South Of Midnight Optimized Settings

Despite us being in the middle of a rough period when it comes to PC ports in recent times, South of Midnight joins Assassin's Creed Shadows as a pleasant surprise.

The Compulsion Games developed title, published by Microsoft as a Day One Gamepass release, is a technical marvel on all platforms, managing to run at 60FPS on both Xbox Series consoles. On top of this all, if you're not of subscription models, the game only costs 39,99€. Here are our South of Midnight optimized settings.

System Requirements

For a game released in 2025, South of Midnight has very low system requirements, mostly due to the game's gorgeous, but unique artstyle. The stop-motion approach paired with a lower-polygon image by design help the game run well while still looking gorgeous. Here are the system requirements, according to Steam:

MINIMUM:

• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: AMD Ryzen 3 1300X / Intel i3-8100
• Memory: 12 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD RX 580 / Nvidia GTX 1060
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 60 GB available space

Credit: Compulsion Games.

RECOMMENDED:

• OS: Windows 10/11
• Processor: AMD 1600X / Intel i5-7600K
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: AMD RX 6600 / Nvidia RTX 2060 / Intel Arc A580
• DirectX: Version 12
• Storage: 60 GB available space

Even older PCs will have little to no problems running South of Midnight.

South Of Midnight Optimized Settings

As soon as you open the game, you'll get the rundown of the menus, which will conclude with the graphics settings. South of Midnight automatically optimizes the game's settings based on your PC specifications, and that will be decent.

We would recommend a few changes, though, especially if it bumped everything to Ultra settings. First things first, the game features two upscaling technologies: DLSS and TAAU. Unfortunately, no FSR for AMD users, but most GPUs from the three most recent generations will be able to run the game without upscaling.

If you own a NVIDIA GPU and have plenty of room to spare, we recommend DLAA, which looks better than native resolution. If your NVIDIA GPU is on the lower end and you want to squeeze a few more FPS, DLSS will work well, and Frame Generation is also available.

Screenshot: Compulsion Games, captured by Blast.tv.

The game's settings are pretty straightforward, so we'll give you the optimized settings list instead of individually going over each change:

• Motion Blur- Personal preference, negligible impact.
• Shading Quality- Very High
• Anti-aliasing Quality- High
• View Distance Quality- Very High
• Shadow Quality- High
• PostProcess Quality- High
• Texture Quality- Very High 8GB VRAM, Ultra for higher
• Effects Quality- High
• Foliage Quality- High

If your GPU is struggling to maintain 60 or your desired target frame rate at these settings, we would advise lowering DLSS Quality instead of lowering the settings per se. If you have higher FPS than you need, bump up Shadows, PostProcess, and Foliage. The remaining settings don't have a big visual imapct.

Difficulty Settings

One trend of the gaming industry that we've been noticing recently is customizable difficulty settings. This is an excellent change, and one we've wanted to see for years.

South of Midnight does give you the classic option of Story, Easy, Balanced, Advanced, so if you don't like tinkering with specific settings, you can just choose which one is better for your playstyle.

If you want a tailor-made experience for your liking, we have a few recommendations. We enjoy challenges and games that punish our mistakes, so here's what we came up with, trying to find the balance between a fun challenge without veering into frustration.

Screenshot: Compulsion Games, captured by Blast.tv.

• Player damage- Balanced. Lowering player damage just turns enemies into sponges.
• Health Coil strength- Reduced. This makes mistakes more punishing.
• Health Coil regen timer- Normal.
• Enemy damage- Increased.
• Boss damage- Increased.
• Combat intensity- Extreme. This raises the aggression of enemies, making combat harder without changing numbers.
• Larva spawn rate- Default.
• Ally damage- Same logic as player damage.
• Hazard damage- Increased. Platforming is a bit part of the game, so mistakes should be costly.

This list is obviously a subjective recommendation. We do recommend that everyone takes a bit of time to customize their experience, though. You might want to keep traversal damage to a maximum, for example, without bumping combat damage up.