About the Game
South of the Circle is a narrative-driven game, from developers State of Play, that tells the story of Peter Hamilton. Peter, a lecturer at Cambridge University, is stranded in the Antarctic. Throughout the game, you bounce around his current struggle to survive and moments from his past revolving around his relationship with Clara, another lecturer at Cambridge, and his family.
From what I gathered, South of the Circle began life in 2021 as a mobile game. The version I played was on Playstation 5.
Gameplay
“Don’t lose yourself out there and just keep straight.”
– Floyd (in game character), South of the Cirlce
That quote told to Peter at the start of the game very much so sums up the gameplay.
For the most part, there isn’t much to do. The majority of the time when you control Peter you just have to push the analog stick in the direction of forward. There are multiple sections where you don’t even need to control Peter.
South of the Circle revolves around selecting Peter’s dialog options. When it’s Peter’s turn to talk, you hold down the button for the dialog choice you wish to select within a short time limit. If you don’t make your selection within the time limit the game automatically chooses for you. Sometimes there is only one option to select or there may be as many as three.
Eventually, you come to major choices, in each section, that the game makes a big display of recording. These choices are referenced later in the game, but more on that later.
Visuals
Graphically, the South of the Circle isn’t much to sneeze at. Pretty average in that department. The colors in the game, however, are fantastic. Especially in the flashbacks. The colors used are vibrant and truly beautiful to look at.
The game does suffer from some awkward character animation and sometimes characters will clip through the environment (or each other). It isn’t really off-putting but you will occasionally find yourself thinking, “huh, that was weird.”
Audio
I thought the voice acting was phenomenal. It made Peter’s journey believable. If you chose the scared dialogue option, for example, hearing it believably in Peter’s voice added to the immersion of the story. Unfortunately, there is one glitch that happened to me multiple times at a specific point towards the end of the game the dialogue track failed and I had to close the game and reload the save in order to fix it.
The music was also really well done. The soundtrack perfectly meshed with each story beat completely adding to each scene.
The Story
The story in South of the Circle was very compelling. I truthfully found myself forced to continue playing to find out what happened. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the story is only about five hours long and, unfortunately, the game doesn’t really have any replay value.
I played through the full game twice (there were a few times I reloaded saves before moving on). Making sure that on the second playthrough when I came to the major choices I chose the opposite of my previous selection. In the end no matter what choices you make you will always come to the same crossroads.
There are two endings but they are based on one choice made at the very end of the game. This choice is given to you regardless of the decisions you made previously in the game.
Verdict
South of the Circle is very much the mobile game it began its life as. I would highly recommend playing the game, just not on console. Download it on your phone and go to town.
The fact that you can drop the controller and basically just watch the game play out on its own makes it not worth the space on your Playstation’s hard drive. I give the console version a 5.1 out of 10.
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Check out this recent review from Marzzman.
