your Inventory while in the lobby, then right-click on the Blueprint and click “Learn And Consume” . This will permanently unlock the recipe for that item in your Workshop. As of the Stella Montis update, there are allegedly 75 different Blueprints to unlock - although only 68 are confirmed to be in the game so far. You can see all the Blueprints you’ve found and unlocked by going to the Workshop menu, and hitting “R” to bring up the Blueprint screen.

It’s possible to find duplicates of past Blueprints you’ve already unlocked. If you find these, then you can either sell them, or - if you like to play with friends - you can take it into a match and gift it to your friend so they can unlock that recipe for themselves. Another option is to keep hold of them until the time comes to donate them to the Expedition.

Full Blueprint list: All crafting recipes

Below is the full list of all the Blueprints that are currently available to find in Arc Raiders, and the crafting recipe required for each item:

Note: The missing Blueprints in this list likely have not actually been added to the game at the time of writing, because none of the playerbase has managed to find any of them. As they are added to the game, I will update this page with the most relevant information so you know exactly how to get all 75 Arc Raiders Blueprints.

Where to find Blueprints in Arc Raiders

Below is a list of all containers, modifiers, and events which maximise your chances of finding Blueprints:

• Certain quests reward you with specific Blueprints .
• Completing Trials has a high chance of offering Blueprints as rewards.
• Surveyors have a decent chance of dropping Blueprints on death.
• High loot value areas tend to have a greater chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Night Raids and Storms may increase rare Blueprint spawn chances in containers.
• Containers with higher numbers of items may have a higher tendency to spawn Blueprints. As a result, Blue Gate (which has many “large” containers containing multiple items) may give you a higher chance of spawning Blueprints.
• Raider containers (Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, Medical Bags, Grenade Tubes) have increased Blueprint drop rates. As a result, the Uncovered Caches event gives you a high chance of finding Blueprints.
• Security Lockers have a higher than average chance of containing Blueprints.
• Certain Blueprints only seem to spawn under specific circumstances: Tempest Blueprint only spawns during Night Raid events. Vulcano Blueprint only spawns during Hidden Bunker events. Jupiter and Equaliser Blueprints only spawn during Harvester events.

Raider Caches, Weapon Boxes, and other raider-oriented container types have a good chance of offering Blueprints. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints have a very low chance of spawning in any container in Arc Raiders, around 1-2% on average. However, there is a higher chance of finding Blueprints in particular container types. Specifically, you can find more Blueprints in Raider containers and security lockers.

Beyond this, if you’re looking for Blueprints you should focus on regions of the map which are marked as having particularly high-value loot. Areas such as the Control Tower in Dam Battlegrounds, the Arrival and Departure Buildings in Spaceport, and Pilgrim’s Peak in Blue Gate all have a better-than-average chance of spawning Blueprints somewhere amongst all their containers. Night Raids and Electromagnetic Storm events also increase the drop chances of certain Blueprints .

In addition to these containers, you can often loot Blueprints from destroyed Surveyors - the largest of the rolling ball ARC. Surveyors are more commonly found on the later maps - Spaceport and Blue Gate - and if one spawns in your match, you’ll likely see it by the blue laser beam that it casts into the sky while “surveying”.

Surveyors are quite well-armoured and will very speedily run away from you once it notices you, but if you can take one down then make sure you loot all its parts for a chance of obtaining certain unusual Blueprints.

Blueprints obtained from quests

One way in which you can get Blueprints is by completing certain quests for the vendors in Speranza. Some quests will reward you with a specific item Blueprint upon completion, so as long as you work through all the quests in Arc Raiders, you are guaranteed those Blueprints.

Here is the full list of all Blueprints you can get from quest rewards:

• Trigger Nade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Sparks Fly”.
• Lure Grenade Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Greasing Her Palms”.
• Burletta Blueprint: Rewarded after completing “Industrial Espionage”.
• Hullcracker Blueprint (and Launcher Ammo Blueprint): Rewarded after completing “The Major’s Footlocker”.

Alas, that’s only 4 Blueprints out of a total of 75 to unlock, so for the vast majority you will need to find them yourself during a raid. If you’re intent on farming Blueprints, then it’s best to equip yourself with cheap gear in case you lose it, but don’t use a free loadout because then you won’t get a safe pocket to stash any new Blueprint you find. No pain in Arc Raiders is sharper than failing to extract with a new Blueprint you’ve been after for a dozen hours already.

One of the best ways to get Blueprints is by hitting three stars on all five Trials every week. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blueprints obtained from Trials

One of the very best ways to get Blueprints is as rewards for completing Trials in Arc Raiders. Trials are unlocked from Level 15 onwards, and allow you to earn rewards by focusing on certain tasks over the course of several raids. For example, one Trial might task you with dealing damage to Hornets, while another might challenge you to loot Supply Drops.

Trials refresh on a weekly basis, with a new week bringing five new Trials. Each Trial can offer up to three rewards after passing certain score milestones, and it’s possible to receive very high level loot from these reward crates - including Blueprints. So if you want to unlock as many Blueprints as possible, you should make a point of completing as many Trials as possible each week.

Best Blueprint farming locations

The very best way to get Blueprints is to frequent specific areas of the maps which combine high-tier loot pools with the right types of containers to search. Here are my recommendations for where to find Blueprints on every map, so you can always keep the search going for new crafting recipes to unlock.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Dam Battlegrounds

The best places to farm Blueprints on Dam Battlegrounds are the Control Tower, Power Generation Complex, Ruby Residence, and Pale Apartments . The first two regions, despite only being marked on the map as mid-tier loot, contain a phenomenal number of containers to loot. The Control Tower can also contain a couple of high-tier Security Lockers - though of course, you’ll need to have unlocked the Security Breach skill at the end of the Survival tree.

There’s also a lot of reporting amongst the playerbase that the Residential areas in the top-left of the map - Pale Apartments and Ruby Residence - give you a comparatively strong chance of finding Blueprints. Considering their size, there’s a high density of containers to loot in both locations, and they also have the benefit of being fairly out of the way. So you’re more likely to have all the containers to yourself.

Buried City

The best Blueprint farming locations on Buried City are the Santa Maria Houses, Grandioso Apartments, Town Hall, and the various buildings of the New District . Grandioso Apartments has a lower number of containers than the rest, but a high chance of spawning weapon cases - which have good Blueprint drop rates. The others are high-tier loot areas, with plenty of lootable containers - including Security Lockers.

Spaceport

The best places to find Blueprints on Spaceport are the Arrival and Departure Buildings, as well as Control Tower A6 and the Launch Towers . All these areas are labelled as high-value loot regions, and many of them are also very handily connected to one another by the Spaceport wall, which you can use to quickly run from one area to the next. At the tops of most of these buildings you’ll find at least one Security Locker, so this is an excellent farming route for players looking to find Blueprints.

The downside to looting Blueprints on Spaceport is that all these areas are hotly contested, particularly in Duos and Squads. You’ll need to be very focused and fast in order to complete the full farming route.

Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Embark Studios

Blue Gate

Blue Gate tends to have a good chance of dropping Blueprints, potentially because it generally has a high number of containers which can hold lots of items; so there’s a higher chance of a Blueprint spawning in each container. In my experience, the best Blueprint farming spots on Blue Gate are Pilgrim’s Peak, Raider’s Refuge, the Ancient Fort, and the Underground Complex beneath the Warehouse .

All of these areas contain a wealth of containers to loot. Raider’s Refuge has less to loot, but the majority of the containers in and around the Refuge are raider containers, which have a high chance of containing Blueprints - particularly during major events.

Stella Montis

On the whole, Stella Montis seems to have a very low drop rate for Blueprints (though a high chance of dropping other high-tier loot). If you do want to try farming Blueprints on this map, the best places to find Blueprints in Stella Montis are Medical Research, Assembly Workshop, and the Business Center . These areas have the highest density of containers to loot on the map.

In addition to this, the Western Tunnel has a few different Security Lockers to loot, so while there’s very little to loot elsewhere in this area of the map, it’s worth hitting those Security Lockers if you spawn there at the start of a match.

That wraps up this primer on how to get all the Blueprints in Arc Raiders as quickly as possible. With the Expedition system constantly resetting a large number of players’ Blueprints, it’s more important than ever to have the most up-to-date information on where to find all these Blueprints.

While you’re here, be sure to check out our Arc Raiders best guns tier list , as well as our primers on the best skills to unlock and all the different Field Depot locations on every map.

ARC Raiders

PS5 , Xbox Series X/S , PC

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